How Engineers Changed Thanksgiving

Have you ever stopped to consider the engineering marvels that make festive meals like Thanksgiving possible? Engineering has played a crucial role in ensuring we can enjoy fresh-tasting vegetables and perfectly preserved foods all year round.

Beyond the realm of food preservation, this episode serves as a tribute to the unsung heroes of our holiday tables: engineers. These individuals are responsible for the seamless functioning of everyday items that enhance our lives. By shedding light on these engineering feats, we hope to inspire a greater appreciation for the engineering community's contributions to making life safer, easier, and more enjoyable.

As a fellow engineer, I am proud to be part of a profession that has such a profound impact on the world. By sharing stories of innovation and success, we can foster a deeper understanding of the vital role engineers play in shaping our daily experiences. Whether it's through the development of new technologies or the improvement of existing processes, engineers continue to push the boundaries of what is possible, ensuring that our holiday feasts are as delicious, healthy, and convenient as ever.

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ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.

Transcript

Engineering Innovations in Thanksgiving

Speaker 1 0:00

Where I live, we're starting to enter winter, so we have a few hours of daylight during the day and it's getting colder. It's also the time of year where a lot of friends and family get together over different celebrations. We're usually having dinner together. From my experience, stating I'm an engineer, that's a quick way to kill a conversation. Generally, people don't want to talk about engineering or don't know what to say about it, or if they do have something to say about it, it's from a memory or a sense of frustration with having a bad experience working with an engineer. Not feeling listened to. If you're finding that I'm an engineer is a conversation stopper, you can leave it there and look for other things that are in common with the other person. Another way to build that bridge with friends and family who aren't engineers is to make some observations about how engineers changed Thanksgiving or changed whatever big meal or celebratory event that you're there for. I'll share a story about what I mean after this brief introduction.

Speaker 2 1:07

Hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products others love for less. I'm your host, Diana Deeney. I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. I consult with businesses and coach individuals in how to apply quality during design to their processes. Listen in and then join us. Visit qualityduringdesigncom.

Speaker 1 1:37

Like I mentioned at the top of the episode, this is a time for gatherings with friends and family, but when you get sick, you really don't want to travel and you don't want to expose your older friends or family to whatever it is that you got, you want to keep it to yourself and get rid of it. Well, that's what happened to me. I was all set to travel, to link up with friends and family, looking forward to it, and then I got sick like real sick, but I still have a family of my own and it's not like the holiday was going to cancel itself. I still wanted to have a celebration, even if it was with my immediate family. So I masked up and brought someone with me to the grocery store and we did some shopping for the basic necessities and things to make our holiday feast special. I wasn't feeling good, and some of the other members of my family weren't feeling so good either, so we opted to do a lot of canned fruits and vegetables, frozen vegetables and refrigerated items so that we can put together our feast items. So that we can put together our feast as I'm standing in the grocery line with my cart looking at what it is we put in there and double checking that we got things that we needed for those special dishes.

Speaker 1 2:54

I started to think about how engineering changed Thanksgiving. Because an engineer figured out how to do something. Repeatedly, I was able to have vegetables that, when I cook them, taste like they were just picked the day before. Or I'm able to open a can of candied yams and make the baked dish that my one kid really likes, and do it pretty easily. And I thought about the refrigerated meat that I put in my cart, whether it's refrigerated or frozen. There was a refrigerated truck that helped get it to the grocery store, and while at the grocery store there are lots of refrigerators working and running to make sure that it doesn't spoil until I purchase it. So now I'm in this mood of looking at things that engineers have done and how they've contributed to Thanksgiving Pressure.

Speaker 1 3:47

Canning foods was developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries mostly to keep food safe for military troops and explorers. A French confectioner, nicolas Appert, who pioneered the technique of sealing food in glass jars and heating them to destroy those organisms that would spoil it. It wasn't long after that the commercial canning operations started working in the early 19th century, which made canned foods more widely accessible, and since then it's played a vital role in supplying food to both military troops but also civilians like me at the grocery store. Now this is the commercial operations, but there was also developments that engineers did in order to bring this technology to people's homes. Gardener and the people who had some orchards or an apple tree could preserve the foods that they grew over the summer and collected in the fall, so they could have it year round. In fact, my grandparents did pressure canning, my parents do pressure canning and I do pressure canning. We wouldn't have been able to do pressure canning at home unless an engineer was involved in helping to get those products to us and the engineers on the assembly line ensuring that the pressure canners that we did get were safe and effective for our use. Some families see it as a necessity, some see it as something that's nice to do. It allows the home cook to try different recipes, especially with different jams, jellies and butters like apple butter or pumpkin butter, things that you normally can't buy off the shelf but that you can make yourself. So pressure canning and the availability of it was one way that engineers changed Thanksgiving. Another way things changed was through freezing.

Speaker 1 5:45

Freezing has been used for a really long time, but it was in 1924 that Clarence Birdseye invented quick freezing. He was working as a fur trader in Labrador in Canada. On fishing trips he would notice that he and the Inuit would catch fish and as soon as they would bring them up out of the water, the fish would freeze, and a couple months later the fish was still tasty as if it was fresh caught. And that's the story of how he was inspired to try it with other foods. The quick freeze method involved both the packaging and the process for quickly freezing food at very low temperatures and the process for quickly freezing food at very low temperatures. Birdseye's method to quick freezing ended up creating 168 patents, and that's covered not only the freezing technique itself but also the packaging, the type of paper used and other related innovations to that.

Speaker 1 6:44

So when I think about the frozen vegetables and pie crust that I picked up for my Thanksgiving meal, I'm thinking about all the time, trials, errors and mistakes that went into making that process possible. And then I think about it's been in existence for 100 years and over that time there's been a lot of changes to packaging materials and to equipment and machines. Engineers have been involved a lot in making it more efficient and more available. It benefits me in being able to have the foods I want when I want and to make it more convenient for my use. And I get home and now I'm using my own refrigerator and thinking about how I can use some of my small appliances to help me make this Thanksgiving dinner.

Speaker 1 7:30

To help reduce the prep time yeah, I'm not looking for sympathy here, but I mean I'm not feeling good and I don't want to spend a lot of time making this fancy dinner. I can use a food processor to chop up my vegetables, which could save me 30 to 60 minutes of chopping time. I got pre-made pie crusts, so that saves me 30 to 45 minutes of rolling out dough. If I still had my electric kettle then I could boil my water much faster than just waiting to do it on the stovetop. That would save me a lot of time. And finally, my slow cooker is a good thing to use when my oven gets busy and I need to reserve it for other things. I can put other casseroles in my slow cooker and I just mix it all up, set it and forget it and it's ready when I need it.

Engineering Appreciation and Innovation

Speaker 1 8:19

In all of these modern conveniences. Engineers have helped to shape my Thanksgiving dinner. I know how difficult engineering decisions can be. There's a huge amount of care, experience, trials and tests in most every decision made. So to my fellow engineers, thank you for changing Thanksgiving. If someone asks you to tell them a little bit about yourself, proudly say that I am an engineer, and if that's a conversation stopper, that's fine. You can still have your pride in being part of a community that helps to make life a little easier, safer and better.

Speaker 1 9:06

But if you want to take it a step further and help engage the other person when talking about engineering, use some of the stories that I shared today about canning and freezing. Many people just pick up the bag or pick up the can and don't think about what went into actually making it happen. You, being an engineer, you better know why there's ridges on the can, all the testing that went into sealing that bag of frozen vegetables and all the care in selecting the materials that are just right for the job. Share just a little bit of your insight on the common everyday things and how engineering has shaped them, and more people will gain an appreciation of the engineering profession itself. This has been a production of Dini Enterprises. Thanks for listening, thank you.