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

homemade steak pie but have to admit that, this week, it didn’t taste quite as great as usual. Or the opposite might be the case. One night, for no apparent reason, a familiar stir-fry suddenly seems to have acquired a mystery X factor. Was it that the peppers were less watery? Was the oil hotter because of that phone call? Was it down to the noticeable freshness and lack of fibre in that particularly good-looking root ginger?

      It’s the intrinsic variation that makes home-cooked food eternally interesting, but variation is the sworn enemy in industrial food processing. Indeed, all the systems put in place by manufacturers of ready meals and other convenience food lines are geared to eliminating it. The whole purpose of the endeavour is to iron out every possible high and low, and produce a totally standard product that always looks and tastes identical, 365 days of the year. As one government food safety manual puts it: ‘To achieve a consistent product with the same appearance, flavour, shelf life, etc., it is important that the ingredient quantities, quality and the processing steps are always the same’.

      The lengthy process of achieving this begins with the food manufacturer’s shopping list. The aim here is to have maximum control over ingredients, to ensure that they are always identical. On an industrial scale, this means buying in ingredients to a very tight specification from specialised companies. Surprising though it might sound to the home cook for whom ingredient preparation is probably the largest component of the cooking effort, food manufacturers carry out little or no preparation of raw ingredients. Instead they buy them in substantially pre-prepared. So, contrary to the notion that ready meals and other convenience foods are brought to you by a company that does all the hard work, it would be more accurate to say that they come from a company that ‘cooks’ products made with a list (often long) of ingredients and sundry additives that have already undergone some form of preparation by several other companies. In other words, the company that appears to be saving you work (usually a supermarket), is devolving that work to another company (a food manufacturer), which in turn gets other companies (food processors) to do the prep for it. These processors, in turn, may be quite remote from the primary food producers: farmers and growers.

      The convenience food chain that supplies the consumer is made up of many links, links that often cross continents. In food manufacturing logic, this elongated chain is not at all crazy, quite the opposite. After all, the basis of any automated industrial manufacturing, be it cars or chicken tikka, is breaking down all the necessary production stages into component parts that can be carried out by separate teams on the assembly line.

      The Chilled Food Association presents its industry’s products as ‘local’ because ‘virtually all chilled prepared foods are made in the UK’, but the ingredients used to make the finished products are often anything but. It quotes one development chef as saying: ‘Food should be simple, well cooked and flavoursome, with minimal amount of handling. It is also essential to use the best available ingredients to hand and promote local produce wherever possible.’ A statement somewhat at odds with industry recruitment literature, which describes ‘sourcing fresh ingredients globally from carefully chosen suppliers’ as a key part of the job.

      In fact, the food manufacturer’s shopping list is thoroughly international. When an ITV Tonight investigation, Food Facts and Fiction, commissioned a UK food technologist with extensive experience of food manufacturing to make a very traditional British-sounding lamb hotpot ready meal of the type commonly sold by supermarkets, he came up with a product made from 16 ingredients, sourced from ten different countries, including New Zealand lamb, Israeli carrots, Argentinian beef bones and Majorcan potatoes.

      Irrespective of which country they are buying from, if food manufacturers can buy an ingredient in frozen form, they will. That may seem surprising, even counterintuitive, given that they often go on to sell them chilled as ‘fresh’, but freezing is seen by food processors, quite correctly, as the safest way of storing ingredients to protect them against any food poisoning risk. Frozen ingredients are also easy for industrial food manufacturers to handle. They don’t arrive at the delivery bay with a stopwatch ticking, needing to be cooked promptly. Instead they can be, and are, stored for months, even years, and brought out as and when they are needed. So most of the meat, fish and vegetables arrive at the factory gate in a frozen state, already months, possibly years, old.

      By buying in frozen food, manufacturers liberate their purchasing from the vagaries of the seasons and price fluctuations, and benefit from buying ingredients in frozen bulk on a global market. So, unless the label specifies otherwise, it’s highly probable, for instance, that the chicken in your ready meal was purchased frozen from either Thailand or Brazil. Around 40 per cent of the chicken we eat in the UK is imported, almost all of it destined for food processing or catering. If required, large chicken exporters in these countries will also obligingly supply that frozen chicken pre-cooked, and/or ‘marinated’: injected with water, cornflour, salt, and even other flavourings. Few consumers notice the tell-tale label description (‘cooked marinated chicken breast’) not unreasonably assuming that when a product contains chicken, that means 100 per cent chicken, probably British, the sort you’d cook at home, with nothing else added.

      It’s an eye-opener to see the ingredient storage zones of food factories. In a typical operation, almost all the meat, be it chicken, lamb, pork or beef, is bought in frozen. So before it can be used it has to be defrosted for five to six minutes. Don’t for a second imagine that in big food manufacturing plants there are lines of people patiently peeling mounds of carrots and potatoes. In your typical industrial-scale factory, 80–90 per cent of all fresh vegetables are purchased in frozen form.

      As anyone who cooks from scratch knows, many savoury recipes begin with chopping onions and finely mincing garlic, but food manufacturers do away with all that fuss. Instead they typically use pre-peeled frozen onions. These are purchased, usually from Poland (which seems to have captured the EU market in onion peeling) and despatched to another factory to be defrosted, chopped into 10 millimetre dice, or sliced, frozen once more, then re-supplied ready for use, wrapped in a plastic sleeve inside cardboard boxes. You’ll never see a bulb or clove of garlic in a food manufacturing factory either, as it is commonly sourced (sometimes from Europe, usually from China) pre-chopped and frozen, or in a processed purée form.

      Potatoes – now there’s another labour-intensive vegetable – similarly arrive at the factory frozen and pre-sliced to a specified thickness, or cut into neat 20 millimetre cubes. While chefs and home cooks routinely stump up for fresh leafy herbs, appreciating the fragrance and vitality they bring to a dish, food manufacturers like a shortcut. A stroll through the food manufacturer’s ‘fridge’ will show you boxes of frozen ones, pre-chopped by some other food processor in a distant factory. And guess what, they are nothing like the fresh equivalent. So why use them? ‘Frozen herbs have a better kick, or flavour profile’, one manufacturing executive told me, but no self-respecting chef or home cook would put up with the ready-to-use herbs (from Germany) that I saw. They looked grey-green and even the coriander had none of the fragrance that this herb so reliably brings to a dish; in fact, it smelt of nothing. But food manufacturers like prepped ingredients like these because, from their point of view, buying in prepared ingredients is actually ultra-responsible because they come from factories specially geared up to handle them, where the skills needed, and the risks posed, are quite different from those in their own process.

      Food manufacturers apply the same logic to cooking fruits and vegetables. Why would they bother with time-consuming, laborious preparation, after all, when they can buy them in frozen and ready to use? They only need to place an order, and pallet-loads of pre-fried or grilled aubergines, peppers and courgettes, sliced to the ideal dimensions for your roasted Mediterranean vegetable pizza, will be delivered to the loading bay. Why would they muck around setting up a factory line for the scratch preparation of fresh aromatics for your Thai curry when they can source ginger already sliced into julienne strips, lime leaves already ‘milled’ into specks, and ‘nuggets’ of pulped chilli – all frozen? In food manufacturing terms, it is economic lunacy to pay someone in the UK to remove the zest from real fruits for a cheesecake, when you can buy in frozen lemon, orange and lime zest that has been mechanically removed, in a dedicated citrus processing plant, in another country. But this remorseless logic also helps explain why the resulting pizza, curry and cheesecake retain only a faint, blurry memory