Aug 6, 2003
I should have known better. He was a good lad - keen, cheerful, confident, - but he had a prominent and bony nose, and that should have told me something, for the nose, according to Hazlitt, is the rudder of the face and the index of the will. I should at least have known that to follow a nose like that, cleaving the future without a glance to right or to left, would sooner or later lead someone, probably me, into trouble, whatever else it might achieve along the way.
We had had a request from Head Office to do a survey of the Waikato and Taranaki dairy factories for insect problems. As is usual with Head Offices, they gave no reason for loading us with this, except to say that the Dairy Board had requested it, and as obfuscation, if not outright duplicity, seems to be the first recourse of such commercial organisations, it seemed useless to pursue the matter. Who knows. They might even have had an attack of conscience, and were wanting to clean up their operation in line with the image they always portrayed of themselves.
So we clambered through each dairy factory, sneezing in lofts dusty with milk powder, and gathering samples with our “Dustbusters” from crevices in bulk stores and vehicles and loading shoots. But apart from the occasional dead weevil in stored cereals (some of the factories use cereals in the composition of various proprietary products), we found nothing that would be likely to tarnish their image.
A few months later the truth began to emerge. The Dairy Research Institute sent us a dismal little package of insect fragments for identification. Research people are much less skilled in the arts of duplicity than are their commercial counterparts, and they had idly mentioned that the fragments had been recovered from a package of some dried milk product by some vigilant Malaysian whose factory had imported the stuff. Even he might not have been too concerned, except that the product was to have been incorporated into baby food, and no one, even an infidel or a pagan, would want to feed insect fragments to a baby. The Malaysian threatened to cancel an order that ran to something over a million dollars. The problem, if not the solution was beginning to make some sense.
The fragments turned out to be mainly the wings, legs, and occasionally heads or other parts, of various midges. You might have expected to find their like near a swamp or a compost bin but not a dairy factory. We were mystified.
So Rob went down to the Research Institute in Palmerston North, and with his direct and engaging manner he won the trust of the scientists to the extent of learning which dairy factory had supplied the offending material. He also learnt that the insect parts occurred only in a few bags and that they were always up against the plastic. The rest of the powder was clean and uncontaminated.
So he visited the offending factory and charmed them into letting him follow through the process of production and the filling of the bags, but still without coming to any conclusion as to the cause of the contamination.
It occurred to me that the insects might have been present within the bags before they were filled. Some years before we had had an enquiry from a manufacturer of plastic packaging relating to a somewhat similar insect problem. A roll of polythene tube, (used in the production of plastic bags), had been returned because it contained insects. There were not very many of them, but the transparent plastic made their little bodies visible through the many layers in the roll.
I hadn’t realised it before, but the tubing for making plastic bags is produced in somewhat the same manner as you can make a cylindrical soap bubble by smartly lifting up a wire loop out of a soap solution. The plastic is extruded from a ring arrangement high up in a tall building, and the tube is prevented from sticking to itself by a draft of warm air blown down through the centre of the ring. By the time the tube reaches the floor, it has ceased to be sticky, and can be rolled onto a drum, ready for sale. The air for the blower was drawn from a duct with its intake above the roof of the building. The problem in this case was that some innovative fool had decided to stabilise the temperature in the building by designing it with a flat roof with a little parapet, so that the whole roof area could contain a couple of inches of water. This was supposed to keep the building cool in summer. It probably did, but it also constituted an attractive playground for seagulls and other water-loving birds, which, in their excitement, defiled the water with their waste products. The stinking pool became a breeding ground for all manner of sewage flies and midges. Some of these got sucked into the air intake, and blown into the plastic cylinder as it formed. Their ultimate fate was of course to be rolled onto the drum, to be preserved there for all the world to see and comment on. We solved the problem by putting a filter on the air intake.
I suggested to Rob that he might look at the unfilled bags at the dairy factory to see if they contained any insect pieces. He did that without finding anything but then his nose led him to go one better. He approached the plastic bag manufacturer, reminded him of his former problem, and drawing his attention to the million dollar difficulty that the dairy factory was currently facing. The manufacturer felt justly aggrieved. The mere mention of a million dollars will often have that effect on a manufacturer. He pointed out that the problem had been long since solved, and challenged Rob to examine his products and find otherwise. He also phoned me, in a tone of mingled grief and aggression, and gave me a well merited flea in the ear about commercial sensitivity and the mystical atmosphere of mutual trust that is supposed to exist between research institutions and their clients. I felt suitably chastened.
In the end it turned out that it was the dairy factory’s obsession with hygiene that had been their undoing. At the end of bagging each batch of powder, they had washed all the components of the equipment that fed the powder into the bags, and then dried them in a blast of hot air. It was their intake that was drawing in the midges, and it was their heating coil that was dismembering the little bodies and sticking their fragments onto the wet loading equipment. There the little relics had dried and remained, until the first blast of powder of the next batch dislodged them and fired them into the bag where they came to rest against the plastic, to the subsequent vexation of the alert Malaysian. Such is life!