After yesterday, I now have
eight photo albums from supplier or farm tours at work, dating back to 2012, two from this year alone—the first time ever that I've gone on two in a single calendar year. There's actually a tour of one of our soap makers on Tuesday next week that I absolutely would have gone on too, but Shobhit and I will be headed back from the Third Biannual Family Vacation on the Washington coast on that day. I have such an in-demand social life, I have to sacrifice cool work stuff!
Yesterday was the
Wilcox Family Farms tour, the second I have taken in as many years. As such, I now also have a photo album collection dedicated to
just these tours. Last year's photo album had 68 shots in it (58 photos and 10 video clips); this year's has 56 shots (46 photos and 10 video clips). I think I did pretty well with that, considering I was just there last year.
The group was also much bigger last year, largely because Noah combined it with a Grocery Coordinator meeting, which meant at minimum there was one person from all fifteen stores, in many cases one or two more. There were just a few slots open, and because I had long been hearing about their innovative "mobile pastures," I was eager to see them and asked to go along. Gabby wound up joining us too, and was among just a small few of us who went both last year and yesterday.
The group was much smaller this year, which actually turned out to be convenient to the experience—we got some better access to certain things this time. There was no Coordinator Meeting to combine it with, and I believe I was told this was the third in as many years that Wilcox Farms hosted this event. There was so much less interest among the stores when the invite went out this year that multiple invites went out, to both the stores and the office.
Six people from Merchandising went yesterday: Noah, Frank (who is new since last year), Amanda, Gabby, Amy, and myself. There were four people from the Marketing & Purpose team, which meant a good 10 people from the office. There was just a smattering of people from stores this year—maybe six? I'm not entirely sure, except that when we all boarded the bus four the tour around the farm's acreage and plants, I counted 18 on the bus, and two people on the bus, including the driver, were from the Wilcox group.
When we were all boarding that bus, I had quickly gone to use the bathroom, and when I was headed out to catch up with everyone, Gabby asked me to get her picture hanging out the back window of the bus with its
The Wilcox Family Farm sign in large lettering stenciled along the side.
Anyway, Amanda had been the one to suggest carpooling, and so Noah drove her and Frank and me down. She and Frank met at Noah's house in Wallingford yesterday morning, left their cars there, and Noah drove them down here to pick me up at my place on Capitol Hill at about 8:30.
Side note on Noah's driving. He kind of drives like a maniac. To his credit, he actually does it very well. But he would zip between lanes on the freeway with sometimes harrowing swiftness, often passing another car really quickly while they were trying to do the same. I was glad Amanda was sitting in the front passenger seat and I was in the back, as Noah's quick accelerations and zipping between lanes rather close to other cars would have given me heart palpitations (and I think to a degree it did do that to Amanda). All I could think about was how much Shobhit would have loved this; he tends to hate being a passenger precisely because the driver
isn't doing these things.
Anyway! We arrived at the farm relatively early, passing a sandwich board sign directing us to a specific parking lot, with "PCC" spelled out with each letter printed in a giant font on one 8.5x11" sheet of paper each. We were all mildly amused by that. We were the first of the PCC people to arrive.
I actually meant to get more photos of some of the things inside the barn where we all gathered, but never quite got around to it—although I did get photos of several new things in there. It's just so packed with objects and info posters and memorabilia from the 115-year history of this farm that began in 2009. Before they pivoted back to cage-free eggs, this barn used to be a three-level henhouse for caged hens, which they had turned to in the 1960s for the sake of efficiency (the dominant reasoning for more unsustainable decisions at the time). We were told there were photos of what it looked like as a henhouse up in the loft space above us, but I never did go up there yesterday. Good thing I
did get a picture of it last year.
Just like last year, there were several tables set up inside the barn/musuem, which we all sat at to listen to a few brief talks when Noah suggested to Dale, who has long been a rep for Wilcox selling eggs to PCC, that we get started. Then we all went out to file into the bus, which took us to three key places: the hard boiled egg plant; the mobile pastures; a nearby dam in the Nisqually River; and the raw egg plant.
The hard boiled egg plant was a much cooler experience this year, as mentioned earlier because this time we had a smaller group. We were guided into a room where the eggs are put through an automated process that boils them. We were told the eggs spend a total of about 45 minutes on the whole process, about 18 minutes actually cooking. And because our group was smaller, we got to walk all the way around the machinery, as opposed to just looking from a respectful distance like we did last year. I got a very fun video clip out of it.
By this point, I had already eaten two hard boiled eggs at the barn where they had eggs and pastries out for us to snack on upon arrival. Here, they offered us hard boiled eggs to eat fresh off the machine. I had one, but then someone brought salt and pepper. I really like my hard boiled eggs to be salted, so I was like, fuck it, I'll have another. So I ate four hard boiled eggs before we even had lunch.
Soon enough we were out at the mobile pastures. Last year, we all got to fit ourselves into full body suits and booties and hair nets, and actually walk amongst the hens. Due to avian flu and the need for greater biosecurity, that was not an option this year. We could only watch from the road on the other side of the fence, but honestly this worked fine, and I think the video clip I got this year of the henhouse being towed to a new location on the pasture might be even better than the one I got last year.
I took
a group selfie while we were there, with Amanda, Amy and Gabby. Then a woman from Wilcox offered to take our picture, and we got
another couple of photos of all four of us out of it.
The drive out to the dam in the Nisqually River, which if I recall correctly had to do with helping salmon runs, was slightly anticlimactic, arguably not worth all the time it took to get out there on an incredibly bumpy, unpaved road in a bus that had to be driven at what felt like ten or fifteen miles per hour. On the other hand, I did get
this beautiful photo out of it.
From there it was on to the (raw) egg plant, which last year they were packing PCC Private Label Eggs when we visited; this year they were working on eggs for other companies. Frank asked what the point was of making it seem special if they also packed private label eggs for the likes of Amazon and Whole Foods, and I had no answer for that. I don't make these decisions! And logical or not, this is how PL has worked for several years now.
We did see one amusing section of the conveyor belts here, a place where eggs go through pulsing ultraviolet light, and as such our tour guide told us they call that the "egg disco." I can't remember exactly what is happening there, but after Googling I think it may be for
reducing microbial pathogens. Either way, once I got home later in the day, I went out of my way to turn the two short video clips I took of this into an "Egg Disco" TikTok video with disco music playing.
That raw egg plant had an unpleasant smell in it. It wasn't overwhelming, but just bad enough to be noticeably off-putting. I figured the people who actually work there just get over it quickly; this is generally the way odors work—soon enough you just stop noticing it.
Once that was done, we all loaded into the tour bus one last time, and came back to the barn museum. They had a barbecue lunch waiting for us there. Predictably, I
ate too much: a delivious veggie burger; potato salad; chips and salsa. This wouldn't have been so bad except for adding on too many things I continued consuming later in the evening. (I'll get to that.)
We were headed back in Noah's car by shortly after 2:00, as they wanted to beat the traffic—and still we hit pretty heavy traffic once we got closer to the city center in Seattle. (Wilcox Farm's address is in Roy, WA, which is near Yelm, and kind of east / southeast of Olympia, a roughly 90-minute drive from Seattle without traffic.) I got dropped off first, and this gave Shobhit and me a couple of hours to hang out together, while I processed photos, until my next thing.
And! My next thing was the movie I went to see with Laney—at Cinerama! Or technically now, "SIFF Cinema Downtown." I met at her place and we walked there, to the theater in Belltown on the same block, just the opposite corner diagonally, from the building I lived in the first six years I was in Seattle—until I met and then moved in with Shobhit. We agreed to see
Alien: Romulus there because this was a movie we were both particularly excited to see.
We both
really enjoyed it. B+ movie! Just like the last two movies in the franchise. It's consistent, at least. We walked home after that, and I stayed up quite late just to get that review, which I really enjoyed writing, written.
[posted 12:12 pm]
