Como Salsa para los Tacos: Rosella
Admiral Biscuit
Rosella had worked in tomato fields before. Plenty of them, starting when she was a filly, in fact. Tomkin was known for its tomatoes. Her family was known for their tomatoes. Her cousins were known for their tomatoes.
Rosella generally wanted little to do with tomatoes, but it seemed that fate conspired in mysterious ways, and like it or not, no matter where she went, tomatoes.
She liked the taste of tomatoes, she liked the shape and smell of tomatoes, but she didn’t like weeding tomatoes or picking tomatoes or de-bugging tomatoes. Tomatoes at the market were tasty, tomatoes at the market came with a story and no effort on her part. Tomatoes on the vine needed coddling and an Earth pony’s care, and she wanted little to do with tomatoes but in Tomkin there weren’t many other ways for a young Earth pony to earn bits.
Besides tomatoes and the cinema, there wasn’t much for a young mare to spend her bits on, so she saved them in a pass-me-down purse, until one day she had enough to go exploring.
The Wide Wide World of Equestria might have been enough for most ponies, but it wasn’t far enough removed from tomatoes for her liking, so she instead embarked on a sightseeing trip to Earth.
Earth also had tomatoes; in fact, humans liked tomatoes a lot. They sliced them and diced them and made them into soups and sauces and sold them in cans or jars or squeeze-bottles or even little packets that you could get for free at some restaurants.
They even had tomato-based juice and tomato-based cocktails and it was all wonderful because she didn’t have to do anything on the production end. She could go into a grocery store or a restaurant and get as many tomatoes as she wanted, ready to eat.
Or drink, if that was her fancy.
She’d saved a lot of bits, but they had a way of evaporating in a big city and Rosella knew it would be time to go home soon, maybe sooner than she’d expected since she was pretty good at saving bits when there wasn’t anything to spend them on, but not so good at budgeting when there were things to spend her money on.
In fact, if she didn’t leave her hotel room for the rest of her stay on Earth, and only ate canned food—she still wouldn’t have quite enough to make it.
•••
A wise pony knew when she was beaten, so she trudged to the embassy and laid out her tale. She’d tried to get jobs here and there, but most of them weren’t hiring ponies or if they were she needed to have the right kinds of documents, and she didn’t.
At the Equestrian consulate, they were sympathetic to her situation and offered her the choice of early return, or a visa to earn bits in a field that suited her.
She wasn’t ready to give up on her vacation just yet, even if she had to work for some of it, and so she agreed to the second option and several days later she had a shiny new H-2A Visa and a new job as well.
Picking tomatoes.
•••
Admittedly, it was far different than in Tomkin. Here the rows were close and it was bare between them. The fields were bigger than she could have ever imagined, stretching out almost as far as the eye could see with nothing but tomatoes.
She didn’t have to walk the fields and pick them; she got to ride on a fancy cart towed by a fancy tractor. A clever mechanism picked the tomatoes off the vine—it also picked the vine, too, but she tried not to think about that too much—and sorted it onto a short conveyor where her job was to inspect the tomatoes as they rolled past and reject the inferior ones. Then they’d go up another conveyor and be dropped into a second wagon, towed by an even bigger tractor than the one which was towing hers.
She wasn’t alone on the wagon; there was a supervisor and three other tomato-sorters who spoke thickly-accented English and made fun of her the first few hours and then grudgingly accepted her tomato-sorting prowess. By the end of the first day, they were a cohesive herd; mid-week, she’d learned some useful phrases in Spanish and they’d learned some useful phrases in Ponish. By the end of the week, they’d started to teach each other curses in their respective languages, and if that wasn’t bonding, she didn’t know what was.
Rosella had to report to both her direct supervisors and her pony superiors and that was slightly annoying, but that was the deal she’d made. And it really wasn't all that much, mostly questions about tomatoes and how they were sorted and where they went.
She was a curious pony, and most of the farm staff warmed up to her after a week on the job, so it wasn’t all that difficult to find out how the tomatoes got unloaded from the field carts and put in either crates for shipping to grocery stores or if they didn’t look the right way got shipped off instead to make salsa. Bryan, the general foreman, had plenty to teach her about tomato distribution on Earth and some of it was interesting and some of it wasn’t but it all got dutifully reported in her daily and weekly work logs, and once those were sent off she could spend the rest of the afternoon relaxing, or the weekend off seeing what she wanted to see.
Most of the rest of the workers only got one paycheck at the end of the week, but she got two. One from the farm and one from the Embassy and she wasn’t sure why that was. Surely they weren’t paying her for her reports on tomato farming. Lots of ponies knew how to do that.
She wasn’t going to refuse the extra bits, though. She used some of them to buy food and drinks for her co-workers, and saved up the rest for one last trip in her time on Earth.
By the end of the week, they’d started to teach each other curses in their respective languages, and if that wasn’t bonding, she didn’t know what was.
Well, it shows some things are universal!
...I'm kind of wondering how much of the production chain they'll end up duplicating. I mean, will they decide that tomatoes grown in the usual Equestrian way are fine for the project, or will they build dedicated mechanized tomato farms purely to supply more Authentic Taco Bell Ingredients?
Them's the breaks, tomato horse!
After looking at the video it really is amazing the sheer volume of tomatoes one farm can harvest. 182,301,395 tons of tomatoes were grown in 2017.
Da Vinci's Notebook had a topical song about a Chinese spying incident entitled Secret Asian Man, which included the lines:
Now I know what they were talking about.
Even the embassy is in on the espionage?
No blog post for this one?
I mean, after all, it's a classic.
Después de todo, es un clásico.
Oh you innocent little flower. Please never learn what "company espionage" means.
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The things that everybody really wants to know about a foreign language.
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Presumably they’re smart enough to know what matters for the production process and what doesn’t. There’s nothing special about the tomatoes, which is what they needed to know; how they’re harvested isn’t of much interest to ponies. The same would go for a lot of the other ingredients. They need to know exactly what they are, but not necessarily the entire process. So tomatoes grown in the usual Equestrian way are fine (and possibly superior), which means they won’t need giant mechanized farms.
Having said that, some of the industrial processes we use might be useful to ponies, maybe not on such a huge scale as our machines, though.
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Poor Rosella is fated to never escape tomato husbandry.
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Yeah, it’s mind-blowing. Like, I live in the country and get some sense of it with corn and soybeans (wheat and hay, too, I suppose, but those just look like fields with tall grass), but it’s still crazy.
I used to live not far from a sugar factory, and watching the yard fill up with beets through the fall and winter . . . the conveyors that the trucks unloaded on started near the building, and then they’d retreat across the giant unloading pad as truck after truck came in, until the entire lot around the plant was filled with piles of beets, and then through the year the piles would shrink and shrink, and then it would start again.
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On the plus side, they probably don’t want Birkenstocks or Wal-Marts.
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With a layer of plausible deniability. “We didn’t know that the jobs for ponies company that we were using was engaged in industrial espionage.” (I feel like the ponies would be smart enough to put some distance between their official embassies and their sneaky activities, and I further bet that other countries do the same thing on occasion.)
And if it does all come out, you send a few scapegoats away as persona non grata, and then promise not to do it again and everybody knows you’re gonna.
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Just the short author’s note; there are not that many interesting facts in this chapter.
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Yes, exactly!
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Some ponies like Grace and Chapulin know exactly what they’re doing, and for who, and why. Other ponies do not, and Rosella is one of those. Perhaps some years in the future, she’ll excitedly visit a new Taco Bell knockoff in Equestria, or perhaps she’ll be in Tomkin harvesting tomatoes and teach some of her fellow harvest-mates the curses she learned from her Earth harvest-mates.
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Yes, that’s the one, and it’s kind of horrifying. The animators didn’t even bother to have her running like an actual horse, something that they were far better with in G4.
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Sometimes the best spies are the ones that don't think they're spying at all.
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"Presumably they’re smart enough to know what matters for the production process and what doesn’t. There’s nothing special about the tomatoes, which is what they needed to know; how they’re harvested isn’t of much interest to ponies. The same would go for a lot of the other ingredients. They need to know exactly what they are, but not necessarily the entire process. So tomatoes grown in the usual Equestrian way are fine (and possibly superior), which means they won’t need giant mechanized farms."
Right, yes, if Equestrian tomatoes do indeed work as well, I doubt they'd bring that whole system over unnecessarily; I just didn't know if they would, and it sounds like they were sensibly checking to be sure, too.
(Though I also wasn't sure if they wanted to set an upper bound on quality, for a more authentic experience, or if Equestrian tomatoes were fine but tasted slightly different and threw things off, or something else like that.)
"Having said that, some of the industrial processes we use might be useful to ponies, maybe not on such a huge scale as our machines, though."
Right. And I could also see them still using ponypower to run a lot of machinery we put engines on or in front of.
(Though now I'm also wondering if steam traction engines are already used in this Equestria, in some niches where they're better than just getting some stout earth pony farmers together.)
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Yeah, Pony Life was from the ground up built with low budget in mind, and a simplistic walk cycle like that is much faster and cheaper to animate is one of those areas where it really shows. It's... little more than an in-between product to keep ponies in people's minds while they're working on G5.
We need an interlude chapter about some humans conducting corporate espionage at Hayburger.
Rosella: "That's fine."
Also Rosella: *screams internally*
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It could be worse:
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Source.
Or weirder:
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Source.
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That'd make for some fun status reports. "Sir, why are we doing this? This stuff is made of hay. We genuinely can't even eat it."
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That should be " … for whom, …".
"For queen and country!" Proserpine declared. A marked dip in the ambient cheering told her that she'd just messed up, big time.
"The buck did you say?" One of the ponies around her asked angrily.
Proserpine buzzed nervously, having been caught up in the enthusiasm.
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Heh, I really need to do something with a changeling on Earth. The disguise powers could be interesting . . .
I do think that there would be particular species simply not allowed on Earth, and I think that changelings would be among them. But how would Earthlings know if a pony who went through the portal wasn't a changeling in disguise? Probably the ponies have some kind of scanning technology to prevent that . . . if orders come from on high, that scanning technology might malfunction while a certain changeling passes through.