Typical Day
Kelsey Applejam yawns and stretches, waking as the 5:00AM sun shines through the big bay window of her old Kentucky home. Her eyes itch a little from the pollen this time of year, but it's just too beautiful out here to even consider living in town. Kelsey takes her allergy pill with a glug of water, plops in some eyedrops, gives her sleeping hubby Pete a kiss, and gets up to face the sun through the big bay window.
Kelsey lives, conveniently, in a lot surrounded on three sides by soybean farms, and on the fourth side is a country road, across which there is a soybean farm. Kelsey is a food scientist researching ways to keep intact key nutrients called isoflavones from soybeans as they are mass-processed into products like soy milk, tofu, and other popular processed soy foods.
Turbine Foods, the company that hired Kelsey based on her previous work with isoflavones in the health food sector, has a problem. When processing soy into any of their lower-fat health products, most isoflavones are cooked into some less nutritious form or another (source).
Now this hadn't been a problem before, but ever since a certain pesky little blurb on the back of Nutrition Action, health food consumers are in an uproar about isoflavone depletion in common food processes.
Now there is an outcry demanding low-fat soy products with PLENTY of isoflavones. It's like the gluten-free thing all over again, and Turbine is racing their competitors to get their ducks in order and be the first to get such products on the shelves at Whole Foods.
It's a nation-wide, all-natural, trans fat-free money grab, and Kelsey has found herself smack-dab in the middle of it. Fortunately for everybody, Kelsey's one of the foremost experts—she did her dissertation on this stuff.
Kelsey's morning routine (after the obligatory allergy meds) includes a jog along the dirt country road down to the 413 and back with her and Pete's dog, Shamus.
At 5:45AM, Kelsey showers, wolfs down a smoothie of organic yogurt, frozen blueberries, and a selection of seasonal local fruits as well as a couple of eggs from the chicken coop out back. Now she's pretty much ready to go. "No harm in getting to the office early," she thinks to herself. The office is a big rural building outside Owensboro which R&D shares with corporate.
The work day proceeds pretty much as expected—Kelsey is the first person into the office at 7:00AM, so she has a minute to reread the papers she had set aside for herself the week before.
Next, she reviews the data sheets of the experiments she's been carrying out with the team—it seems a front-runner is emerging among the various processes they've tested for the low-fat soy milk product. Things are coming along right on pace.
"Knock knock!"
Kelsey looks up to see the bald head of her boss, Clayton Werther, the Director of Product Development, peeking around her door as he usually does around 8:15AM.
"Anything to report?" He asks.
Kelsey gives him the rundown of their latest findings, and Mr. Werther leaves, seeming pleased. That was the response Kelsey always hoped for—that he be satisfied and leave. Now she and her lab-monkeys (what she calls her research assistants) were left to their own devices.
Conferencing with her coworkers and setting plans for the next phase of testing takes Kelsey through to lunch (pickles, hummus, and tomato sandwich on wheat with seaweed snacks). Post-lunch they sleepily lay out the ins and outs of the coming experiments with lower-proof alcohol wash treatments and ideal cooking temp tests.
At 1:00PM, they break for coffee, come back to finish the discussion, and eventually break again to set up their new experiments. They like breaking up the day.
At 5:00PM they have their last meeting and Kelsey approves her team's next methods. She allows them to leave slightly early (leaving the lab at 5:30PM is a treat these days), and sets aside a stack of experiment procedures for her daily 7:00AM reading. By 6:00PM, Kelsey shuts off the lights and heads home.
Kelsey arrives home at 6:30PM to find dinner ready, Pete jamming out to some disco and playing some online war game or another with his pals out west. Pete is a stay-at-home dog-dad and writes for an online gaming company. It's the perfect setup (at least for Shamus.)
It's Friday, but Kelsey is a little tired, so after dinner (organic Gyros and Pete's famous "indulgence fries," a la deep fryer) Pete and Kelsey decide to go with the Greek theme and relax at home with some gladiator movies and bake up some nice galaktoboureko.
Before bed, the stuffed, happy couple walks Shamus around the block (about a three-mile walk, to be fair,) and hangs out in their Jacuzzi tub out back for a while. That just about knocks them out. By 9:00PM, the sun has set on their old Kentucky home, and Kelsey drifts off to the sweet sounds of Pete and Shamus's snores as she stares at the clouds over the soy farms through the bay window.