Organoleptic Sampling
"Organo-what?" you ask. Every industry has to have a few terms to make themselves feel smart. Usually, as in this case, it is a complex word to describe something simple.
Organoleptic means is to smell and taste, and to feel texture in the mouth. That is what we had to do in the food lab. Often, I thought of it a lunch. This practice varied from company to company. At one place it was only on an as-needed basis. Another place, everything we ran was set out in quantity in a taste panel at the start of the shift.
At one company we had to taste the food every two hours. There were numerous items to try and the food was really good. I went home full every day, which was usually seven days a week. Since it was like a buffet every two hours we had no use for taking a lunch.
What was amazing to me is that the higher someone ranked in the company, all companies, the more able they were to distinguish nuances in the food. Incredibly, those who worked under them were always able to notice the same thing once it was brought to their attention. They would ask me if I tasted whatever it was that they tasted, I would usually flatly say, "No," because it just wasn't there for me.
They actually had seminars for quality control people to practice tasting foreign matter in food. For instance, they would taste food grade (edible) machine grease and food grade machine oil. This grease and oil was not the type that you would use in your frying pan, but what was used the lube the machinery. This was done because there was a chance that the lubes could drip down into some food.
It saved a big controversy one time when I tasted foreign matter that fell into a batch. By comparison I was able to determine that it was the food grade grease.
The globs of grease had apparently ran off of a bearing. That kept us from putting tons of food on hold or scrapping it.
How I Learned to Complain: My first job ever was to shovel celery half the time, Which was extremely grueling work. No woman could do it. Period.
After the shoveling, the rest of the time was spent watching celery fill the tanks on the other end of the pipe. I wondered why I kept shoveling and not watching.
My female crew leader informed me that the other guy told her I didn't want to switch.
"What!?", I told her, "Why would anyone want to do that job. If you would have ever done the job for any time at all, you would have had more sense than to believe that!"