2008 - Day 2 - Holidays are over!

Thank god the holidays are over. I'm tired of all this forced good cheer and peace and love and shit. Let's get back to normal, and quick.

So anyway, I just have a few minutes, I have to get back to work. I have an audition on Friday for a new TV show, and I have to write my own audition. I have to write and host a segment of this new TV show and I have to make it interesting and fabulous! I'm looking forward to it though, because if there was anything I would be perfect for, the host position on this show would be it.

I don't want to go into to many details yet, but its a "how to" kind of show all about food. I'm going to write about something I know; how salmon gets canned. You see I worked in a salmon cannery for two summers when I was younger, so I know all about it. Contrary to popular belief, they don't just put open cans in the water and wait for the salmon to swim into them. No, canneries wait till the fish are caught and brought there. Then the fun begins.

Canneries are really dangerous places. Its cold, its wet, there are sharp knives and dangerous machines everywhere. The cement floors are wet and covered with fish slime, oil and guts. People work long hours. They are tired and cranky. They throw fish guts at each other and make bad jokes. Oh, and the coffee sucks.

12 hours of gutting fish on the slime line is a horrendous job. Its repetitive and hard on the body. You are always cold as the temperature inside has to be kept low to maintain the product. It's wet; there is water spraying everywhere. Standing on a cement floor in rubber boots, up to your ankles in fish guts, wearing a rain slick over the warmest clothes you have, you really can start to hate fish. I bet the fish would hate us more though, if they were still alive and were capable of such thoughts. Anyway, when the salmon are running and the cannery is in full operation, it can be a very exciting place. Everyone is working, everyone is partying, and everyone is thinking about what they'll do when the season is over and they have some money.

After my second year in the cannery, after 56 straight days of work, after putting in 110 to 115 hours on the clock each week, I was able to go to Paris and live for about six months on the money I made in 9 weeks. Not a bad trade-off.

When gutting a fish, you stick a knife in its belly and rip up from one end to the other. Then, spreading its fleshy sides, remove the internal organs from esophagus to anus. Sometimes I found interesting things they ate recently, like rocks and stones, but I once found a coin inside a fish. I don't remember what happened to it. I also remember seeing fish with bear claw marks on them. They escaped the bear, but ran into a net. Oh, well.

Fish destined to be sold fresh or fresh frozen had to be treated delicately to maintain their integrity, and therefore, the highest price.

Fish destined for the cannery are treated with less care, and they are sent to machines to be headed, gutted, finned and prepped for canning. The name of the machine that did all that in one smooth flow was the "Chink". Not very PC now a days, but it harkens back to another time, to the beginning of the cannery era, when most of the workers were Chinese laborers. I found a picture of a cannery in operation in 1908, and the caption read, "Iron Chink at work..." In 1984, it was still called the Chink. Dangerous machine that one. I saw a guy stick his hand in too far to retrieve a fish and get his arm broken. He was trying to stop a fish from clogging the works. Bad decision, made because he was over tired and not thinking clearly. He was lucky in one respect; after getting back from the hospital with his arm in a cast, the cannery found a soft dry cushy job for him for the rest of the season. Better than paying unemployment for them, I guess.

Anyway, after the fish are prepped, they get chopped up and put in cans, skin bones and all. The chopped fish are sent down to the "piano bar", that's a line where the chopped fish are spread out nice and evenly so they fall evenly into the cans. The workers on the "piano bar" quickly spread the flesh with both hands as it goes down a conveyor, and it kind of looks like they are playing a key board, hence the name, the piano bar. I subbed on that line a little, though it was mostly women.

After the cans are filled and before they are sealed, they go down another line where workers, again mostly women, remove flesh from the overfilled cans and put flesh in the lighter cans. A can too full may not seal properly, and a can too light won't weigh enough.

The filled cans are then sealed, and sent to the oven where they are baked for 90 - 120 minutes at a high temperature. This will kill all bacteria, and also soften the bones and skins and makes them edible. Salmon is a unique fish in that there are not too many bones, they can be eaten, and when the consumer opens the can it has a pleasant look to it.

So, that's cannery 101 in a nutshell.

Anyway, I got to go write a fish story, and you have to go back to whatever it is you do. What do you do anyway?

If you ever worked at a cannery, write me and tell me about it.