During morning projects at the Elephant Kitchen, we usually wash the Elephant’s food for the day. Our fruits and vegetables mostly come local farms. Some of the farmers use pesticides and some do not. We don’t know which ones use pesticide, so we wash them all.
The soak time, wash time and wash method is different depending on the vegetable. Sometimes we give them a swirl in the water, sometimes we scrub hard with a washcloth. We usually wash cucumbers, watermelons, pineapples and pumpkins. We do not wash the bananas or corn.
In the photograph, you can see the metal shelves on the right. They hold the extra food in the kitchen that will not be eaten that day. We usually unload pumpkins and banana branches onto the shelves straight from the truck.
Corn, watermelon, pineapples, and cucumbers can come in big plastic bags if we buy them from the market. Those are just unloaded and stored under shelves or piled up. Vegetables and fruits that come directly from farmers do not come in plastic bags. They are unloaded into baskets. Sometimes we run out of baskets and have to make a pile on the floor.
Once the bananas have been removed from the branch in bunches, we stack them on wooden shelves across from the metal one. We store them there until they ripen enough for the elephants to eat. Bananas for the babies are hand peeled.
This time at the park, I saw white cucumbers for the first time! They were the same shape as the cucumbers last time, but with very little pigmentation. At first, I thought they were squash, but the inside is cucumber through and through!
Photographs taken by: Maxine Rawson-Rodriguez
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