Friday night/Saturday morning I had the chance to volunteer at the bishop’s storehouse peanut buttery canary in northern Houston. I went along with two girls from my youth group and we worked the 9:30pm-2am shift.
The LDS church has 113 storehouses and 105 canneries through out the world. The food from these operations goes to humanitarian aid efforts, like the tsunami or Katrina. The food also goes to local food pantries and people in the community that need a helping hand. (more info)www.lds.org/newsroom
Emmaly & Cherise by the bag-o-peanuts
Once a year we are asked to volunteer time to man one shift. The food packed is typically locally produced. So Idaho packs potatoes, the Midwest packs grain and Houston has a cannery that cans peanut butter (west Texas has lots of peanut farms).
The Houston Cannery takes about 30 people to run and they run 24 hours with 4-hour shift increments. We got there and watched the safety video and then geared up for our shift. The factory is small, about the size of a high school basketball gym and the hum of the machinery drowns out any conversion, expect for some loud singing from the bored peanut sorters. One side of the room is lined with 4’*6’ bags of peanuts. The peanuts go through a roaster and then six people sit by a conveyor belt and pick out the burnt or uncooked ones.
An elevator takes the sorted peanuts into a mixer mill (is that what they call it, that’s what they use for cattle feed), where the salt and sugar is mixed in and then the peanuts are pressed into peanut butter.
The peanut butter is then calibrated and filled into the plastic jars and lids are screwed on. They jars are put under a magnetic field to seal the jars, the labels are put on and the jars are packed and ready to go.
My job for most of the night was to screw the lids on the jars It all sounds pretty boring and easy, but the process is moving quickly and the machinery is fidgety. They was constantly someone banging on pipes and calibrating the pressure. We produced approximately 20 jars/minute and by the end of our shift we had packed 4600 jars of peanut butter, not bad for a nights work.
The Bishops storehouse is a great program and helps lots of people and organizations and it was good to be a part of it.
We ended up going to IHOP and eating an early breakfast. Lets just say IHOP at 3 am is one of the most interesting scenes I have seen in a while. However, we did not get shot so I would consider it a successful night.
p.s. I look horrible in these picture, keep in mind it was 3 am and I had been up almost 24 hours. ....I am getting too old for this.
5 comments:
That is a really cool program! Did you smell like peanut butter for days and days?
Thanks for sharing with us about the Bishop's store house -- you are so great Em staying up until 3am making peanut butter!
(sorry about my deleted comment, I did a goofy typo)
Hmmm, lots of questions:
Do you get to shop there after your shift? Do they only sell peanut butter, or do they have the other canned goods?
Did you go home wanting to eat peanut butter, or were you burned out on it a while?
Did they ask about peanut allergies? I would guess someone with a peanut allergy wouldn't go in the first place, but I'm still curious.
Does the smell of peanut butter drift very far away from the cannery? My father worked at Nabisco, and we could smell it long before we saw it.
Glad you had fun 8^)
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