One of humankind’s greatest achievements has arguably been our skill and abilities in identifying and understanding the natural abundance our planet blesses us with. It’s probably fair to say our efforts in mastering the physical realm, and utilising a multitude of sequentially discovered innovations to our advantage, is what has led to our becoming the dominant species on the planet. The breadth of knowledge we’ve gained from our studious investigations is also what largely underpins our very survival.
In the process of unlocking Mother Nature’s secrets, mankind has devised all kinds of ingenious procedures and devices which help to produce and manufacture goods, food and services of every shape, size and description. Some bright soul has actually estimated there are around 10 billion different “things” currently produced in the modern global economy, with the number growing daily.
This vast array of goodies we need for our food, shelter and clothing; or purely for entertainment and business purposes, requires huge amounts of effort and resources to produce them. Once finished, the goods we need and desire are packaged and moved, using ever more resources and energy, through complex distribution networks until they eventually find their way to consumers in all corners of the globe. The undertaking all this activity of course also produces unimaginable amounts of waste and pollution. We are also continually eating away at resources which have only finite limits. That is to say, many of the minerals, plants and animals we so freely use will one day all but disappear. You will be pleased to know that these problems, the collateral damage if you like, are issues of an entirely different stripe and not what I intend discussing here.
What follows instead is a light hearted story, eventually to be a series of stories, which tracks the journey and fates of a few common products we all probably use at some stage or other. After all the effort we go through to manufacture and distribute our elaborate products, for one reason or another, some of them never get to fulfil the use for which they were originally intended. As we will discover, there are many reasons behind these unintended and sometimes sad redundancies.
The Story of Alfredo Quinoa
Our first journey into the world of elaborate redundancy begins in the parched and arid Nazca Desert of southern Peru. It’s a most fitting place to start a story of intrigue, as the high plateau desert, which stretches for more than 50 miles in the high Andes, is also home to the mysterious Nazca Lines.
The naturally preserved lines of lime coated stones found in the Nazca desert dust are actually huge motifs, created by an ancient native culture about 500 years BC. One theory suggests the markings might originally have been created to be used as celestial markers. Other conspiracy theorists think they may be guides to assist an alien landing or an invitation to a benevolent God. Whatever the original intent, included among the ancient and monumental Andean workings are hundreds of simple lines and shapes, as well as 70 which are designed in more complex shapes such as birds, fish, llamas, jaguars, and monkeys, or human figures. Other designs include trees and flowers. Some of the figures span over 370 meters in length and can only be seen from the air, or from elevated mountain positions. Very unique and strange stuff indeed… and if you don’t believe me… well, here are a few pictures I found via a quick Google search. You can do the same if you are interested, there’s plenty there.
Apart from the mysterious formations, the Nazca Plain is also one of the more dry and windless places on the face of earth. Despite that shortcoming it is also home, along with many other regions of the high Andes, to the indigenous herbaceous plant we know as Quinoa.
The plant, once sacred to the ancient Incas, is grown as a crop on the plains of Nazca, primarily for its edible seeds. Quinoa isn’t a cereal grass like many of the other grains we eat though. It’s derived from a shrub like plant, about 1 -2 metres tall and is thought to have originally been domesticated some 3 to 4,000 years ago from wild weed populations. Oddly enough, quinoa is also related to the beetroot and spinach families. The little round seeds which form in the flowers of the shrub after a short growing season are gluten free and generally cooked in the same way as rice. They’ve long provided a complete source of protein, dietary fibre and minerals for the people of the high Andes.
When the plant matures, the fruit is manually harvested (too difficult to do with machine as the seeds mature at different stages) and the bitter coating around the seeds is removed by threshing. Because of its health giving qualities, quinoa has grown in global popularity over recent decades and is now grown in a number of other countries around the world, but only where there is suitable mild weather and sufficient altitude. A couple of other interesting facts you may be interested to know about quinoa before we move on with the story of Alfredo. Due to its popularity the price of quinoa tripled between 2006 and 2013; and it is now more than ten times the value of wheat. Such a pricing is probably not a good thing for those who have long depended on it as a cheap and reliable source of staple food. Quinoa was also recently approved as a kosher food.
THE STORY OF ALFREDO QUINOA
From the short account above you may have gained some appreciation about Alfredo’s parent plant. When it began to grow in the lightly watered Andean sunshine, it carried with it both an illustrious and a complex gene stock.
As the parent plant began to grow and flourish in the ideal conditions of the arid plain, the flowers and seeds gradually began to form and bud. This is what we will recognize as the birth time for Alfredo and his many siblings.
Alfredo and his brood enjoyed a carefree, if somewhat inert and short, childhood. They swayed softy in the gentle breezes and began to mature at differing paces, depending on how much water and sunlight they were able to extract or expose themselves to. Chatting quietly amongst themselves in the language of Spanish Quinoan during these happy days, the young grain nodules spent many an hour contemplating their existence with simple childlike honesty. Why are we here? What will our future hold? Will I one day be big and strong like Mother?
It took only a couple of months before some of these questions were answered. One day a truck drove out across the dusty plain, a plume of dry dirt trailing high behind it. It stopped next to the rapidly maturing patch of quinoa plants and a group of men and woman jumped from the vehicle and set to work hand picking the flowers which had reached maturity. The plucked flowers were temporarily placed in baskets on the farm labourer’s backs, before eventually being taken out and dumped onto a large square of canvass laid out on the dirt next to the crop field. Alfredo and his nicely matured family were among those who were unceremoniously separated from their Mothers stem and placed into a basket on the back of a stooped and heavily calloused woman. He could hear the noise of the threshing before he saw it. Thwack! Thwack!!
When his basket was eventually dumped onto the ever growing green pile, Alfredo caught a brief glimpse of several other men and women who were taking handfuls of his plant cousins and whacking them with great vigour and zest over some stones in the middle of the canvass. The naked white seeds that sprung from the threshing were rolling all over the ground, almost covering it as they moved around in a state of wild pandemonium. It was only half an hour before the naked Alfredo too found himself tumbling across the ground. A short while later he was swept up into one of several big piles; and then shovelled into a large burlap sack.
It was deathly quiet inside the ever plumping sack. All chatter had ended and each grain was being stoic and silent as they waited to see what other surprises might be in store for them on this fateful day. That question too was soon answered when the top of the sack was sewn up and the entire sack and its contents lifted manually and placed onto the back of the old truck. Alberto’s little Quinoan heart began to race when he heard the truck engine rumble into action. Soon after he felt himself rocking and swaying in a frictionless dance with all of his newly found cousins as the truck began motoring along a bumpy dirt track.
Day soon turned into night, the word on that having been passed down to Alfredo by some cousins who were near the top of the sack. The truck continued plodding on its merry way. Throughout the night it travelled ever downwards from the mountains on a twisting tarmac. When the new day dawned, Alfredo heard the unfamiliar sound of seagulls. The truck had apparently arrived at a port and a short time later the separate grains of quinoa were squashed even tighter together as a large crane lifted the heavy bag from the back of the truck and swung it down into the cargo hold of a rusty old tramp steamer. Many uneventful hours passed before the quinoa heard and felt the boat’s engine spring into life. Shortly after, the sack began to rock and sway to the rhythm of a swirling ocean as the boat sailed away from Peru.
Several days later the boat docked and was unloaded in a place called San Francisco, on the west coast of North America. The quinoa knew this because they’d overheard some of the crew talking about it as they were sticking grappling hooks into their bag.
Over the next few hours the group of Peruvian quinoa were shifted short distances within the port perimeter. At their first stop the bag was fumigated, apparently to ensure no fungal spores had hitched a ride with them from Peru. The sack Alfredo was in, along with hundreds of others, were next inspected by several uniformed men before the new truck they’d been placed on headed out of the port’s gate and onto a north bound highway.
By mid-afternoon the quarantine and customs cleared quinoa arrived at a sorting factory on the outskirts of San Francisco. Alfredo was awed by the sparking facility, which he saw only briefly while his sack was being emptied onto a wide conveyer belt. The millions or newly arrived Peruvian quinoa grains were moved through a variety of stainless steel sorting trays. This process was apparently meant to determine grain quality, and to weed out those seeds which didn’t quite cut the mustard. Much to Alfredo’s surprise he found himself eventually dumped into a stainless steel container marked “Export Quality”. Alfredo reflected that this in large part this was probably due to the sunny northern exposure he’d enjoyed during most of his growth period.
The next step in Alfredo’s exciting adventure was a warm bath in a slightly saline solution. When the water was later drained from the container, large fans blew heated air to dry them all. Alfredo began to think he’d landed in the lap of luxury, quinoa heaven.
After all the flurry of exciting activity they enjoyed following their arrival in the USA, the next few days were deathly quiet by comparison. The Peruvian quinoa grains were pretty much left to their own entertainment devices, happy to still be in the warm confines of the modern factory. On the fourth day, however, a fork lift came and lifted Alfredo’s container, moving it to an adjoining room and placing it on a bench. The pristinely clean and dry grains were duly weighed and packaged by another machine, which sorted and sealed them into 20 kilogram plastic bags. When each bag was full it was then neatly stacked onto a packing pellet by a small Asian woman. When the pellet was full and in the shape of a nice neat cube, it was wrapped and covered with thick plastic sheeting. A forklift then lifted crate onto the back of another truck, again much newer than the one on which they’d left their little field on the Nazca Plains.
Alfredo was again excited when the truck engine started and they began their next journey which began by snaking out of the factory grounds and then heading via a busy highway to the south.
Alfredo had no idea, but they were all now heading towards San Francisco International Airport. When the truck finally stopped at a big cargo shed on the fringe of the airport, a range of paperwork was signed off before the cargo of quinoa was offloaded, only for a brief while, in the corner of a large hangar like shed. A short while later an even bigger fork lift than the one at the factory came along. It picked up the ten pellets of packaged quinoa separately and deposited them onto a set of carriages which were then hauled train like across the tarmac to where another big machine was waiting to lift them all into the hold of a big bellied cargo plane.
After a long taxi down San Francisco Airport’s main runway the heavily laden plane banked in ever rising circles until the pilot finally set a course directly towards the North East. The plane continued flying roughly on that vector until it eventually touched down at Manchester Airport in Central England, ten hours later
Once back on the ground, the plane taxied for a short time before to a halt. Alfredo observed he and his band of brothers were going through pretty much the reverse of what they’d experienced when departing from San Francisco. Pretty soon they were all on another truck travelling down a rain and wind swept road until finally entering into a gated compound on an industrial estate. This time the truck they were on had its own mechanical lifting device; and it swiftly unloaded its cargo of plastic coated pellets into an open sided shed. Being a weekend, there wasn’t a soul in sight for a full two days. The Peruvian quinoa were left to shiver in their plastic bags, grateful that their outer plastic coating at least protected them from the worst of the inclement weather.
Not long after the sun rose on Monday morning, a much sunnier day, people began to arriving at the site. They burst into an immediate flurry of activity. The plastic covering over the pellets was dispatched with a series of slices from a Stanley knife. Several men then carried each of the 20 kilogram bags of quinoa over to a wooden hopper, slicing the bags open with their own knives and emptying the contents into a machine that directed the grains into smaller one kilogram plastic bags.
Each of the bags that emerged from the machine bore the following label printed on the outside:
Macro Health Foods
Peruvian Quinoa
Gluten Free Goodness for the Health Conscious
Alfredo, who had long been separated from any of the grains he’d grown up with, was loaded into bag number 20 of the 24 bags which were packed into a new cardboard box. When the box was full it was sealed with lengths of silver tape and the box was placed on top of an ever growing pile in a row of metal storage shelves at the back of the complex.
Alfredo thought initially that this might be the end of the long road he’d been on, but he was shortly to be proved wrong. After sitting on the shelf for nearly a fortnight, a worker arrived with a sheet of white address stickers, upon which was written in bold typeface:
The Urban Farmer Health Food Store
O'grady Street
NORTH FITZROY
MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA.
One of those labels, along with a sealed plastic bag containing other delivery and customs clearance paper work was stuck on top of the box Alfredo was sitting in. Three weeks earlier, Alfredo had no idea that an airplane had even existed. Now he was about to be despatched on his second long journey, this time a 24 hour flight back to the southern hemisphere; and an entirely different continent than the one from which he’d first emerged.
There was a lot of happy and friendly chatter going on in the well-stocked Fitzroy Health Food shop when Alfredo’s box was opened and its contents laid into a steel mesh basket near the cash register. Over the next week or so, Alfredo was aware that many of the bags he’d arrived with were disappearing as people came into the shop, picked up a bag and made enquiries about its content. When these people were happy with the explanation, they reached into their pocket and handed over some rectangular pieces of paper to the shopkeeper before walking out of the shop with their new purchase.
One day, about a week after he’d been placed in the basket, a young hipster couple named Brad and Juanita came into the shop and saw it had Peruvian quinoa on sale. They seemed to know a bit about this healthy new product which had been sweeping the world like a storm in recent years. After some enthusiastic discussion between themselves they too handed over some of the rectangular paper in exchange for the bag which contained Alfredo.
As he was being jostled along inside the bag with an array of other healthy food items, Alfredo’s thoughts again began to wonder what his final fate might be. It didn’t take long for him to find out.
That evening Brad and Juanita were hosting a small dinner party for a few friends. Pride of place on the carbohydrate side of things was a bowl of fluffy quinoa, to which Juanita had added some diced dried apricots and pomegranate seeds. Static electricity held Alfredo against the side of the plastic bag as he watched half of his comrades from Peru slide out and into a pot of boiling water. The remaining quinoa was left in the bag on the kitchen bench. This allowed Alfredo the chance to eavesdrop as his owners and their friends shared some thoughts about the quinoa dish
“A bit bland,” said one. “I think I prefer brown rice.” said another guest. Juanita thought it was actually delicious, while Brad remained fairly non-committal about the taste and texture. He did, however, question the ethics of the first world depriving the people of the Andes from their traditional cheap and reliable source of carbohydrates. He’d apparently read about this in an environmental blog he subscribed to.
There didn’t seem to be any final resolution about the delights of the novel new food, but the end result from the evening was that the remaining quinoa was sealed into its bag with a peg to stop air from entering. Alfredo and his fellow “remainers” were then placed at the back of a pantry cupboard, alongside some couscous, brown rice and whole meal pasta.
Whether it was because Brad and Juanita truly didn’t like the taste or if they’d just moved on with other things in their lives, Alfredo remained unused in the pantry cupboard for the next eighteen months. Maybe his owners might have forgotten they’d ever brought him?.
In any case, it seems the young hipster couple eventually reached a point where they’d outgrown the trendy town house they’d been living in. Juanita was showing distinct signs of being with child and the couple decided they needed to buy a larger house further out in the suburbs. As part of preparing for that move, Brad did a thorough clean out of all the cupboards, throwing out anything that was redundant or had reached it’s used by date. The Macro Food Company in Manchester had printed on Alfredo’s bag a best before date that had been reached a full six months earlier. Brad did ponder the bag and its contents for a moment, possibly wondering if the dry quinoa might actually still useable or not. In the end he decided to put it in with all the other stuff that was to be thrown out.
The next leg of Alfredo’s life journey was consequently a short trip to an outside food bin, followed by a slow rubbish truck trip to a landfill site when the bin was taken out for collection three days later.
The truck load of smelly rubbish, mostly perishables, was soon being tipped over edge of a large embankment, with gravity forcing it to slide down and join a big pile of rubbish below. This then, it seemed, was to be Alfredo’s final fate, confined to eternity on a rubbish pile after the long and complicated trip he’d made from the Plains of Nazca in Peru. Fate, however, still had a few more tricks up its sleeve for little Alfredo.
That night when all the trucks had stopped moving about and the people who worked at the landfill site had gone home, groups of scavengers emerged from nooks and crannies to forage through the day’s smelly new offerings. Amongst these scavengers was a sickly looking grey rat. Alfredo could feel its whiskers scrape against the side of his plastic bag as the rat sniffed the contents. The rat’s large teeth easily nibbled through the plastic and the rodent was soon gorging itself on the contents, including our hero, Alfredo.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The following day a new and different group of workers arrived at the landfill site. These white clad men and women were biologists attached to one of Melbourne’s leading research laboratories. They were at the waste site in search of feral and fetid animals who fed on Melbourne’s detritus. One of their professors had long held a theory that animals who’d been exposed to our good and bad bacteria, which food waste had in abundance, may have built up useful resistance to some of humankinds as yet unsolved medical mysteries.
With a series of elaborate traps and nets permanently set up around the site, the scientists carefully checked to see if any had been successful in the luring of unsuspecting animals. On this particular morning’s check, the harvest was bountiful and had included several different kinds of insect, mice, cats and other rodents, including the grey rat which had eaten Alfredo. The catches of the day were all placed in containers and taken to a laboratory where they were humanely despatched before samples of their DNA were taken.
Once the full DNA sequences were determined and recorded, a few weeks later, the results were referred to the professor and his team for analysis. One of the results, the one from our new rat acquaintance, showed some very interesting signs which were far from the norm. The professor so was intrigued by the finding he referred them to a colleague of his who was working on a similar kind of research in Jerusalem, Israel. Together they worked in close association over the coming months, before they eventually managed to determine from the rat’s genome a ground breaking way in which melanomas, skin cancers, might be either reduced or totally eliminated. It turned out then that little Alfredo’s life was not in vain after all.
The party that was eventually held at a Jerusalem restaurant to celebrate the discovery, and also the selling of that discovery’s intellectual property rights to a large pharmaceutical company, coincidentally had a very special dish on the menu. A steaming pile of freshly cooked quinoa - the healthy power food which had just recently been approved as a kosher food!