Swallow This by Joanna Blythman Page B

peanut due to cross contamination during manufacturing. This is not mentioned on the label making the product a possible health risk for anyone who is allergic to peanuts.
    Presence of allergens is by far the most common reason for product recalls, but why is this? Obsessed with being cost-effective, many food processors operate the food factory equivalent of hot-desking by redeploying the same plant equipment and assembly line, often in the course of a day, to make several different products. So a factory will be set up to handle a range of foods of one production type. For instance, a factory geared up for continuous production of smooth products with small particles can handle soups, sauces, desserts, baby food purées, fruit and tomato preparations. One with a continuous instant and dehydrated line is custom built to manufacture things like packet soups, gravy granules and stock powders.
    Whatever the factory specialism, every last bit of equipment should be thoroughly cleaned and sanitised between batches of different products so that each new batch starts from a clean slate, but the frequency and regularity of allergen recalls shows that this is not always the case. ‘Nut Trace Contamination’ (NTC) warnings on processed foods that read ‘may contain nuts/nut traces’ or ‘produced in a factory using nuts’, are ostensibly aimed at people who suffer from nut allergies. In extreme cases, they can develop a severe, life-threatening reaction, anaphylaxis. However, the ubiquity of NTC warnings on manufactured products hints at the underlying problem of controlling factory food. Such warnings are an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that because of the sheer complication and complexity of the factory equipment, and the speed of production, manufacturers do not have, and can never have, total control of what ends up in their food. In fact, preventing cross-contamination, be that from peanuts or any other ingredient, is quite beyond them.
    Unless you suffer from nut allergies – in which case it’s a matter of life and death, you may have only been mildly perplexed by the appearance of NTC warnings on products where nuts aren’t listed as an ingredient. Why would there be nuts in your pitta bread, chilli con carne seasoning mix, or your ready-to-heat Thai vegetable soup, after all? When the FSA researched consumers’ views of NTC warnings, people told them in no uncertain terms that they were unclear as to their meaning. ‘The equivocal nature of the phrases had been universally resented by respondents’, the FSA reported. Furthermore, they were ‘seen as an insurance policy for manufacturers’. That conclusion is shrewd. Food manufacturers do spend a lot of time watching their backs and limiting their liability precisely because they are in a high-risk business.
    Whether it’s a case of allergens, contamination with food poisoning bugs, or rotting food, any such ‘production faults’ (as they are known in the industry) will very likely hit several seemingly distinct and separate lines simultaneously. When one such factory supplying Tesco was informed that some rice in packs had become mouldy, for example, the FSA had to issue a product recall information notice on all batches of no less than eight ready meals: chicken jalfrezi, Szechuan chicken, chilli con carne, chicken tikka masala, beef in black bean sauce, sweet and sour chicken, chicken korma and balti vegetable curry. The sheer scale and productivity of the manufacturing enterprise also clocks up risk: a typical factory might be ‘cooking’ 2,000 portions of rice at a time in the same machine. So when a problem arises on the production line, it affects millions of portions of food in no time at all.
    Are these mammoth food factories really just scaled-up versions of a domestic kitchen, as manufacturers would lead us to believe? If consumers of their products had an accurate mental picture of how their products were made, they could arbitrate on