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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.
    This invented ready meal might sound like a media stunt, but in fact it doesn’t give a full flavour of the globalised sourcing of food processing companies. When the Food Safety Authority of Ireland analysed the components of one particular pizza brand that bore a ‘country of origin Ireland’ label, it found that it was made from 35 different ingredients that passed through 60 countries, on five different continents. This was the breakdown:
Dough: France, UK, Poland, USA
Yeast: UK, Ireland, Germany
Salt: UK, France, China
Sugar: Brazil, Indonesia, Jamaica, UK
Herbs: Greece, Italy, Spain, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Morocco
Tomato paste: Italy, France, Netherlands
Cheese: Switzerland, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, UK, Netherlands
Chicken: Brazil, Ireland, UK, Netherlands,