Once Upon a Delicious Dream

By Guadalupe Landeros
3rd Grade, Williams Elementary School
Sherrie Taylor Vann, Teacher
Colusa County
Illustrated by Delta High School

One day at the hamburger stand Lupita was eating some French fries. As she dipped her fry into the pile of bright red ketchup she started to daydream about how it was made.

She had seen lots of trucks piled high with tomatoes harvested from the grower's fields driving down the highway headed to a processing plant. Most of the tomatoes arrive at the processing plant and are weighed on a large scale while they are on the trucks. Some of the tomatoes are scooped up by a machine to be graded. Lupita thought, "I hope they earn an A!"

Lupita watched to see how they were graded. First, the inspectors looked for worms, mold, good color, and things that don't belong with the tomatoes, like leaves, rocks, and sticks. Sometimes things like watermelons sneak in with the tomatoes. The tomatoes are dropped off so the trucks can go back to the fields to pick up more tomatoes. The trucks whizzed by so fast that they blew her hair across her face. "Yikes!" thought Lupita.

When the tomatoes are unloaded they go down a water slide. "Whee! This is fun," said the little tomatoes. Lupita wanted to splash down the waterslide too! They whirled around the waterslide while a camera took pictures of them and looked for bad tomatoes. As they slid in the water, combs swept through the tomatoes and took out any vines or leaves they could reach.

By the time the tomatoes reached the bottom they were clean and shiny from their waterslide. The water goes into a big pond to be reused. "That's good for the planet because it does not waste a lot of water," thought Lupita.

Now that the tomatoes are clean they are cooked at a really hot temperature. They are pushed through screens to take off the skin and take out the seeds. The skins are taken to a farm and fed to pigs. The machine that fills the truck with the skins is like a robot and a person moves it around like a video game. "I'd like to spill some on my teacher's head because she gave me too much homework," thought Lupita, "but she would get really mad!"

After the tomato skins and seeds are removed, the tomato paste has to be cooled down so it can be packed for shipping. A machine cools down the tomato paste instantly by using cool water and a vacuum to suck out the heat. The water is really hot after that so the water goes around a pond to cool off again so it can be reused. Lupita thought, "it would be funny to push my brother, Tony, into the pond because he took some of my French fries!"

Once the paste is cool it gushes through big metal pipes to the packing warehouse. It goes through the pipes into plastic lined bins. The huge, hard plastic bins are filled with 300 gallons of fresh tomato paste. Each bin is sealed so air cannot get in and spoil the paste. "Wow! That is going to make a lot of ketchup for my fries," thought Lupita.

The filled bins are stacked by people driving forklifts while they wait for the delivery trucks. When the trucks are loaded they take the tomato paste to other companies that make things like ketchup or pizza sauce. "Yum, tomatoes make delicious foods!" thought Lupita.

"Finish eating your French fries Lupita because we are all done and ready to go," said Lupita's mom. Lupita's mind came back to her family and her dinner. "OK, OK, I am finished," answered Lupita. She devoured one last bite dripping in red delicious ketchup and went home with her family.