Cooking Up A Story

Follow along as we travel from the field to the factory to learn how some of the best and freshest green beans get picked, processed, and canned all within a few short hours of time.

Related: Show, fresh food, green living, season 1, small farmer, sustainable agriculture |3 Comments »

Recipes from the episode: Old Fashioned Green Beans and Bacon

Director’s Journal

For those of you who have been following, I like to see how things are made, how they work. Take me to a factory and it’s like putting a kid in a candy store. I eat it up. So when I learned that one of the first processing plants to become Food Alliance certified was in my backyard, I thought this is one I’d like to see. And to learn how sustainable practices were crossing over from grower to processor. It sounded like a logical progression.

We started where the green beans are grown, out in a bean field. A very large bean field. They had 4 pickers going at once. And I don’t mean 4 people bending, sifting, and picking. These pickers were closer to the size of a Hummer on steroids. Who invented these things? They attacked 4 rows at time, bristly brushes lowered into the bean bushes (yes, I’m having fun). And out popped scratch-free green beans. Beautiful beans. Then they got dumped into a waiting hauler, which dumped them into a waiting bin at Truitt Brothers.

And then the fun began. Conveyor belts galore. It was dizzying. From one to another, to another, to another, almost into infinity. I think you will get a sense of it from the film. I’m not sure why they had to travel such a distance in such a way, but I’m sure each step had its purpose. Those beans were washed, jiggled, and tumbled so many times, I can’t imagine any leaf, rock, or piece of dirt that made it to the can. Only beans, just a few hours old. As Sue Root said, you can’t get much fresher than that.

Related Print Story: Truitt Brothers: Preserving the Bounty in the Modern Age

—Rebecca

Additional Resources

• University of Florida, IFAS extension, Canning Vegetables
• University of Illinois Extension, Growing Green Beans
• Bean Picker

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Show, fresh food, green living, season 1, small farmer, sustainable agriculture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.