You know how your Super Froster Frickers arrive at your breakfast table.  Tony the Tiger brings them.

But did you know that the milk in the cereal bowl might have been transported to your Edmonds grocery store over a distance of 200 miles and 500 years?

That's what some Edmonds and Lynnwood people found out recently on a day visit to the eastern Washington community of Marlin, home of a thriving colony of Hutterites who trace their religious roots back to Austrian Jakob Hutter, leader of the Anabaptists, around 1525.

Our hosts weren't surprised guests were coming for lunch.  They prepare all of their meals in a commercial sized kitchen.  Members of the colony also eat together, in a large dining hall.  

We feasted on borscht, chicken cutlets, mashed potatoes and gravy, sauerkraut, a small vegetable quiche, coffee and a frosted cupcake for dessert.

The cupcakes seemed to be floating all around the colony.  We saw platefuls in the machine shop, in the milking barns, and they were dispatched along with the daily lunches sent out to the men folk working the crops in the fields, which stretch almost out of sight.

And I imagine the kids in the colony disposed of their share.  They attend class in the colony and are taught by teachers hired from the Moses Lake area.  

The Hutterites don't tell the hired tutors what to teach. They do tell them what not to teach.

"If you're talking evolution, forget about it!" our female guide said emphatically.

The youngsters learn music at an early age and there is a lot of singing on the colony, but no musical instruments.  TV sets are verboten but there are computers in the classroom and in some industrial areas.

"The men use them in some of their work," our guide said.  "I also think they do some fooling around with them," she whispered. Alcohol is not forbidden on the colony.  

Real wine is used in communion and when the men come in from the fields after a long, hot day they are allowed a beer or two. Nobody in the colony drinks soda pop.

I visited Hutterite and Mennonite colonies in both Montana and North Dakota, as a young newspaper reporter.  

All the plowing was done by horse or mule.  The trips to town were all by horse and buggy.  

Since then modernization has created a lot of changes.  The machine shop at Marlin is fitted out with enough heavy equipment to resemble a Boeing assembly line. 

Machines do most of the milking and the herd we visited also resembled an assembly line.  Which is to say that while the cows were being milked in the indoor facility, newborn calves were being carted outside and housed in doghouse-sized shelters.

The females were, of course, destined for the milking sheds.  

I didn't even want to know what happens to the male calves.  Lets say that I do not expect to see any of them entered in a claiming race at Emerald Downs.

The dairy furnishes far more milk than the colony can consume. Some of it ends up as butter.  The surplus is piped into giant tanker trucks for distribution all over the state.

The Snohomish County visitors were transported to the colony via a "Travlin' Northwest Style" mini-bus owned and operated by Ed and LaTisha Miner of Lynnwood.

Before returning home we were handed loaves of homemade wheat bread and offered the opportunity to load up on cakes, pies, Hutterite recipe books and cupcakes.  

That night we might have been washing the bakery products down with milk transported to our hometowns from a distance of 200 miles and 500 years.