Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  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.

  Spaghetti on Trees

  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.5 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.6

  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.

  Our fondness for ready meals in Britain is symptomatic, like so much else in our gastronomic culture, of our lack of real connection with food. More than any other European nation, we have embraced industrialised food production, warts and all. The health implications of this are well rehearsed – hydrogenated fat, palm oil and bucketfuls of sal
t are just some of the horrors we have been unwittingly consuming for years.7 But our convenience-food habit is affecting more than just our health. It is distancing us not just from food, but from everything that goes with it, with implications that extend well beyond the kitchen.

  Although few city-dwellers before the twentieth century cooked for themselves, the intricacies of the food supply network meant that people had much closer contact with those who produced their food. Middle- and upper-class mistresses discussed menus with their cooks, often dealing directly with suppliers, or approving the produce they delivered. The urban working classes also had direct access to suppliers, of whom there were a lot more than there are today: food deserts are a modern phenomenon. Even the ‘added value’ in cooked food was real in the nineteenth century: when Victorian workers bought a baked potato from a street hawker, most were paying for something they could not produce themselves. Yet now that we all have kitchens, we are still prepared to pay other people to cook our food – which might make sense for those who can afford to do it occasionally, but for the less well off it makes no sense at all. The great paradox of convenience food is that the ‘added value’ in it is all in the part (the cooking) we could easily do ourselves. The part most of us could not provide (the raw ingredients) is the one we seem most reluctant to pay for. Strange, isn’t it?

  Cooking is about much more than chopping up a few vegetables and throwing them in a pan, or putting a ready-made pizza in the microwave. Because cooks control not just what goes out of a kitchen, but what comes into it, they are a vital link in the food chain – the guardians of our gastronomic know-how. Only cooks know how to source raw food, tell its quality, make it taste delicious, manage and store it, make use of leftovers. Few skills have a greater collective impact on our quality of life. People who don’t cook don’t use local food shops, invite their friends around for dinner, know where food comes from, realise what they’re putting into their bodies, understand the impact of their diet on the planet – or educate their children in any of the above.

  As it happens, both my parents know how to cook. My mother and father can draw you an approximate anatomical section through a cow or pig (both are medically trained, which probably helps). They can tell you which cuts are tough or tender and why (it depends what the animal used them for), which bits are cheap or expensive; which are good for roasting, frying or stewing. They know when vegetables are in season, what to do with giblets, how to tell whether fruit is ripe, whether meat is safe to eat. This knowledge, as my parents constantly reminded me and my brother when we were growing up, was forged during the Second World War, a time of general deprivation when common awareness of food had never been greater. My generation is lucky never to have known such hardship, but even as postwar babies, we learnt some of the lessons of wartime. Like many people my age, I find my parents’ horror of waste has rubbed off on me. Growing up in the 1960s, I also picked up some basic knowledge of seasonality. I can still remember my childhood pangs of disappointment (motivated by sheer greed) when the summer absence of old King Edwards meant I would have to forgo my mother’s peerless roast potatoes, known among family and friends as ‘crunchies’ in tribute to their crackingly crisp exteriors, achieved, needless to say, through liberal basting with dripping left over from the previous Sunday.8

  Today, unless you choose to make a career of it, picking up that sort of culinary knowledge is close to impossible. Go to a supermarket and try to find someone there to ask for advice, and good luck. Try to work out which bit of animal you are about to cook, and ditto. Of course supermarkets deliberately obscure the origins of meat, knowing that if most of us recognise a bit of animal in the packet, we won’t buy it. As for vegetables, trying to pick out local, seasonal varieties amid the profusion of ‘eternal global summertime’ can be hard work – or impossible. So much for gathering food. As for cooking it, there is a big difference between reading a saturated-fat statistic on the back of a ready-meal packet, and cutting off a lump of butter and sticking it into a pan – an act that never fails to afford me pleasure, even though I shudder at what it must be doing to my arteries. There is no better way to learn about food than by cooking it; yet few of us today are shown how.

  Back in 1957, the BBC screened one of the most famous April Fools of all time: an episode of Panorama in which the highly respected broadcaster Richard Dimbleby reported, with complete seriousness, on the unusually good spaghetti harvest that year in Switzerland, due to the mild winter. His report included footage of Swiss farm-workers in a mountain orchard picking spaghetti off trees.9 Since few in the audience had ever cooked spaghetti, most believed the report to be true. Fifty years on, not many of us would be taken in by such a programme: spaghetti is one of the few foods that we bother to cook. But 20 years from now, who knows? As Jamie Oliver discovered during his recent TV school-dinners campaign, food knowledge among modern British schoolchildren is shockingly low.10 Most of the kids in Oliver’s class stared in puzzlement at the leeks, onions and potatoes he showed them as if they were creatures from another planet (the vegetables, that is, not the kids; although both could arguably apply). If we continue as we are, the prospect of the next generation being totally ignorant not just of foreign foods, but of basic British staples, is scarily plausible.

  The Hidden Art

  Although cooking is a vital human skill, its position in society has always been ambivalent. Considered taboo by many ancient cultures, it was commonly viewed as an unclean act, and of lowly status. No doubt some of this prejudice came from the fact that cooking involves serving others, but a more powerful reason was probably the mess and brutality inherent to it. An essential part of a cook’s work is knowing how to gather and produce food, something which in the past generally meant knowing how to raise and slaughter animals. Domestic cookbooks published before the twentieth century invariably contained advice on the latter, and even today certain foods – notably various kinds of seafood such as lobsters, crayfish and eels – are routinely killed in the kitchen. In addition to killing, cooks through history have been expected to skin, pluck, bone and gut animals – skills that even a generation ago were common among ordinary housewives. One 1965 recipe in Elle magazine took for granted that its readers would be capable of skinning a rabbit; a task that would make most Elle readers today run screaming from their kitchens, assuming they were there in the first place.11 Cooking is brutal and dirty work, but its product, the meal, is of immeasurable cultural significance. Cooks kill and nurture, give pleasure or poison. They are servants who hold power over those who employ them. Their knowledge is vital, yet they work in secret. Cooking is full of such contradictions – no wonder we are so confused about it.

  Although the traditions of cookery fall into two distinct camps – professional and amateur – the distinction between the two is not synonymous with public and private. Since only wealthy households had separate kitchens until the early nineteenth century, they were invariably run by professional cooks. What we think of today as domestic cookery – that is, amateur – was largely confined to the countryside, where people had access to raw ingredients, and houses often had large open fires or brick ovens. Many early rural dwellings were simply kitchens in which people lived (Finnish smoke saunas being one example), and such buildings remain emblematic of the ancient marriage between hearth and home. Although early town houses also had open fires, as cities grew larger the fires got smaller, and the nearest most city-dwellers came to cooking for themselves was to sling a pot over the living-room grate and make some sort of stew. For the most part, urban populations subsisted on a diet of bread, cheese, salted fish or meat, plus the occasional hot meal bought from a public cookshop; which is why the latter had a vital role to play in cities right from the start.

  Public cookshops date back to the city states of the ancient Near East. As well as acting as urban food hubs, Egyptian and Mesopotamian temples often had public bakeries too. When Sir Leonard Woolley excavated the great ziggurat at Ur, he found sev
eral such bakeries in the temple compound – his comment was that the building was more like a kitchen than a temple.12 Woolley also discovered less exalted cookshops in the city. One on a side street appeared to be an ancestor of the modern kebab shop, with a solid brick range, a charcoal tray with brackets for carrying braziers of meat, and a wide brick counter on to the street for displaying cooked dishes to customers. Similar establishments have been found all over the ancient world. Roman citizens could choose from a large variety: thermopolia sold hot snacks and drinks over the counter, popinae specialised in cheap meat left over from temple sacrifices, and tabernae served hot meals that one could sit down to eat.13 Another common practice in the past was the taking of raw food to the baker to be cooked. Romans did it with their free grain, and working-class Britons took their Sunday joint to the baker’s to be roasted until well into the twentieth century.