Unwrapped: Scaling of actions and things

     I used to love watching a program called “Unwrapped” (the fact that it was hosted by a Marc Summers (no relation that I know of) didn’t hurt). The program (available via some streaming services) took the viewer into the factory to see how some everyday household, or food, item was produced to be able to sell it, and distribute it, nationwide or even globally. (There was also an Unwrapped 2.0 which I never saw.)

     I have a favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe — it comes from a Mennonite cookbook “More-With-Less Cookbook”. It requires a number of ingredients (surprise!). A cup of this, a teaspoon of that, 2 eggs, and so forth all get blended into the dough before it gets put into the oven. It takes a while to put together and doing it well takes practice. But, anyone can do it in their kitchen with the right tools and ingredients.

     Let’s ramp up “one level”. Now I would be cooking for 200 people at a food kitchen for the homeless. My recipe makes about four dozen. Saying two cookies a person, I would want to make about 400 cookies or about 8 times the recipe. Every cup becomes a half gallon. Two eggs increases to 16, and a teaspoon becomes about 2 2/3 tablespoons. This is a lot of material to work with but the biggest adjustment is with the tools. larger bowls are necessary and it is no longer possible to do all the mixing by hand (my sons still can’t understand why I mix by hand — but I like the tactile feedback of doing it by hand). Larger pans are also needed and a second oven would be very useful.

     The program “Unwrapped” takes this scaling a huge number of an increase. A cookie factory may make 40,000 cookies a day. If they used my recipe (unlikely, but not impossible) each cup would increase to 50 gallons. They would be using 1600 eggs (around 17 gallons), and the teaspoon would increase to 800 teaspoons (about 17 cups or a bit more than 2 gallons). European recipes use weights for much of a recipe and, perhaps, that might make more sense to many of you — but I am used to the US measurement system (though it does make scaling numbers harder).

     At any rate, for 40,000 cookies a day the standard mixing and baking processes are no longer adequate. Huge industrial mixers are needed along with pipelines filled with powders and liquids. Ovens turn into line ovens where a continuous stream of unbaked cookies are deposited on a conveyer belt and pop out of the other end of the very long (perhaps 50 feet or more) oven baked. Decorations require special mass tools. Of course, for this scale, one is also dealing with packaging and distribution — but I’m not going to tackle that here. (I think logistics — making everything occur as it needs to happen — is fascinating, and we all make use of it every day — but that is still not today’s topic).

     So far, we have only worked with the process of expansion. We have not looked at all the ramifications — or consequences — of this ramping up. We have to have herds of dairy cows and daily deliveries. Trucks of sugar are needed to put into the storage bins and pipelines. Acres of fields are needed to grow the spices, wheat, cocoa, and the various other ingredients.

     Say that we shift from cookies to loaves of bread. Recipes vary but 4 cups of flour in a loaf of bread is not unreasonable. The population of the US is presently about 335 million. Let’s just say (for estimates sake) that each person eats the equivalent of 1/4 loaf of bread per day (it may be in the form of pita, or tortillas, or whatever). That becomes 84 million loaves of bread per day. 84 million loaves boosts the number of cups of flour back to that 335 million cup level. That ends up at about 92 million pounds of flour. Each bushel of wheat produces around 50 pounds of flour. There are about 37 bushels of wheat produced per acre (on average). 92 million pounds of flour becomes 1,840,000 bushels which are produced from 49,730 acres of wheat. Almost 50,000 acres of wheat are needed per day to meet US needs for that 1/4 loaf per person.

     In the US, 55.9 million acres (approximately) of land are devoted to wheat farming. In a year, about 18 million (50,000 times 365.25) of those acres translates to 1/4 loaf of bread for each person for each day of the year. We use wheat for other than just bread and we also feed grain (more likely corn but wheat is not impossible) to animals. Some of the statistics I have read indicate that we use about 4/5 of the wheat grown internally and export the remaining 1/5.

     Is your mind overwhelmed by the effects of scaling? Mine certainly is.

     I have used an innocuous, everyday, item to illustrate the effects of scaling. However, scaling applies to everything. With 335 million people in the US and about 8 billion on the planet. Everything we do becomes part of something much, much, larger. 25 pounds of trash per week per household becomes around 2,500,000,000 pounds of trash per week for the US. One vote expands into part of a block of millions of people. One new pair of shoes per person per year gives us 335 million new pairs of shoes per year in the US.

     There is a saying that is attributed to a First Nation that one should always “tread lightly upon the earth”. This is maintaining an awareness of what we do and how it scales if everyone does it. (There is another saying that says we should “look at the effects to the seventh generation” — saying that our decisions affect the future and we should keep that in mind.) We may say, “oh my part of this is so small it doesn’t make a difference”. But, with scaling, it does.

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