It started with an explanation, and a can of soup

Hello world! (Or hello 1 reader who made me start this thing to begin with!) I feel I've got a bit of 'splaining to do regarding my blog URL thing. My name is April, but I don't really have short arms. I also don't have much technological sense, so on occasion, my friends have referred to me as a dinosaur (to be more specific they call me a t-rex). I may have been known to use this lack of knowledge to get out of things by bending my arms so it looks like my hands come out of my shoulders and saying “rhaaaarrr.” You would be surprised at the kind of leeway people are willing to give when a middle aged woman roars at them. Anyway, I’ve used that excuse to my advantage quite a bit, however, my friend HB (you’ll hear more about her later) decided to up and move away, and she forced me to stretch my arms a bit to make a blog so we could stay in touch. So look at me! I’m on the cutting edge of technology…technology from roughly 5 years ago I guess. In about 3 years maybe I’ll see what this whole “Twitter” thing is all about…

Now, onto my random thoughts for today…many years ago I worked with a guy named Mike. Mike was a great guy, a world traveler and taught me that many problems in our office could be solved with a confident voice and a red pen. His theory was that if people heard the confidence in your voice they would either: 1. Know you could solve the problem (using the red pen) so they would stop arguing with you, or 2. Know that they couldn’t make you change your mind so they would stop arguing with you. Clearly the critical piece of this puzzle is that people would stop arguing with you. Once Mike let me in on this secret I was in business and I’ve been thankful to him ever since.

Unfortunately, another secret Mike let me in on was the fact that as a teenager growing up in Iowa he worked on a chicken farm. And I don’t mean a picturesque, red barn, one John Deere tractor, family farm kind of chicken farm. I mean a giant warehouse full of hormone/antibiotic-filled chickens (here’s the part where I frown disapprovingly, yet also have to admit to buying this kind of chicken all the time from the grocery store). Anyway, Mike used to work at the chicken farm and told me that one of his jobs was to collect the old, dying chickens. The ones that had stopped laying eggs and/or were too sick to live much longer.--I’m sure in my naïve mind I thought the story could end happily there. Perhaps they’d get to live on a real farm somewhere as a thank you for all the eggs they had produced? Nope, not so much. Mike let me know that he collected these chickens to be sold to companies to be used in chicken noodle soup. The next time I had chicken noodle soup, I closely examined the “pieces of real chicken!” in it and felt a little queasy. Why is it we can just happily munch our food without giving a second thought until we’re face to face with the actual reality of what it takes to get it on our plate?

And I don’t just mean meat. As teenager I spent a summer working from 7 pm to 7 am 6 days a week at the local pea processing plant. Peas would come in on giant trucks from the fields and if they weren’t timed properly, a line of trucks would form where the peas would be off-loaded into the factory. Some of the trucks would have to wait more than an hour to be unloaded. In 104 degree heat. Needless to say those peas weren’t lookin’ so good by the time they got to us. Do you know what they would be used for? Baby food. Because it all would get blended together. Of course there were other times when the peas would be sent back for a second cleaning because things like small rodent bits were found in the batch. I don’t eat frozen or canned peas anymore. There are times when I’m not sure if I should marvel at the efficiency of the American food system or be horrified by it.

Part of me wants to ask you all what’s your worst food job/experience so I’ll know what else to watch out for, but the other part of me would rather bury my head in the sand. Luckily, I think there’s only about 2 people reading this and they know I have a weak stomach and know that I don’t think I could take one more thing to be worried about regarding our food or its impact on the environment, or big business or anything else! So instead I’ll just ask what was your worst job? I know there are some good ones out there!

“Gosh April, this was a random blog” you might be thinking to yourself, and you’d be right! All I have to say is that I had canned chicken noodle soup for lunch today, picked out all of the chicken before I warmed it up, thought about Mike and wanted to share. Who knows what might inspire the next post?!