{"id":10148,"date":"2019-09-09T15:03:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-09T22:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=10148"},"modified":"2019-09-29T15:04:59","modified_gmt":"2019-09-29T22:04:59","slug":"captain-ketchup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2019\/09\/09\/captain-ketchup\/","title":{"rendered":"Captain Ketchup"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/thesalt\/2019\/09\/02\/754316710\/meet-the-man-who-guards-americas-ketchup\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"from NPR (opens in a new tab)\">from NPR<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Meet The Man Who Guards America&#8217;s Ketchup<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/people\/143160021\/daniel-charles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\">DAN CHARLES<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.npr.org\/assets\/img\/2019\/08\/26\/img_9106_custom-ee54c4ea04ced513e4ff705371b0021e7d3b51ba-s800-c85.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><figcaption>Hector Osorno is the Kraft Heinz Ketchup Master, whose job it is to make sure around 70% of the ketchup sold in America tastes the way it should. <em>Dan Charles\/NPR<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>My search for the secrets of American ketchup began in a sun-baked field near Los Banos, Calif.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The field didn&#8217;t look like much at first. Just a wide, pale-green carpet of vines. Then Ross Siragusa, the head of global agriculture for the company Kraft Heinz, bent over, lifted up some of the vines, and revealed a mass of small, red fruit, too many to count.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Each acre of this field, Siragusa tells me, will produce about 60 tons of tomatoes. That&#8217;s up from about 40 tons per acre just 15 years ago. The tomatoes themselves are a mix of tomato varieties that are specially bred to produce red, thick ketchup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A mechanical harvester approaches at the pace of a brisk walk. It&#8217;s a giant machine, a factory on wheels. It collects a swath of tomato plants, shakes fruit loose from the vines, and sends a stream of bright red tomatoes into a big truck driving alongside. The scale and speed of the operation boggles the mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Within a day, a processing plant in Los Banos will turn these tomatoes into paste. Weeks or even months later, the paste will become the central ingredient in ketchup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[ <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/thesalt\/2019\/09\/02\/754316710\/meet-the-man-who-guards-americas-ketchup\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"click to continue reading at NPR (opens in a new tab)\">click to continue reading at NPR<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from NPR Meet The Man Who Guards America&#8217;s Ketchup by DAN CHARLES My search for the secrets of American ketchup began in a sun-baked field near Los Banos, Calif. The field didn&#8217;t look like much at first. Just a wide, pale-green carpet of vines. Then Ross Siragusa, the head of global agriculture for the company [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}