Un-Health FoodOne of my first ever school holiday jobs was at a health food import business.
Got nuts to salt or pick-n-mix to make up? Use that cement mixer in the corner. That carob out of date? So's this mixed fruit. Mix it all together, bung a new one-year-from-now use by on it and flog it off cheap. That sort of place.
They'd get spices in 200 litre cardboard drums, and package them up in little plastic bags, the sort you buy in your supermarket. You used two machines to achieve this - one had a hopper that you filled with the stuff, and attached an empty bag to the other end. The machine was set up to shake noisily until just enough stuff had vibrated it's way into the bag, then stop. Then you shoved the bag through a heat sealer and into a box. The whole process required constant supervision shifting the bags around, and checking the shaking machine didn't shake itself out of calibration and add too much into the bags.
I spent an entire day transfering a drum of MSG into small packets, standing in a cloud of MSG dust. The resulting headache didn't go away for a day.
No giblets or shit, but not very pleasant anyway. They fired me the day before my 16th birthday. Obviously any increase in my $120pw wages would cripple them. I've made it a personal crusade ever since to never eat another health food.
(Got nuts to salt or pick-n-mix to make up? Use that cement mixer in the corner. That carob out of date? So's this mixed fruit. Mix it all together, bung a new one-year-from-now use by on it and flog it off cheap. That sort of place.
They'd get spices in 200 litre cardboard drums, and package them up in little plastic bags, the sort you buy in your supermarket. You used two machines to achieve this - one had a hopper that you filled with the stuff, and attached an empty bag to the other end. The machine was set up to shake noisily until just enough stuff had vibrated it's way into the bag, then stop. Then you shoved the bag through a heat sealer and into a box. The whole process required constant supervision shifting the bags around, and checking the shaking machine didn't shake itself out of calibration and add too much into the bags.
I spent an entire day transfering a drum of MSG into small packets, standing in a cloud of MSG dust. The resulting headache didn't go away for a day.
No giblets or shit, but not very pleasant anyway. They fired me the day before my 16th birthday. Obviously any increase in my $120pw wages would cripple them. I've made it a personal crusade ever since to never eat another health food.
Udderbelly A tale of four titties,
Wed 12 Nov 2003, 14:40,
archived)