I spent the day in Natania. I had an "emergency call" by a bakery of Caucasian bread in the town's central market that has been closed by local Health Authorities. The pic shows the mold on the walls in the flour deposit. The owner had covered the walls with super-antifungus paint but the mold was returning and spreading. The Kavkazi Jew and her daughter were solemn and dead serious, I tried to improve the atmosphere and connect to them, but these people has absolutely no sense of humor and were in no mood of smiling. I called Natalia to translate on the phone: the mold loves darkness and humidity, and the deposit had no windows nor ventilator opening. They had built it without municipal permit, and they feared it would be noticed from the outside. I proposed vents and windows on the ceiling, but it had been built so incompetently that it may collapse if tampered with. He gave me a large Caucasian bread to taste, and I was so hungry that ate it in the drive to Kever Benjamin. It felt like a block of cement in the stomach and I wondered: Was he still secretly baking bread? Was the bread infested by the toxic mold and its spores? Or is it that Caucasian bread always produce that feeling in the stomach? It took a few hours, but by now it has been digested and I feel better. I should never eat outside.
The good thing is that I am starting to be known as a consulting engineer who "has solutions, will travel". I am having much more work than I can do. Also the semester has started and I teach five courses!
5 comments:
Have them tear the grain storage room down and build a new one.
How could they build a substandard grain room anyway? The whole structure is just four cinder block walls, a sloped concrete floor and a roof. Once the structure is up it needs to be made airtight in order to keep dirt out.
Besides, I thought all bakeries used bagged flour.
Ehh, what do I know?
I am not an engineer but it seems to me that ventilation and dehumidification is more important than windows (or that perhaps artificial lights could be installed). The openings (intake and exhaust) needed for a forced ventilation/dehumidification system could be quite small - there must be some opening already to get the flour in and out.
As for Ronduck's comment re: bagged flour, I know that near where I live there is a former bakery that has a large concrete farm silo (very incongruous in an urban zone). Apparently, they found out that it was cheaper to buy flour in bulk than bagged for the volume they were producing. But the vast majority of US bakeries do rely on bagged flour.
K
Sure, the storeroom has dozens of sacks of bagged flour stacked on a wooden platform.
More advanced bakeries have silos and move the flour in pipes.
Now that you mention it, ocurred to me that the opening of the flour bags must produce a thick dust of floor, which sticks to the wet concrete walls, creating an ideal medium for the mold colonies.
I dont want to generalize, but it is possible that our lost brothers in the remote Caucasus mountains lost some of their original Jewish intelligence. On the other hand, they developed iron stomachs!
It is thought by some that the intelligence that the Ashkenazim are noted for was developed due to the unique conditions of their exile in Europe, where many of the normal trades such as farming were closed to them, but money lending was left open as Christians were forbidden to engage in usury. For most agricultural people, high intelligence is not an especially necessary trait for survival, but for the Ashkenazim, those who were best at living by their wits (the intelligent) were favorably selected for survival and reproduction. Or so the story goes. In the very different conditions of the Caucasus, where as you say Jews lived as autonomous villagers, this same strong selection in favor of intelligence might not have occurred and the general statistics show that the Sephardim do not possess especially high intelligence as a group.
It would seem strange that the dust in the air from the flour bags would only cling to the walls on the inside of the flour silo, or was the mold present on all walls of the bakery?
Also, given the way these things are usually done (in the cheapest and fastest way) , I wonder if the super-antifungus paint was just applied over the already moldy walls? Even anti-fungus paint will not kill existing colonies that have a good source of food for themselves (the linseed oil in old paint itself, usually). They will go on living under the new layer of paint (now even happier because they have been sealed into a dark and moist environment) and eventually break thru. Probably what needed to be done was that at the very least the walls had to be scrubbed with a chlorine bleach or other mold killing solution or even the old paint removed entirely and THEN you apply the anti-fungus paint to a sterile wall and the mold colonies cannot re-establish themselves (you hope). Keep this in mind the next time you try to eradicate the mold.
K
Thanks.
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