Monday, 2 July 2012

There

There

There I stand in the bakery before the huge steel metal machine, 100 yards long and silver. A cake machine worth a mint. All sorts of ingredients thrown together to make cakes, quite a mix! You’d need to see it for yourself to understand what goes on. Not a case of add this and that to make a cake, oh no. Recipes and correct steps to take.

Think of the engineering that made this huge machine. Tens of thousands of components, some penny size, others as big as a car. People with brains made this bit of kit. Moving it and installing it must have been a job! How many trucks trucked it here?

Then there are ovens as old as the factory, still burning gas and cooking cakes. The grand children of the engineers will be alive now. Same as the first bakery workers. Who sees it that way, just me? I ponder the other things around me. The list goes on: cake mixers, air conditioning, factory floor plan, production lines where many people work. The end result is cakes. Lots of them!

Cakes that are designed, produced, marketed, distributed and eaten. A whole industry within an industry, all related. From designers and engineers making the machines, people producing cakes and customers eating them, it’s a world all by itself. As complicated as an aeroplane factory or car plant or rock quarry. A dizzying array of thought and actions brought this bakery into existence.

Think about that when you eat your Colin the Caterpillar cake.

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