Sunday, August 14, 2022

More exotic crops

 

Much of Michigan's Marshmallow harvest is in. You can see the truck in the background to get a sense of scale.

I talked to the farmer and he said there was a lot of waste in marshmallow processing.

A fork-truck takes each marshmallow into the factory seen behind the stacks of raw materials. There the marshmallow is quick-frozen to make it stiff, then it is chucked up in a huge lathe and turned down to the diameter as seen on the shelf in your local grocery store.

After turning, the marshmallow stick is dusted with powdered sugar and the individual 'mallows are cut from the stick.

Mallow breeders at Michigan State are working at a furious pace to breed marshmallow fruit that are less girthy but then they have problems with the svelte marshmallows falling off the plant before they are ripe due to some kind of genetic coupling. Of course the marshmallows are completely ruined if they touch the ground.

 



12 comments:

  1. Kind of the same waste in the toothpick industry. Trimming an entire tree down to a single toothpick......

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    1. The shavings are then processed and packed into jars as Marshmallow Fluff and similar Mallow Cream products.

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  2. There really is a marshmallow plant that traditionally was used to make the confection as well as medicines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Althaea_officinalis

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  3. Sadly there are plenty of people dumb enough to believe satire like this is factual.....And we let them vote.

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    1. What Dan said. There are people, especially in the younger age groups, who would believe it. They are the same people who think meat just magically appears in the plastic wrap in the grocery store. They have no real concept of the fact that staggering numbers of animals, large and small, are slaughtered every single day, so that they can have the delicious and nutritious three squares a day that virtually of them take entirely for granted.

      And as Dan also pointed out, these people vote. And without a doubt, they vote almost entirely Democrat. And as such, they are potentially very dangerous. When the magically plastic wrapped cuts of meat have vanished from the store, and when the shelves are stripped bare of even the most basic staples such as beans and grains, these heretofore 'respectable' people will be coming to we Deplorables whom they mock and despise, to get their 'cut'.

      But they will most likely not risk their own necks. Because by that time we will have been denounced by Dot.Gov and their wholly owned Media as 'hoarders'. And as such, the new IRS swat teams, 87,000 strong nationwide, will be paying us a 3:00 AM visit to relieve us of our ill-gotten stores of food.

      Johnny and Janey (who thought that meat was grown somewhere back in the "Employees Only" part of the store) will never have to risk their own hides or even get their fingernails dirty. Dot.Gov will have done their dirty work for them. After all, why do you think they vote Democrat in the first place?

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  4. They look similar to our local cheese farm products, pre-drying and ageing.

    The drying is a fraught process, almost entirely dependant on the vagaries of the weather, so getting a good wheel of hard cheese is often difficult (and why the crappy soft cheeses are always available).

    The best time of year to visit these farms is early spring, when you can see all the newborn baby cheeses scampering across the fields. (The barbaric old custom of the Nordic "Habitat" peoples of hunting and stuffing the babies is, thankfully, no longer allowed. So no pouffe's are available now except 'grandfathered' examples, usually kept by the type of people so callous they still wear the traditional "twin-set and pearls" cheese-hunting outfits - cheeses cannot see pastel colours, so it was nothing but a slaughter, the pearls are a traditional tally-counter displayed after the hunt whilst imbibing excess amounts of sherry).

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  5. This is lamentably old tech- wasteful in the extreme. Cutting edge mallow plants now take the giant fruit and rather than turn them to diameter, extrude them into suitable sizes.

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  6. MSU, huh? Had a good friend who got his advanced degrees there. Wonder if he was working on it?

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  7. I'm glad you were able to stay safe from harm. Marshmellows in the wild can charge, their speed very surprising. Especially dangerous when they have young ...

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  8. Do a search for BBC Sphagetti harvest April Fool.
    People really believed it.
    But back then the BBC was trusted.

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