Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets. Joanna Blythman
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 your hearing and wear your company-provided ear plugs, then retreat for hours at a time into your own isolated, private world of thoughts, dreaming perhaps of being promoted to a better post, or finding another job doing something else entirely, until it’s time for a break.
And you will need to become accustomed to working in extreme temperatures. Apart from the warmer slaughterhouse and cooking stages, the ambient temperature in most zones of food factories is bitingly raw and cold, conditions that chill you down to the bone marrow. Anyone who works here will have to show endurance and stamina, and hopefully be in possession of a very robust immune system. If you tend to get a cold whenever you get chilled, you won’t last long. You will also need to get accustomed to the smells. The faintly bloody smell you might find in a traditional high street butcher is one thing, but that fleshy odour, scaled up and intensified on an amplified scale because of the high throughput of carcasses, is another. If you work in a factory specialising in crisps, fried breaded and battered foods, chips, or ‘hand-held’ snacks such as crisps and corn chips, you will come out smelling like the products you make; the fatty whiff hangs in your hair. The most off-putting smell that assailed me was in a ready meals factory, where the atmosphere was filled with the sweet, cloying scent of gloopy, viscous tomato sauce and starchy, sticky béchamel with a fragrance reminiscent of regurgitated baby milk. Maybe people who work there stop noticing it after a while. I hope so. Working in food processing facilities is hard graft in so many ways, so it is hardly surprising that a high staff turnover and high rates of sickness absence are par for the course, or that many major plants are consistently understaffed and rely on agencies to fill the gaps. The use of temporary agency labour is commonplace throughout the food industry, particularly to cover peaks in demand: the run-up to Christmas, for instance.
The less experienced jobs in food processing are so unremittingly monotonous, repetitive and unrewarding that they must surely depress the spirits and elevate stress levels. Who wants to spend 12 hours a day arranging meatballs as though they were boxes of chocolates, or checking that there are four cubes of meat in every portion of chicken casserole, according to the product specification? But some food processing jobs are highly skilled. Although most people would consider it the most grizzly, hellish job in the world, the slaughterhouse men who take a dead whole carcass and ‘dissemble’ it – that’s breaking it down into its main parts, stripping back the skin and hide, vacuuming out spinal cord, splicing heads in two, removing tendons and hoofs, brains, pancreas, kidneys, suet, collecting ears and thymus, emptying colons, examining lymph nodes, separating guts, cutting out the major bones, pulling off membranes, de-gristling and segregating everything that hasn’t a food or other use to produce fore- and hind-quarters for further butchery – are consummate experts.
Those whom I have seen working on the carcass ‘dissembly’ line move at a fierce pace: a state-of-the-art abattoir can break down a whole cow into quarters and bag them, in 40 minutes. There, staff typically operate non-stop for three and a half hours at a time in a hot, steamy, visceral atmosphere, demonstrating a certainty and adroitness that comes from experience. In food processing terms, they are well