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 paid, because they have to concentrate intently, each and every second, on what they are doing.
Their task requires training, physical strength, endurance, precision knife skills, excellent hand-to-eye coordination, and a developed understanding of anatomy. Their brains need to be engaged every second. A slip of the knife, a moment’s lapse of attention, and a gory catalogue of accidents is waiting to happen. The jobs of these slaughtermen are repetitive, but they aren’t dull or unintelligent any more than that of the craft jeweller or clockmaker, who peers into the innards of watches all day, making minute adjustments and repairs.
For their part, the food-factory boss men, who have nice, bright, clean offices with lots of windows, upstairs, or in another building, talk not of ‘food’, but of ‘product’. The word ‘cooking’ doesn’t come into it; they use the more honest term: ‘manufacture’. Industry top brass refers not to ingredients, but ‘food ingredient technology’ and ‘food ingredients systems’. Their vocabulary speaks volumes about how companies view the job in hand.
Food processing executives have a long list of daily hygiene and food safety concerns, because danger is omnipresent in the industrial food system. Metal detection, for instance, requires an entire strategy, part of the ongoing military campaign to prevent any uninvited foreign object from getting into your microwaveable meal, sandwich or prepared salad. With so many complex, intricate pieces of industrial equipment in use, there is always a very real possibility that a screw, nut or some other piece of equipment drops into your macaroni cheese. Allergens are another constant bugbear. A trace of soya or peanut where it ought not to be, and a whole day’s production is scuppered.
Given the high risk inherent in industrial-scale food manufacture, record-keeping is critical. Every piece of equipment and ingredient must come with a paper trail to vouch for its origins and safety. The managers below the boss men have internal audits – essentially box-ticking exercises – coming out of their ears. They supervise elaborate coding schemes to ensure that each and every product that goes through the production process is traceable back to a specific batch, grade and type, made at a specific time of day. That’s no mean effort: a ready meals factory can be churning out 250,000 individual servings a day, made up of 60 or 70 different products, using ten different
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 paid, because they have to concentrate intently, each and every second, on what they are doing.
Their task requires training, physical strength, endurance, precision knife skills, excellent hand-to-eye coordination, and a developed understanding of anatomy. Their brains need to be engaged every second. A slip of the knife, a moment’s lapse of attention, and a gory catalogue of accidents is waiting to happen. The jobs of these slaughtermen are repetitive, but they aren’t dull or unintelligent any more than that of the craft jeweller or clockmaker, who peers into the innards of watches all day, making minute adjustments and repairs.
For their part, the food-factory boss men, who have nice, bright, clean offices with lots of windows, upstairs, or in another building, talk not of ‘food’, but of ‘product’. The word ‘cooking’ doesn’t come into it; they use the more honest term: ‘manufacture’. Industry top brass refers not to ingredients, but ‘food ingredient technology’ and ‘food ingredients systems’. Their vocabulary speaks volumes about how companies view the job in hand.
Food processing executives have a long list of daily hygiene and food safety concerns, because danger is omnipresent in the industrial food system. Metal detection, for instance, requires an entire strategy, part of the ongoing military campaign to prevent any uninvited foreign object from getting into your microwaveable meal, sandwich or prepared salad. With so many complex, intricate pieces of industrial equipment in use, there is always a very real possibility that a screw, nut or some other piece of equipment drops into your macaroni cheese. Allergens are another constant bugbear. A trace of soya or peanut where it ought not to be, and a whole day’s production is scuppered.
Given the high risk inherent in industrial-scale food manufacture, record-keeping is critical. Every piece of equipment and ingredient must come with a paper trail to vouch for its origins and safety. The managers below the boss men have internal audits – essentially box-ticking exercises – coming out of their ears. They supervise elaborate coding schemes to ensure that each and every product that goes through the production process is traceable back to a specific batch, grade and type, made at a specific time of day. That’s no mean effort: a ready meals factory can be churning out 250,000 individual servings a day, made up of 60 or 70 different products, using ten different
Similar Books
