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

‘If you got it, you wouldn’t like it really’ she tried to convince me, to no avail. Then one night – bingo! – my parents were going out, and by way of compensation and a Saturday night treat, I was allowed to choose my own meal. My mother was worn down, and caved in. At last, I would get to taste the much longed-for Vesta curry! What’s more, I’d even get to eat it on my lap while watching telly! In a household where we all sat down together for breakfast and evening meal, with the TV switched off, this departure from custom felt thrillingly subversive.

      I’ll never forget the crushing disillusionment I felt at the gulf between the TV advert, the imagery on the packaging, and the reality. The box showed an almond-eyed, bejewelled beauty bearing a generous plateful of something that looked enticingly glossy and brown, set on a bed of pearly white rice. But what I had on my lap was about half as much in quantity as I had expected, and the curry bit looked pretty much like dog food, or worse, something you’d been taught to step around if you saw it lying on the pavement.

      I had to tough it out though. Maybe it would taste better than it looked; I didn’t want to give anyone the opportunity to say ‘We told you so’. But after a couple of mouthfuls, I was defeated, and had to admit that I just couldn’t eat it. Fortunately, my grandmother was hovering around, with the comforting Plan B of cheese on toast already in mind.

      I should point out that I was, perhaps, a rather unusual six-year-old: I had eaten curry and enjoyed spicy food. A family friend had once been in Pakistan and he had learned to make ‘Indian’ food that actually tasted like something you’d eat on the subcontinent, or so he said. In retrospect, since this was decades before the painstaking Madhur Jaffrey and Rick Stein age of grinding your own spices, I imagine he used the then ubiquitous ready-made Vencat curry powder, but what he cooked for us did, nevertheless, give us a hint of what home-cooked Indian food might taste like, enough for me to see instantly that Vesta curry, with its brown Windsor soup-like gloop, was something else entirely.

      To backtrack here, Vesta, the pioneering ready meal brand, was already pushing a sales pitch that was to become all too familiar to British consumers. Its ‘lavish’ chicken curry came ‘complete with an authentic curry sauce’. It was ‘ready prepared by Vesta for you to cook’ by ‘expert chefs who have done the hard work for you’. OK, it was a slowcoach of a product by today’s ping-of-a-microwave standards, taking 20 minutes to reheat, but that seductive labour-saving promise, combined with prominent claims of authenticity and the skill of a professional chef, is still the central plank in processed food marketing today. The ready meals entrepreneur, Sir Gulam Noon, summed up the industry’s vision of itself when he told the Financial Times that he ‘changed the palate of the nation, and broke the housewife’s shackles from the kitchen’.

      These days, convenience foods have certainly moved on from the Vesta days, both in terms of their technical sophistication and the claims advanced for their ‘realness’. In the ready meal category, lasagne and chicken tikka are now the two best sellers. But I have yet to encounter a ready meal that tastes a lot, or even a little, like homemade food. They have improved from the Vesta days, but freed from their packaging and reheated, they generally remind me of the dispiriting hot meals dished up by budget airlines. That sticky brownness, that larger-than-life tinned tomato soup aroma, those uniform textures and consistencies, those starch-stiff ecru sauces, the predictable high tone twinning of sweet with salty, and the consequent thirst that surely follows; for me, ready meals are a sorry apology for real food.

      I am forced to revisit this prejudice at regular intervals, however, when newspapers ask me to investigate a particular convenience food category – value, low-calorie, children’s, free-from, for instance – and the claims made on their packaging. And trust me, there are legions of products to investigate. Looking at the chilled category alone, by 2013, UK-based food companies were manufacturing over 12,000 different chilled food recipes. This is a big business – over £10 billion a year – which represents some 13% of the UK’s total retail food market. Within this grand total, ready meals are by far the largest sales category. The UK ate its way through 3 billion of them in 2012.

      The only way to investigate ready meals properly is to buy a batch of comparable products from a variety of different retailers, and take them home to study in depth; it’s not something that you can do easily in the supermarket aisle. The ingredients listing is obviously the first port of call, and these days, because processed foods such as ready meals are often complex, multi-ingredient products, these lists can run to several paragraphs of tiny print that’s more or less impossible to read without some sort of magnification; unless, that is, you happen to have 20/20 vision.

      Editors often want a description of how each product looks and tastes, so I remove them from their packaging and reheat them in the oven or pot. Now, perhaps if you eat them regularly, the sight and smell of warm, bubbling convenience meals will set your gastric juices flowing, but for people like me who aren’t, they are strikingly different from the home-prepared equivalent. For starters, they often have a quite powerful odour, one that tends to hang around in the bin, sink and dishwasher long after the contents are gone.

      Of course all food, including home-prepared food, makes itself known to the nasal passages to a greater or lesser extent, but usually in a pleasant, appealing way. Yet when you compare a selection of processed foods, you start noticing that they have particularly distinctive smells, or rather, a curiously similar portfolio of smells.

      Now, according to Greencore, one of the largest chilled food manufacturers, the UK chilled food industry is ‘the most advanced in the world because of its high standards, rigorous safety and management systems and the sheer quantity of exciting new recipes which it develops constantly’. That would make you think that there is a rich diversity amongst all the convenience foods on our shelves. But when I opened them in my kitchen, I found that I could easily classify my ready meals into odiferous families, a bit like houses of cards: aces, spades and so on. First there’s the ‘red’ family, that’s the hot tomato/pizza/lasagne/tomato and basil soup/‘med’ veg bunch. Next up, there’s the ‘brown’ family, think of cottage pie/steak and kidney/casserole/stew/Peking duck, chow mein noodles and everything sold with a barbecue label. In the ‘beige’ family, variously labelled breadcrumbed/battered products share a strong resemblance, a particularly haunting, almost acrid oily aroma that soon impregnates the oven and lingers thereafter, irrespective of whether they are fish, meat or vegetable-based. The all-out attention-grabbers are the Indian-themed dishes, whose spices give them just enough personality to distinguish them from the others, although they otherwise share many similar characteristics.

      When it comes to tasting ready meals, the flavour profiles are every bit as monotone as the smells. Tasted blind and mashed up to disguise any tell-tale texture, one might easily mix up a sausage casserole with barbecue spare ribs, or confuse Mexican chicken fajitas with sweet and sour chicken. Why is this?

      It all began to fall into place when I was in the test kitchen of a ready meals factory, where food technologists check the taste and ‘visuals’ (appearance) of the day’s output to ensure that they conform to a tight specification. ‘The objective’, one executive explained. ‘is to see that the consumer gets the same taste experience every time’. Now this explained a lot. When you stop to think about it, home-cooked food varies all the time. For a kick-off, it reflects the cook’s mood. Anyone who cooks can testify to how an oft-made recipe can turn out differently, depending on your mental state; harassed and rushed perhaps, serene and calm maybe, or even distracted and not fully engaged. Patiently caramelised onions one day can be burnt threads the next. There’s a fine line between a custard sauce that obligingly coats the back of the spoon, and a bowlful of curdled egg.

      The ingredients for home cooking also vary in subtle but palpable ways. One brand of tinned tomatoes doesn’t give quite the same result as another. Lemons yield variable amounts of juice. Some bunches of herbs can be more aromatic than others, some spices fresher. Seasons make their presence felt too. Fresh summer garlic is sweet and subtle; the same bulb, stale, overwintered and used in March, can have a blunderbuss effect on a dish. Stewing beef bought from the supermarket, and encased in plastic with gases to keep it looking ruby red, will cook differently from the same cut, simply wrapped in waxed and brown paper, purchased from an independent butcher.