Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets. Joanna Blythman

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СКАЧАТЬ supply supermarket chains that do not want the hassle of dealing with a plurality of small or medium-sized companies. With the exception of Morrisons, which is unusual in that it owns its own dedicated meat processing facilities, UK chains prefer not to get hands-on with the products they sell. Although 95% of the chilled prepared food Britain eats is sold under a retailer’s brand, supermarket chains do not own the factories churning out the food and drink that bears their names. Instead, they devolve that expense, responsibility and potential risk to third-party suppliers who work at arm’s length, according to the chain’s specification.

      In order to squeeze economies of scale from their investment, food manufacturers need to be turning out products on a fairly constant basis to make good on their outlay and investment. Time is money. Stop-start processing plants without a full production schedule don’t make commercial sense, so these enterprises commonly supply not one, but several supermarket chains, to attain that critical volume. One shift, it will be Sainsbury’s ready-to-grill kebabs gliding along the assembly line, the next, meatballs for Tesco, or chicken pies for Asda. Even those processed foods that are sold as familiar household brands – as opposed to supermarket own-label – are commonly manufactured by a company other than the one with its well-recognised name on the box.

      This is why third-party factories have innocuous, neutral names that give little or no clue as to the nature of the enterprise. If you drive past them, they look anonymous and blank, like vast storage units. Unlike the characterful brick and stone factories that still remain from Victorian times, they have no windows.

      Inside, their employees work long, demanding shifts: 12 hours isn’t unusual, sometimes night shifts. They tend to be young, and driven by a very strong work ethos, the kind of people who are prepared to take any job that’s going, seeing it as a stepping stone on the road to eventual financial betterment. Typically, some 90 per cent of the staff come from Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. In one workplace canteen I visited, the cook was Polish, making a daily bigos, Poland’s favourite cabbage and sausage stew.

      Except for the odd tantalising glimpse of the external world from the canteen windows, these people work in artificial light, in a factory world. And outsiders most certainly cannot see in, a necessary measure to guard secret recipes and commercial confidentiality, we’re told.

      So although these factories provide households up and down the land with billions of portions of processed food – half a million kebabs on just one day would not be unusual for a busy meat processing site – most of us haven’t a clue what these mammoth population-feeding units look like inside. They don’t run Doors Open Days, and any visitor, pre-arranged or otherwise, will be greeted by a uniformed guard, and a security barrier. Their unwritten motto? Transparency ain’t us. It’s not like the old days, when primary teachers would take classes to see a dairy farm and bottling plant so they could work up a cute little Day in the Life of a Pinta project. The prevailing sentiment amongst food manufacturers is that the less we have a mental picture of how our processed food is made, the better.

      This defensiveness is understandable. Would most of us feel tempted by those attractively packaged and slickly marketed convenience foods, the sort of thing we choose in seconds then slip in the microwave of an evening, if we were allowed a sneak peek into the places where they were made? Not greatly, I’d wager. As for working there, they would definitely be one of the last places in the world that most people would ever want a job.

      ‘You see, we’re just a scaled-up version of a domestic kitchen’, one enthusiastic boss assured me as he showed me round his pride-and-joy ready meals factory. Another executive looked me in the eye and told me with apparent conviction, and perhaps a hint of nervousness, that his meat processing plant was ‘just like a biggish kitchen’. I nodded politely, but I didn’t get the analogy: it’s a food processor’s fairy tale with all the scary bits edited out.

      Food manufacturers have created a body of lore and legend around their products that sounds tremendously comforting. ‘Recipes for these foods are gathered from all over the world and are created by chefs who are passionate about what they do’, says the Chilled Foods Association. ‘They [chefs] also like working with fresh ingredients and being involved right from the start – from initial concept to final food. They get their inspiration from different sources. Travel and cookery books are particularly important but they all love to experiment and research new ideas. Many chilled foods are hand-made in basically the same way as in the restaurant kitchen or in the home, so being able to create virtually any type of food is considered very satisfying.’

      But whether they are geared up to manufacture crisps, frozen fish fingers, tinned fish, dried cereals, cheese slices, Rice Krispies®, or ready-to-microwave party canapés, factories don’t look, or feel, anything like a kitchen, even of the industrial catering sort. They more resemble car plants and oil refineries, or even the missile-launching pad at the end of Dr No, where James Bond sabotages the efforts of a small army of operatives, lost and almost robotic-looking within the bulk of their protective clothing.

      Without a detailed, highly technical explanation, or a degree in engineering, chemical engineering, microelectronics, microbiology or food technology, most of us would find it extremely hard to see any parallels with domestic food production in these cavernous factories, because there are precious few sensual or visual cues. It’s not at all like those appetite-whetting TV adverts for pasta sauces, fish fingers, and other processed foods that show ‘our chefs’ in homely yet aspirational kitchens, surrounded by sensual displays of fresh, whole ingredients. It is most certainly not a dream job of browsing through recipe books and playing around with the world’s finest and freshest ingredients. In fact, it is actually relatively rare to see anything that looks much like food as we know it in these factories, and when you do, it will most likely be swathed in strong plastic, in giant tins and cartons, or packed in cardboard boxes and stored in a freezer.

      Most cooks, even hardened professional chefs and caterers with experience of institutions such as prisons and hospitals, would find this environment unfamiliar and baulk at working there for a day, let alone for a lifetime. Many of the individual industrially proportioned units of equipment would fill a generous-sized sitting room. Grouped together, they could easily occupy the ground space of a football pitch and the height of a motorway petrol station forecourt.

      These factories are laid out in one seamless, highly efficient assembly-line process, designed according to a flow diagram to create the sequence of steps and tasks in the manufacturing process. Depending on the company’s product lines, equipment can include spiral chillers, dehumidifiers, injectors, extruders, steam-jacketed kettles, centrifugal screeners, swept surface coolers, hoppers, sifters, oil conditioners, Stephan mixers, colloid mills, steam infusion and plate exchanger cookers, batch fryers, spray dryers, horizontal conveyor dryers, flash-cooling pumps, oven bands, freezer belts, horizontal agitators, batch and continuous lines, make-up lines, continuous mixers, high shear mixers, evaporators, and a whole apparatus of other kit that bears absolutely no resemblance to any home cook’s appliances and batterie de cuisine.

      The equivalent here of a domestic saucepan is a steaming vat that would require a window cleaner’s ladder to look into, one with dimensions large enough to swallow up several Mafia informers at a time. Equipment clunks, spurts, grinds, squeezes, divides, stacks, minces, bakes, sucks, checks, injects, detects, chills, blasts, shapes, ploughs, agitates, steams, dries, forms, codes, freezes, defrosts, microwaves, churns, paddles, calibrates, signals, bleeps, hums, rolls, vibrates, and cools. Sauces are cooked by the ton then spewed out onto other food components that are cooked on a conveyor belt. One ready meals company is proud to say that its factory manufactures ten tons of chicken tikka a day.

      The noise produced by these gargantuan pieces of plant is deafening. There’s no way that you’ll be humming along to Radio 2, or chatting with colleagues on the production line to help make the shift go by faster. There’s no possibility of any camaraderie here. Instead, if you’ve any sense, you’ll do what you can to protect СКАЧАТЬ