brettmjohnson

Prince stood up from his chair and walked over to my cart. He grabbed a plate of pancakes and started helping me serve.

Prince is my Minneapolis homie, and that is the most Minnesota thing I've heard of him.

I worked for several years in flour mills, including in the quality control lab. There were thresholds set for certain contaminants in both the incoming and outgoing produces. For instance, the wheat may contain non-wheat seeds and stones. These are typically filtered out by size and density before milling.

If a load of wheat had an unacceptable level of contaminants, we would come down on the supplier for shipping us poor quality product. Since wheat is purchased by weight, disreputable suppliers would throw in sand or gravel to increase the weight.

During the milling and storage process, raw or milled grain is food for molds, insects, rodents, and birds. This is unavoidable, since it is not feasible to hermetically seal the whole mill and grain elevators. So the goal is to control the vermin.

There are different approaches to control quality:

• Shut down. Take everything apart and clean it. While this works for restaurants, it doesn't work so well for factories. We actually did this every two months in winter and every month in summer for each major type of equipment. It would not be feasible to do this daily.

• Use poisons, insecticides, anti-fungals in the process. Obviously, use of poisons in the food chain is undesirable, so "safer" additives are used. Bleaching agents added to flour not only make it whiter, it kills mold spores. One mill I worked at spread poisoned french fries outside to kill mice and pigeons. This was halted because it killed a lot of other animals as well, including pets and raptors.

• Use non-poisonous mechanisms to control pests. For instance, one mill I worked at used hawks and owls to control pigeons and rodents. Sieves and filters remove contaminants by size and density. Heat kills insects. Ultraviolet light and reduced humidity controls bacteria and mold growth. But none of these are 100% effective. Raptors can't catch all the prey. Too much heat destroys the protein in the flour. Dropping the moisture content too low would diminish the quality of the flour from the customer's perspective (it won't rise or bake correctly).

My wife had two separate cervixes (one false), but she always had to have two PAP smears.

Edit: Every time she moved and got a new gynecologist, she would tell them and would be ignored, until "WTF!" Women often complain that doctors don't believe them -- its true.

If the food itself (rather than the air) was room-temp, then the refrigeration did not fail overnight. It would have failed 24-48 hours earlier.

I saw Grindhouse in a big cinema, and it seemed the whole audience loved the Machete trailer. We we all a bit disappointed, because we understood it was a "fake" trailer, but every one in my party said "I would totally see that movie!"