People Food

Blessings Darlings!

As many of you know, my food storage program is built around a base of feed-store bought wheat and corn (and, damn, I wish feed stores around here sold whole soybeans).  Some people have wondered about whether humans can/should be eating food that's sold for feed for animals - sure grains sold for direct human consumption are better somehow.  Cleaner? Better inspected?

Certainly the same products sold for human consumption are more expensive.  But better/cleaner/certified?  Nope!

While the Chubby Hubby isn't at all into prepping, really, he DOES bring a serious knowledge base into this part of the discussion.  While in college, he worked summers at a Huge Corn Processing Company.  They made (I'm sure they basically still exist now, but have been swallowed by an even LARGER Huge Corn Processing Company) most of the types of corn products used across the US: corn starch, corn sugar, corn syrup, glutens, flours, etc.  He has told me stories of how things work there.

The corn the company got was the same corn that the feed producers get. The same silo spits it out into the same train hopper cars.  The silo tests ALL of the corn for toxins.

The feed companies and the Human Processing company both use the same process to 'clean' the corn - fundamentally, using fans/compressed air to blow away things not the right weight as the kernels should be.  After that, the feed company fills 50 pound bags with the grain.  Meanwhile, the Corn Processor starts to play.

Corn Processor 'cleans' the corn .... by dumping the kernels water with sulfer dioxide in it, making the water a weak acid.  Yummy! This kills stops any mold from growing during the 24 hour soak, but allows enzymatic action in the kernels.  They then wet mill it, and the slurry gets divided into it's 4 main component parts - hulls starch, germ, and something I can't recall right now.  Dang. The splashing acidic slurry eats away at the concrete around the milling machines, by the way. 

Anyway, let's talk about where the starch goes.  It gets refined in TONS of different ways, for different purposes.  Every now and then, they take out a sample to test it.  When they take a sample, some spills on the floor. 

How do they clean the floor?  Oh, with water.  Where does the corn starchy water go? BACK INTO THE MIX FOR PROCESSING.  How yummy is THAT?

So, yeah.  I grind my own flour, from whole grains meant for animals.

Frondly, Fern