Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (26 page)

Back out in the fish room, I spot a yellow wooden notice on the far wall, with the words
NO BANGING OF SALMON CARPACCIO AFTER 7.30
–
THE THEATRE REQUIRES SILENCE
painted on in red. It turns out that the stage of the D’Oyly Carte Theatre is just the other side of the wall, and that not even the thumping strains of Gilbert
and Sullivan can drown out the sound of high-impact haute cuisine. It takes me a while to adjust to the idea that just a few bricks away from this fishy cave, there is all the opulent splendour of Edwardian theatre. It is a reminder that however celebrated chefs may be, theirs will always be a backstage art.

The Savoy kitchen is a one-off, producing food of the sort that few of us will eat more than once or twice in our lives. Yet in many respects, it is like any other professional kitchen. Its heat and noise, stress and swearing are all typical; as is its hiddenness. Professional cookery is essentially a cabalistic pursuit, steeped in traditions developed behind closed doors. As Grimod de la Reynière, the world’s first professional gourmand, put it, ‘With food, as with the law, to find it good, you must not see it being made.’
³
The thrill of visiting a restaurant kitchen is rather like discovering how a magic trick is performed: it feels somehow transgressive. Yet plenty of people these days are prepared to pay for the privilege: a meal at the chef’s table at the Savoy will set you back something in the region of £600, and there is no shortage of takers. Despite various exposés of the restaurant trade from chefs such as Gordon Ramsay and Anthony Bourdain, our fascination continues to grow. As the titles of Ramsay’s TV programmes suggest (
Boiling Point, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares
,
Hell’s Kitchen
), his media career rests largely on playing with the taboos of cookery; in showing us things we are not supposed to see.

Few of us have enough cash to dine regularly at the Savoy, but as a nation we are eating more restaurant-style food than ever before. The reason for that is ready meals, which over the past 20 years have made Dame Nellies of us all. Back in the 1980s, Marks & Spencer’s chilled meals still seemed bizarre enough for the comic Ben Elton to devote an entire stand-up routine to them. One wonders how many he and his audience have consumed since. In the 10 years to 2004, the convenience-food sector in Britain grew by 70 per cent, and continues to grow at 6 per cent a year. We eat ready meals on average at least twice a week, spending £1.6 billion on them in 2006 – almost as much as the rest of Europe put together.
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Ready meals have become, as Tony Blair might have put it, the food of the people; not haute cuisine, perhaps, but fancier food than any previous generation ever dreamed of
eating regularly – let alone in the comfort of their own homes.

The scale of this latest culinary revolution becomes palpable once you see the factories where the food is cooked. Pennine Foods is a ready-meal producer near Sheffield that employs 1,000 people and supplies all the major supermarkets. Its main kitchen – or, to be more correct, its cookhouse – feels like the engine room of a large ocean liner. Three storeys high and 50 metres long, it is, like the Savoy kitchen, decked out in stainless steel and extremely noisy, but unlike the Savoy, it is also full of pungent steam that tastes of soy sauce (Pennine specialises in Chinese cuisine). The cookhouse workers are also clad in white, although instead of chef’s aprons and jackets, they sport lab coats and wellies, and in place of chef’s hats, those plastic hairnets that make caterers’ uniforms the least sexy on the planet.

But the most obvious difference between the Savoy kitchen and this one is their scale. Professional cooking equipment is all big, but ‘big’ hardly does the machinery at Pennine justice. The food mixers, for instance, consist of a row of kettledrums six feet wide, each fitted with a hinged lid and an oar-sized rotor blade. Accessed from a raised steel gantry, these drums are where the sauces for your stir-fry prawns and Shanghai chicken are blended, made up from recipe cards no different to those you would use at home, apart from their gargantuan quantities. Next to them are the factory’s ovens and steamers: three stainless-steel boxes, each the size of a decent lock-up garage, into which trolley-loads of marinated pork, duck and chicken (or ‘protein’, as they are collectively called) are wheeled, to be roasted or ‘steam-thermed’, a process that bakes and steams at the same time.

On a whiteboard by the door is the day’s schedule, which tells workers what quantities of food they are each to make.
STEAM-THERM
, it reads,
PILAU YELLOW x 52; PILAU WHITE x 13; COU PAELLA x 2.5; GASTRO PAELLA x 5
. The list confirms what the factory manager Kevin Hand has already told me: cooked rice is Pennine’s biggest-selling product, coming out of the factory at the rate of 700 kg per hour.
COU
means Count On Us, the Marks & Spencer diet range, and there is plenty of that on the rota too:
COU STICKY x 1.5; COU CAJUN x 11; COU SHANGHAI x 4; COU CAJUN TOM x 13
. Clearly Pennine’s customers are eating a lot of exotic food
and trying to lose weight at the same time. Sounds familiar. The bewildering list goes on and on. According to Kevin, the factory produces 120 lines in all, requiring up to 600 recipe ‘components’ to be cooked on site each day. We watch one of them, a steel wheelie bin full of freshly made pasta, being tipped by an electric hoist into a vast cauldron of boiling water, causing a loud hiss and an instant local thickening of the savoury mist. Scaling up the cooking process is one of the great challenges of ready-meal production, and at the far end of the cookhouse we pause to admire Kevin’s pride and joy: an induction wok unique to Pennine that uses a very high current passed through coiled wire to heat up a steel plate to 300°C, whereupon prawns and suchlike can be cooked in seconds as they are ‘tumbled’ across it using a set of flippers, rather like a giant game of table football.

In order to see what happens to the prawns after they have been cooked, we now have to perform an elaborate ritual. So far we have been in the ‘low-risk’ part of the factory – so called because it deals with raw food, any contamination of which is likely to be blasted out of existence by the cooking process (not many pathogens can withstand a 300°c game of table football). But once cooked, the food passes into a ‘high-care’ zone that we can only enter after purging ourselves of our outer clothing, walking though a bath of disinfectant, scrubbing our hands at an enamel trough and disinfecting them with alcohol, much as we did when we first entered the factory. We come to a changing room that has a stainless-steel bench running down the middle, with hundreds of pairs of green ‘low-risk’ wellies on one side, and a similar number of white ‘high-care’ ones on the other. As we sit on the bench and swing our legs over in an attempt to get our stockinged feet into our wellies without touching the wet floor, I remark on the extraordinary precautions we are having to take. ‘I used to work in a nuclear power station,’ says Kevin, ‘and it was just like this.’ I can’t decide whether or not I find this reassuring.

Suitably clad, shod, dunked and scrubbed, we emerge in a large fluorescent-lit space in which hundreds of workers operate rows of Heath Robinsonesque production lines full of machines that process, assemble and package different sorts of food. My favourite is the spring-roll machine, which sucks up yellow pastry mix from a black tray and
smears it on to a heated steel drum that cooks the pastry as it rotates. The sheets peel off automatically on to a conveyor belt that runs beneath a series of syringes, which dollop blobs of ‘spring’ on to them as they go past. Finally, the sheets come to a series of tiny interlocking rollers that wrap them up deftly and tuck in their ends. It’s not quite as good as watching an Italian mamma making pasta, but it’s pretty mesmerising nonetheless. Before these spring rolls leave the factory, they will have to undergo a visual quality check, random tastings by line operators and quality-control staff, an X-ray machine, a metal-detector, a high-accuracy weight sensor and an RFID (radio frequency identification) scan that will automatically log their provenance and sell-by date. If they make it out of here, they will be some of the most rigorously monitored food in history.

Pennine produces between 310,000 and 740,000 ‘units’ of food a week, consisting of ready meals, packets of spring rolls and so on. Not only is that a staggering amount of food, but the variation from day to day is also startling. Kevin tells me that the factory’s output is not just determined by traditional peaks such as Christmas (which he starts planning for as soon as the last one is over) but by something as unpredictable as the British weather. ‘If it starts to rain,’ he says, ‘our orders shoot up. They can swing by as much as 400,000 pounds’ worth on a single day.’ Asked what rain has to do with it, Kevin says it is about customers’ moods. If it starts to drizzle, many of us apparently try to cheer ourselves up with a ready meal, but when it rains more heavily, we tend to stay at home and raid the fridge instead. Given that Pennine uses only fresh ingredients and only has enough stocks on site to last a single day, meeting such demands is, to put it mildly, something of a challenge. How, I ask Kevin, do Pennine’s suppliers cope with all these fluctuations? ‘They have to be very responsive,’ he says in level tones.

I am starting to realise there is more to the convenience-food business than meets the eye. As if cooking hundreds of thousands of ready meals every week were not difficult enough, it seems that the customers who eat them – you and me – are as hard to please as any operatic diva. We may not have dishes named after us, but our gastronomic whims are catered for just as assiduously. Take duck à l’orange, for instance. This hangover from the
bon vivant
1970s still has a
considerable fan base in Britain, most of whom like it just the way they remember it back then. Kevin tells me ruefully that Pennine found a fantastic way of cooking and packaging the duck so that its skin remained perfectly crisp, creating a delicious textural contrast with the sauce. The dish bombed. What true duck à l’orange aficionados really want, it seems – and what, thanks to their intransigence, they now get – is a ducky, orangey gloop. Every dish that Pennine cooks has some interest group to please: savoury vegetable rice is bought mostly by pensioners who like their vegetables very well cooked, while the thirty-somethings who buy the stir-fry Thai range like theirs somewhere between al dente and raw.

From tales of the cookshop, one soon starts to build an intriguing portrait of British eating habits. Whether we like our vegetables crunchy or boiled to death, it seems that we have a broad-based predilection for spicy, sticky meat. Post-modern fusion is creating a whole new British cuisine: dishes such as battered sweet and sour chicken (the bastard child of Chinese chow and fish and chips) and sticky chilli chicken, a sort of alternative spare rib with an Asian twist that recently gave Pennine their most successful ever launch. Although the company’s development team makes regular trips to China, nobody in the factory is Chinese, because we British don’t like Chinese food cooked the Chinese way; we like it deep-fried, sweet and fatty. Because we know it is bad for us, we tend to buy it as a special treat at weekends – and when we’ve decided we want a blowout, we really mean it. When Pennine launched a low-fat batter that tasted almost as good as the real thing, nobody went near it. We may never meet those who cook our food these days, but they still know all our guilty secrets.

No matter whether they produce naughty treats like Pennine or posh nosh like the Savoy, in one sense all professional kitchens represent the democratisation of food. Meals as luxurious as those at the Savoy were once the privilege of nobility, and only the well-to-do had kitchens capable of producing elaborate meals until well into the nineteenth
century. Now the vast majority of us can afford to eat exotic, professionally cooked food at home whenever we choose. Marvellous, isn’t it?

Well, yes – and no. The problem is not with ready meals as such – the best ones are very tasty, using only fresh ingredients – but with what they prevent us from doing. With ready meals, supermarkets have found a way of extending their influence over us just that little bit further – a critical bit further, as it happens, since by keeping us out of the kitchen, they reduce our ability to influence the way our food is produced. When we buy food raw, we can prod it, test it, squeeze it and smell it, look it in the eye, compare it to other specimens. We can, in other words, make sure we are getting what we pay for. If we have regular suppliers, we can go one better, building up a relationship with them, asking their advice, ordering something special. We become what the Slow Food Movement calls ‘co-producers’: discerning buyers who have a reciprocal, rather than passive, relationship with those who produce our food.
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But the less we cook, the less we care about how our food is produced. High-quality supermarkets such as M&S and Waitrose have discovered that even customers who are prepared to pay a bit more for fresh chicken from higher-welfare breeding programmes are unwilling to pay extra for the anonymous protein in their ready meals. As a result, even top-quality lines use intensively reared meat, increasingly sourced from abroad.
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Then there is the problem of scale. At the enormous volumes we are consuming, ready meals are distorting the entire food chain. However fastidious the on-site operations of factories like Pennine, they could never source their ingredients from small-scale producers such as those who still supply the independent restaurant trade. Just think about that rainy (but not too rainy) Friday evening, as thousands of us decide on a whim to stuff ourselves with sticky chilli chicken. Only supermarkets and their suppliers have the scale of operation to deal with such a surge of demand. It is, after all, one they have themselves created.