Jon and his dad spent several weekends building some really nice storage shelves in the cold storage room a few months back. I mean, nice ones. Adjustable and everything. The only “food storage” we had was a few boxes of macaroni and cheese, a couple boxes of Goldfish crackers, and 4 packages of Chips Ahoy cookies that I got on sale at Albertson’s. Not exactly a year’s supply of anything. So Jon set up a dry-pack cannery assignment for me at church a couple weeks ago. The cannery is where a lot of the humanitarian and welfare aid for our church is done. Volunteers go in and do the actual packaging of the food into #10 cans, and in return the volunteers have the opportunity to purchase X amount of cans of whatever. So this was our chance to get some actual food storage.
So I went in this morning, having absolutely no idea what I was doing. I just knew that I was there to help with whatever they wanted and I knew that I wanted to leave with some cans of food. I had “n00b” written all over me. I actually couldn’t even find the physical entrance to the building for several minutes. (Yes, it was painful to admit that in writing.) But I got in there, and they were very nice and I filled out my sheet with what I wanted to purchase, and then I followed a guy around with a cart filling up boxes with my food cans. It was pretty painless. So $130 later, my trunk was filled (by me) with real food storage. I felt like a grown-up.
Then came the actual volunteering part. This made me very nervous. Surely they have people in there everyday with the best of intentions to help, but who aren’t all that bright. How bad could I screw up putting Hot Cocoa powder into cans? So there are all of these ladies there who, clearly, have done this a few times. They pick what I later learn are the easy spots on the assembly line. I am left to lift 40 lb bags of hot cocoa mix. I have to balance the bag on my hip, pour it carefully—without spilling any—into cans, trying to approximate how much is 4.8 lbs of cocoa mix. There is another lady who is “shaking” the cans, to get the powder to settle, another lady who puts the can on a scale to make sure it’s actually 4.8 lbs., another lady puts one of those gel packs in it to keep in the freshness, and yet another lady seals a lid on. (Yeah… who had the crappiest job?) I pretty much did this for 2 hours. We did switch to powdered milk later, at which time I stole the “shaking” position on the assembly line.
So I got through the two hours, made a few jokes (that I’m pretty sure no one got but me), hopefully did some good, and came home with a trunk full of real food storage. Yeah! And I could tell that by the time I left, there were some ladies in there looking at me with a little bit of respect. I kept up with the hectic dry-pack environment, and I earned some definite cannery-cred. I’m no longer afraid of the cannery.
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Hey! Just perusing your site tonight and I came across the Cannery posting…I hate to be ignorant about the ways of the world, but can you explain to me the year’s supply of food storage? and you have cold storage too? (I thought this was a refrigerator…)
So clueless,
Karen
Comment by Nerak — January 20, 2008 @ 6:29 pm