There is a baking company located in Tennessee that produces a number of little snack cakes that you have almost certainly sampled. In fact, it is very likely that you have a box of these little goodies in your pantry right now. I will not tell you the name of these delicious treats, but I used to work for them.  

          Since I am not blest with personal wealth I had to work my way through school. That explains why it took me just over two decades to finally earn my doctorate. My jobs were somewhat varied, although I managed to be involved mostly in the auto repair field. There was a time, however, when I was out of work and needed a job. Nearby to where we lived in Tennessee there was a bakery that made snack cakes and little treats that are sold around the country. Being someone who had sampled their wares many times, I went there and applied for a job.

          As it happened, they were hiring and I got a job. The plant manager was taking me around and introducing me to the various heads of departments, and at the same time giving me a tour of the place. It really was fascinating.

          What was really fascinating, though, was what happened when the plant manager started walking me up a circular flight of stairs that wound up a very large tank. At the top of the stairs was a platform and on the platform was a very large, very unkempt man sitting in a chair and smoking a huge cigar. Before him was a control panel that had a couple of buttons and a couple of gauges. I didn’t know what he did, but I know he didn’t have to work too hard to do it.

          I looked over the edge of the platform and down into the tank. The tank itself was enormous. Coming down from the ceiling were two massive metal beaters (for lack of a better word) that constantly rotated on their own axis while moving on tracks laid into the ceiling. It took me a second to realize what these monster beaters were mixing. It was a huge vat of brownie mix. The mix was churned up and then came out on a metal conveyor belt at the bottom. The mix passed through an oven where it was baked while still moving. Then it was cut into pieces and packaged. To see that vat of mix was like a step into heaven. The man’s job there was simply to keep the mixers running and the temperature even.

          The plant manager spoke. “Cecil, I want you to meet the new man.”

          Cecil turned to me and extended a large, greasy hand. “Hey,” he said. Then he pulled the cigar from his mouth and tossed the whole thing over into the vat. The plant manager never said a word about that, but he did ask how the equipment was running. I watched the cigar fall and then float on the top of the mix until a beater pulled it under. It was disgusting.

          My job there was to keep the place clean. That may mean one thing to you and me, but it meant an entirely different thing to the company.

          We have in our minds a gleaming area where snack cakes are made in a germ-free environment. Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle. Keeping the place clean meant scraping dropped oatmeal cookies or little cakes or brownies or whatever off the floor with a snow shovel. If there were piles, the stuff on the top would be thrown back into the various mixes while the rest was usually sold to a couple of local hog farmers to be fed to their hogs. A couple of times a week we hosed the place down. Sometimes, if a machine was down for maintenance, we would wipe it down. But, there was precious little actual cleaning going on.

          At the conveyor belts, there would be women sitting in chairs maybe ten feet apart down one side of the belt with a counterpart directly across the belt from them. Their job was, depending on the type of snack cake coming down the belt, to either keep the cakes straight on the belt so they would go through the wrappers cleanly or squirt the cream into the cream pies. Periodically, the belt would stop for one reason or the other and the ladies with the hoses that delivered the cream would shoot the stuff directly into their mouths. These were the coveted jobs and only the ladies with the highest seniority got those positions. Company policy was, eat whatever you want. The thinking was that after a couple of days you would be sick of the stuff. (It only took the cigar to do that for me.) But the ladies on the belts never seemed to slow down on the munching.

          And the rats. Like little German Shepherds. Fat little German Shepherds. And slow. No problem whatsoever to whack them with the snow shovels. All that did, though, was make them mad.  

          What I learned in that place was that no matter how attractive the packaging is on something, it is what is inside that counts. I have applied that to everything, from foodstuffs to people. It was a good lesson to learn.

          Keep in mind, this was 1976. I am sure that since that time conditions have improved greatly. Still, I rarely ever eat packaged snack cake type goodies.  

          Enjoy.                                  

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