The Sauce Must Flow
Como Salsa para los Tacos: The Sauce Must Flow
Admiral Biscuit
Serrano knew that human industry was done on a scale which dwarfed pony industry, but he’d never been able to wrap his mind around it. As a foal, he’d played in the house while his mother patiently chopped up peppers for sauce, and even though it was silly, he couldn’t help but picture a big factory as just being a lot of mares all chopping up peppers.
A few newsreels in Equestria had shown human assembly lines, and he could sort of get an understanding of how many there must be by seeing all the cars on the street or all the goods for sale at Wal-Mart. It didn’t prepare him for his first view of the factory, how big it was, how many cars were sitting idle in the parking lot, how many truck trailers were backed up to the loading docks.
The factory was vastly bigger than any mill or sauciers’ establishment and intellectually that made sense, he could still see in his mind rows of stove and pans and chefs and then when he walked through the door into the factory proper he caught a glance of forklifts moving boxes by the pallet and the bottles on the line blurring by at a breakneck pace to satisfy the needs of millions of consumers.
It was insane. How could there be any kind of quality control? How would anypony know what was in any particular bottle? As far as he could tell, the only people involved were at the very end, stuffing the bottles into cardboard boxes as fast as they could, and the people who were driving the forklifts around to carry the full boxes away, one pallet at a time.
He did know that Taco Bell sauces came in little packets instead of jars, and he’d been told that some of those sauces were made here and put in packets here and if the bottles were filled this fast, how much faster might packets be made? They held far less sauce and Taco Bell gave them out by the half-dozen upon request; they had to have been produced at a furious rate.
Serrano didn’t get to find out right away. There was a brief orientation meeting and a safety meeting for all new employees and a reminder that he had to wear his food-suit and mane-net and muzzle-cover at all times, lest a stray hair wind up in the finished product.
Back in Equestria, a stray hair was proof that the pony who’d said she made the salsa really did. Humans didn’t like that though; the size and scale of the factory made him finally realize that humans generally had no idea where their food had come from. Commercials showed chefs in kitchens, not factories full of pipes and bottles on conveyors. No one opened a sauce packet at Taco Bell and thought of this factory, or the people who worked in it.
•••
After his brief training, he was sent to the head end of the salsa line. That gave him a brief opportunity to check out the tail end of the sachet line as he walked past—a constant barrage of pneumatic noise, a giant roll of unfilled sauce packets feeding like newsprint into a machine, and with each ca-chunk another dozen now-full packets got sliced off the sheet and into a holding bucket, which dumped them out by the hundreds into a box below.
One man watched that end of the line, occasionally pulling defective sachets out of the bucket and tossing them into a waste basket.
The unformed packets were fed into the machine on a roll; the salsa arrived in a hose and that bothered him. Sauce wasn’t supposed to be in a pipe.
•••
His job was at the other end of the pipe, feeding raw ingredients into the maw of the demanding machine.
When his mother made food, if it was something she hadn’t grown and picked herself, she inspected it at the market stand and again when she got it home. She carefully trimmed it, keeping the best parts for the food and the worst parts for the compost heap or for stew. Then came dicing, and another inspection before the vegetable was worthy to go in the pot.
Here, the incoming vegetables got a quick look as they were emptied onto the conveyor; people picked out the tomatoes that weren’t all the way ripe and picked off the stems and leaves and then they got fed into a giant machine which diced them and unceremoniously dumped them into a bin big enough to fit several ponies. Onions and cilantro met a similar fate.
From there, they all got measured by weight and then dumped into a giant cooking pot. Until he’d set hoof in the factory, the biggest mixing bowl he’d seen had been the one on a pony-drawn cement mixer. This one dwarfed that, and was made all of shiny stainless steel besides.
His job was demanding, but not skilled. Inspect as quickly as possible the ingredients going in to each cooking pot, make sure that nothing that didn’t belong went in, make sure his protective gear was always on. There were a few levers and latches he had to use, but for the most part it was buttons to push and then a machine would do the work from there.
By lunchtime, Serrano was more than ready for a break. The pungent aroma of salsa had somewhat faded in his nose, but he’d been hungry all day. Such was the price of working in a food factory.
The lunchroom didn’t have anything fresh, just a machine with processed brand-name food and another with Coke. Some people brought their own lunch, some of them ate vending machine food, and some of them didn’t eat anything, just played on their phones.
Some of the defective sauce packets made their way into the lunchroom, ready to spice up a person—or a pony’s—lunch. He’d brought a sack of stone-ground oats, and the Taco Bell fire sauce gave it an extra zing.
•••
Serrano didn’t gain his equilibrium until after lunch break. Between the size of the machines and the removal from any type of cooking he knew, he was off-balance for the entire morning, not only trying to learn a new job, but also trying to wrap his head around the scale of it, the process of it. Kettles and pipes and conveyors, the constant beeping from machines that wanted attention and from forklifts to warn people before they got run over, paper logbooks that had to be filled out even though a machine could have done that, too.
The scale of the factory was beyond anything that ponies could build—was beyond the scale of a factory that ponies should build. But the recipe at the front end of the line was what he was here to learn, the ratio of tomatoes to onions to cilantros, what kind of spices got put in . . . humans might have lost their way when it came to the care with which they produced their food, but ponies could fix it, could scale the line back until it was a mare or two dicing vegetables and cooking them in a sauce pot instead of a hogshead.
•••
If he concentrated on remembering the ratios, he got behind, and then he got yelled at by his co-worker, a heavyset man named Dan. If he didn’t quite focus on them, he could keep up, and hope that he remembered them at the end of the day.
Dan wasn’t keen on having a pony co-worker to train, and Serrano wasn’t enthused about Dan either, but the two of them both understood their role and the necessity of getting along well enough to keep production moving, and by the end of the shift they’d reached an uneasy truce. Ponies could sometimes be won over by food, and while after a shift at the factory Dan probably didn’t want anything to do with home-cooked salsa, Serrano also knew how to make three-milk cakes, and everypony liked those. Especially if they had strawberries on top.
As much as it pained him, he wrote out everything about the factory before starting in on the cake. The lack of attention given to the ingredients—most tomatoes weren’t even touched after they were dumped out of their crates, except to move them in bulk to another process—to the insane size of the mixing and cooking bowls and the relentless pace of the line. The machine that indifferently packaged salsa from a hose into packets with inspirational messages printed on them, only to be dumped into a big box which ultimately got carried off by a forklift to who knew where.
Was everything on Earth made that way? Did all the products for sale at Wal-Mart rush down some kind of conveyor with minimal human interaction only to be stuffed into boxes or plastic-sealed to cardboard at the end of it? What about bigger things? Were all the cars that crowded the road made that way, on giant conveyor belts with no proper craftsponies involved, only workers like Dan who knew how to follow instructions?
Serrano didn’t send the email, he kept it as a draft and went into the kitchen and made a 3-milk cake, working on the whipped cream topping as it cooked.
When the cake came out of the oven, it was like he’d completed his absolution, and he reviewed his email as it cooled. There were a few spots where he could have been more diplomatic, and to be honest human industry had its advantages—for example, he could set his oven at a specific temperature and trust that it stayed at what it said it was. With salsa by the ton, consistency must be very important, especially since nobody could check every single packet to make sure it was good. Sometimes when the oven wasn’t hot enough or was too hot his cakes came out wrong.
He sent the email and frosted his cake, then ate a slice to check for quality, and then he went to bed because he was exhausted.
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yo quiero taco bell
Somebody needs to introduce Serrano to How It’s Made.
The factory must grow.
Wait, no. This isn't that sort of factory.
...I wonder if anyone's modded tacos into Factorio?
Score the best intelligence gathering food fic is back.
You're doing this on purpose, aren't you?
If Serrano thinks this is bad, he should check out some Upton Sinclair in a local library...
10743423
That would be a fun addition to the Awesome Shop. Bonus points if they come in Ficsit branded wrappers that you can litter everywhere.
10743423
Has anyone modded food production of any kind into Factorio? The player character must be a robot because he never eats or sleeps. Needing to produce food for the player would be a challenging additional goal.
10743416
I found this video:
Probably very similar to what Serrano was doing.
He who controls the sauce, controls Taco Bell.
The "this is how salsa is made -> is this how everything else is made?" thought really rang true here.
Only soup is.
As someone that used to work in a food facility like this on a smaller scale, this cut deep. And was the same kind of reason I quit. I needed to see love and attention and care put into my food, which got me firmly back into the kitchen once I left that job.
Never thought I'd be rooting for pony industrial espionage.
I'm a little surprised that you make no mention of the metal detectors and other QC machines that exist in factories like this. It would be very interesting to see a response to those. That being said, similar can be said for the QA labs. If you've never worked in one, I have. I actually used to sell and maintain the equipment used in them for several companies. If you'd like some insight into what's in them and what they're for, feel free to give me a shout or PM.
:)
10743341
10743416
Or maybe he’s better off not knowing.
10743423
The sauce must flow, the factory must grow.
I feel like I’ve seen some playthroughs of that and had no idea what was going on. Might have been thinking a different game, though.
10743484
Yup, it is!
10743487
Of course I am. You know me.
There might wind up being a subtle or not-so-subtle Peaches reference in it.
There might already be.
10743531
I haven’t read it, but I imagine he would be horrified.
Like, honestly, a sauce factory is way better than a slaughterhouse.
10743678
I found that one when I was looking around for sauce production videos, too, and I really like how they age the peppers for three years. I don’t imagine that Taco Bell does, though (but I could be wrong; I haven’t yet found out who makes their sauces).
10743824
Yes, totally.
10743980
Like, I’ve worked in some factories, and while sometimes I know what the end product is going to be, other times I’ve made a part of an unknown assembly that’s intended to be used on an unknown machine. There’s probably dozens if not hundreds of machines out there rocking a part that I tumble-finished and heat-treated, but I have no idea what those machines are.
10744092
Yes, exactly.
10745369
The real question is where you draw the line (and I’d imagine that that varies by person). I would assume you’re not opposed to industrial flour milling, for example (although there are other options, as I’m sure you know) . . . realistically, a lot of food in the US is going to be machine-produced to a degree unless you’re buying from a lot of local producers—and if you are, good for you!
I think that working in a food factory would put me off a lot of processed foods, TBH. Never really considered sauce to be something I could or should make myself, but then I know people who make their own salsa and apparently mayonnaise is pretty easy to make as well.
Always root for pony industrial espionage. It’s the cutest kind.
10746040
I didn’t know that was a thing, although with about ten seconds of hindsight, of course it is. I’ve seen various minor QC in TV shows like How It’s Made, but can’t recall seeing a full analysis of all the steps on the line.
I did get yelled at once by QC for forgetting to put the roofrack screwdriver in a Subaru; every one of them is supposed to have a Torx-30 screwdriver in the glove box when it rolls off the line, and for a couple weeks that was part of my job. Had a whole box of them, stole a couple because you never know when you might need a genuine Subaru Torx-30 screwdriver.
I am curious, although at this point in the story it’s not something that I expect to focus on. Ponies are after recipes and process and presumably back in Equestria the food will be prepared in a proper pony kitchen (which comes with its own QC problems, although as Serrano says, finding a hair in your salsa is proof the pony who said she made it really did.
I suppose Flim and Flam would be selling counterfeit sauces with hairs sourced from a nearby barber.
10746850
Factorio is a game about building a factory, and eventually launching a rocket. Most playthroughs end up with belts everywhere and sometimes trains and robots, too. I think I've mentioned it to you before actually, because trains.
There's also aliens that come asking for bullets every so often, and if you don't deliver (via turrets), they eat your base.
10746894
So, in modern American food manufacturing there's really two tools that EVERY facility uses, at least, every one I've worked in. The truly huge ones use two others in my experience. The first is a simple scale. Weight checks are almost universal. In context of this facility in the chapter, used for checking for uniform packet weights. The other is a moisture analyzer. A company called Ohaus makes the most common and affordable ones. Basically, they put a sample in. The unit then weighs the sample, then cooks it at incredibly high temperatures to determine the moisture content of whatever is being made. For this facility, it'd basically be an insurance against sad watery salsa.
The other two main tools are: A water tank. For real. It's essentially just a fish tank. They use it to check seals on the product. A finished satchet or bag is simply dropped in and held submerged to insure that whatever packaging is being used is properly sealed and it water tight. Any bubbles? The sealer isn't working right. Any product leaking out? It's DEFINITELY not working right.
The one that's less common, but would be used in that facility is called a Water Activity Meter. A small sample gets put in a tray and the unit uses a super tiny fan and lense to check a variety of things with the intent to determine potential for harmful bacteria growth in the products. Basically, when used in conjunction with smart people and some fancy software, it gives a solid indication of the potential shelf life of a product before it starts risking bacteria or other harmful things due to product age. Not super useful where capascin is involved, but still important for the other parts of the food like the actual tortillas and the like.
There's other tools too of course, but those are the main ones that would be likely in a facility like what you've got Serrano working in. The moisture analyzer and it's potential uses, due to its simplicity, I could see being a huge boon to the ponies. It's a scale that cooks a thing then re weighs it before spitting out a measurement of how much moisture is in the product. You could improvise one with an oven and a jeweler's balance if you're willing to do the math by hand. It just won't be as precise as a proper one. In context of this? Nobody like watery salsa. Watery salsa is sad salsa. Sad salsa is antithetical to the purpose of what they are after. Also, tell me Twilight wouldn't go bonkers for a tool that will measure moisture cook-off to the microgram regardless of it's official intended use.
10746894
As for the metal detectors... oh God yea. Every food facility has some version of it. They usually tend to be a wide sort of scanner that product passes under along a conveyor. Mettler Toledo makes some. If any foreign metal is detected, the entire line comes to a screeching halt for some versions. In others, it instead simply boots whatever samples that are detected off of the conveyor. In this facility? I suspect screeching halt. Reason: The packets they use are foil lined. They'd e scanning product BEFORE it's packaged. The product in question is a liquid, so... yea. Screeching halt while the QA crew isolates the problem section and extracts it from the rest.
Alternatively, a solenoid release system that would redirect contaminated liquid into a different pipe if anything trips the sensor.
For the packets themselves? They likely use infrasonic scanners. Basically high speed ultra sound machines to scan for any foreign material in the finished product. To a pony, it would basically be a giant supermarket scanner that gives an ungodly screech every now and again when it sees something off before kicking seemingly random samples off of the belt. They look thatbway because they use barcodes to match any contaminated products to their batch number. Any potentially contaminated batches are further inspected using even higher tech gadgets to make certain anything in the packets is a simple one off type mistake.
What did the humans think it was, soup?
I do love watching the eldritch horror of human-scale mass production setting in. This isn't the pony way. This isn't the pony way at all!
Poor Serrano.
This always brings me back to episodes like Super Speedy Cider Squeezy or Canterlot Boutique, where there are ponies that want to industrialize others, but the ponies doing the crafting reject the industrialization. I think it's the cutie marks. Ponies are just inherently more attached to the creative process than we are.
What does Como Salsa para los Tacos mean in English?
10750424
roughly, ‘like salsa for tacos,’ and it’s a play on a book (and movie) titled “Como Agua para Chocolate” [like water for chocolate]
10747531
I know, right?
Modern human society is a duality. Everything is available for sale, and yet is it worth the price?
10748385
The question we need to ask ourselves is if they want industrialization and they’re just bad at it, mostly, or stuck in their old ways, or as you say more attached to the cutie marks?
The weather factory snippets we’ve seen suggest that they do understand industrialization and use it some places, and some of the ‘Twilight dealing with how Ponyville does stuff’ suggest a willful resistance to change, even if it’s for the better.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know what the right answer is, either in Equestria or here on Earth. There is value in the old crafts, the old skills, and there is value in the new ways of doing things, and how you weigh them out is legit beyond me. My IRL job is one that straddles the line; I do lots of good old-fashioned mechanical work that would have been understood by my grandfather, and I also do network diagnosis and reprogramming because a lot of the mechanical stuff has a computer helping it out.
10750552
We know they can if they want to, what with both the Crystal War and the Flim & Flam timelines showing a fully industrialized Equestria, but the first was done purely out of necessity and stars only know how Flim & Flam of all ponies managed their complete takeover of Equestria. It's likely more a choice than an inherent ability to do so or not.
I think how Serrano imagined a factory probably hits on the right note on how Equestria views industrialization with his "a big factory as just being a lot of mares all chopping up peppers:" to them, there always needs to be some form of hooves-on work involved. A factory making sauce would have ponies chopping up, cooking and bottling the ingredients. Sure, there may be conveyor belts involved, but if we look at for example Cloudsdale, a lot of the actual work is seemingly still done by ponies rather than just machines.
As for which is better, that's... probably better off as a subjective thing to leave to whatever any given culture prefers.
Well, duh. Everyone knows pipes are for soup!
10769582
Exactly!
10752612
Oh yeah, and there’s some stuff in the show that I’d argue is mass-produced, things like the bolts of fabric Rarity has, or paper—possibly more than a few of their everyday essentials. I’ve also implied in stories that shoes are mass-produced, although they still have to be fitted by a farrier. IIRC, there are tin cans in canon, which also suggests at least mass-produced cans, I don’t think it’s economically feasible to craft cans for the masses without at least some machines helping on the way (admittedly, I could be wrong on that; I haven’t gone in-depth on the history of putting food in metal cans).
Yeah, exactly. The same thing which is done in a pony’s kitchen, but in a larger building with more stations and maybe bigger pots for cooking, bigger stoves, etc. Maybe with some tasks automated (the conveyor belts, for example). Machines to do some of the foolproof tasks, while proper craftsmares do the fiddly work. And I think he’d accept that some of the raw materials are to a degree mass-produced; even with traditional farming, there have long been machines to assist in the harvest—even Applejack doesn’t pick apples individually (although I bet she’s inspected every single one she intends to sell at market).
Yeah, that’s very much a debate. Of course you tend to get things cheaper (at least in a literal out-of-pocket cost) when it’s made in bulk, since there’s always savings when you’re making a hundred thousand identical units instead of one-offs. And there’s some stuff where you really don’t care; if you can write on the paper and it hasn’t got bark, it’s probably good enough.
Realistically, anything canon implies is disposable is probably mass-produced if possible to cut costs.
If you believe that, better don't ask where soup comes from...
- MLP: FiM
- Slice of Life
Running across Equestria, a vast network of pipes transfers soup from the mines out West to hungry ponies on the East Coast. Few ponies sitting down to a bowl of fresh cazuela ever think about the soup pipeline.Edit: It seems everyone had beaten me to finding this reference. But well, at least I'm the first one explaining it to the newcomers.
Good to see there is still hope in the universe.
And then the ponies realize they need more sauce since everypone loves it, forcing them to scale back up...Good chapter!
I enjoyed reading it.
May have found a type:
Is there missing a word? Maybe hugs?
10743416
Their whole operation needs to be introduced to that.
Heck, they need to be introduced to Google. Let's see here... taco bell supply chain
rscs.com
and look, a link for ordering equipment
and googling 'taco bell recipes' shows many videos of copycat recipes.
and of course https://www.tacobell.com/FAQS has pretty much all the info the ponies thought they needed spies to get.
I'm Fetch. My cutie mark is a trivia book. Finding info is my thing. :D
PS: I actually do NOT go to Taco Bell. I'm not a fan of that cuisine. I'll stick with going to my preferred local pizzeria (there are 10 in my town, and none of them big chains like Domino's, Pizza Hut, or Papa Gino's. Those 3 used to be here, but left between 2000 and 2019)
Found a 'Cheese Sandwich' song that sort of fits this story. https://youtu.be/pzFEmWkpoZw
10799826
You’re right, that does fit the story. I also like that animation style.
10784715
Not only will there often be soup (and soup in pipes) references going forward, but there are also often peach references due to a thing I did way back when.
- MLP: FiM
- Random
- Slice of Life
Twilight Sparkle eats a peach.Here’s another one I’ll give you as a bonus, I’ve had a miller (the occupation) in multiple stories, and the miller has never had a name and never will. It will always just be ‘the miller.’
Agreed.
Or else they’d make the recipes freely available, so everypony can make the sauce.
Good chapter!
I enjoyed reading it.
Thank you!
No, but maybe there should be a comma there. (”Ponies could sometimes be won over by food, and while after a shift...”)
10797556
They’ve got that, and they’re putting in new computers at their headquarters as fast as they can.
I found that, too.
Yes, but those are copies. They want to be as genuine as possible, rather than trust copycat recipes and videos on the internet. After all, while there are plenty of good, useful ones, there’s also this:
The next chapter will feature the ponies who are also working with internet recipes and reverse-engineering and other experiments. They’ve also got a food truck!
...
(the truck doesn’t run)
If you ever really want to get in the weeds for research projects, there are probably some challenges I could send your way. Of course I can’t think of any of them at the moment, but every now and then I get completely stymied on a bit of trivia, and while I’m a pretty good researcher, I’m not always the best using the internet to its full potential.
10801840
No, that is not necessary. I don't do it for a job. Among my immediate family and my friends, I just happen to be the one that is the most Google savvy. Before Google, I spent a LOT of time at my local library.
10802068
Pity :P
Yeah, me too, in both regards. Back in the days of paper catalogues, learning how to keyword search was a huge benefit and I’m still pretty good at it. Although I’ll admit I know people online who are a league above me.
(admittedly, I could be wrong on that; I haven’t gone in-depth on the history of putting food in metal cans).
I don't know the whole story, but earlier this year I made a number of Civil War era reciepts( old word for recipes), and from what I recall from one of the books I looked at canning was a fairly new concept around that period which coincides with your headcanon for Equestria. The big issue was that early canning was horribly unreliable and spoilage or accidental poisoning from toxic metals or FBP's was a huge problem.
As to assembly lines, I currently work in a cafeteria on the local campus and so while it's not quite as bad as Serrano's experience we get weekly trucks (sometimes more than one) and food waste is an issue from people not labling pans or bags, shipment issues, making to many backups, etc. On an average morning I might make between 15 and 20 omelets not counting the other breakfast items including premade sausage patties or bacon, French Toast, Scrambled eggs, and 5/10 lb bags of Breakfast potatoes.
11038857
From what I remember, metal cans started to become a thing around Napoleon's time, and while there were some advantages, there were some disadvantages as well. As I’m sure you know, some types of food preservation date much further back and I suppose it’s a kind of blurry line as to what’s canning and what’s not (especially if we’re considering glass jars); you’ve got jellies and jams and sauces and sauerkrauts and pickling or brining, beer. . . . Townsends covers a few methods on his YouTube channel, he usually does Revolutionary War-era cooking. I do think I remember the reliability being a big issue in the early days, ‘it works 90% of the time’ isn’t great when there’s a 10% chance that the can you open will kill you if you eat the contents. And I also think I recall that some of the early cans were sealed with lead. IIRC, Cody (on Cody’s Lab) did a traditional canning of beans, and when he opened it some time later they looked okay, but he wasn’t willing to risk trying to eat them.
I don’t think ponies are quite ready for industrial food production like we humans do it, although I do think that they have places where they have or are transitioning to a more industrial food production system. Like the cook in the Ponyville Hospital, for example. I’ve worked in restaurants and college food service, too, and can confirm that there are all sorts of problems in the kitchen/storage area leading to food waste. Some of it (IMHO) also comes down to certain industries wanting to be over conservative for safety--I’ve eaten a pizza that sat out for three days and I was fine, but no reputable location would sell that (nor should they); I think a lot of the food regulations tend to err on the side of caution, on the side of ‘we know if it’s only been out for three hours it’s safe, so that’s the limit, even though up to ten hours it’s probably okay and any food poisoning will be mild.’ In the group homes they made a big deal out of that, because if you don’t know you can’t say it’s safe. Likewise at one shop I worked at, one of the managers was married to a guy who did route deliveries for a snack company, and we often snacked on expired food--usually it was just as good as new, sometimes it was a little off flavor-wise, but nobody ever got sick just because a bag of chips was past its ‘best by’ date. And back when I lived in a bigger town, I used to bulk-buy route-return bread at an outlet store. Heck, I got gifted a pallet (literally) of microbrew that was past its prime. I was warned that there could be skunky bottles and to sniff them before drinking, I think I got one bad bottle and all the rest were fine.
11042372
We actually had to stop making Pizza at work during lunch service for this very reason, the "new" rules were to change pizzas every 20 minutes, although we never made it exactly, typically we averaged only around 12-15 pizzas. Of those, however, we would throw away like 3/4 of them un-touched.
11042414
That’s got to be a real challenge for places putting out lots of food like you do . . . the group homes where I work part-times are really conservative on food safety, but it makes sense since some of our clients have health issues, and they don’t do enough volume of food for food waste to be a huge issue (it is an issue, of course). And in some homes there are dietary restrictions, although oddly enough the people that do purchasing never seem to figure that out. Like one home where two of the three guys weren’t supposed to eat tomato-based stuff, and yet we were well-stocked with canned tomatoes, tomato-based spaghetti sauce, etc.