Excerpt
SUMMARY: Kitchen convenience means something different for millions of small farmers in poor countries. A nonprofit in St. Paul creates simple, efficient tools that could save people hours of labor on tasks like threshing grain and shelling peanuts. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Now to Minnesota, where one part old technology, and several new ideas from retired workers, are creating a recipe of hope for many in the developing world.
Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro has the latest story in our Breakthroughs series on innovation and invention.
WOMAN: I promise you a perfect cake every time you bake. That’s right, perfect. You be the judge. Or write General Mills, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and get your money back.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO (NewsHour): Minnesota is where the idea of making things easier in the kitchen became an industry, the birthplace of such fictional legends as the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Jolly Green Giant, and Betty Crocker.
WOMAN: A perfect cake every time you bake, cake after cake after cake.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Perfect? Maybe not. But convenient and efficient? No question.
ERV LENTZ, Volunteer: Some with nuts, some without.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And that’s the idea behind a nonprofit company in Saint Paul called CTI, or Compatible Technology International. Different kind of cakes, though.
ERV LENTZ: Just plain trash.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Erv Lentz is squeezing discarded peanut shells, trying to make fuel briquettes. He’s 83, one of dozens of retired engineers, agronomists and other with ties to the food business who volunteer here.
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