Bad Teeth and Lousy Food: Production Lines

I ended the previous episode with a reference to my post-graduation move to London, but that was a little premature. There are a couple more tales to tell from my student days before I go there. The first of these definitely has a food-related side to it, but in a very different way from the other posts in this series. There'll be no recipes or restaurants here. There won't even be any descriptions of dishes - lousy or otherwise. There will, however, be plenty of food. Tons and tons of it. Seemingly infinite lines of it, shifting along mechanised conduits and tumbling into vast blanching tanks and freezers; relentless rivers of produce flowing through a sinister steel and plastic landscape on an inexorable journey to seas of supermarkets and small food stores. When I die I'll go to heaven because I've done my time in hell: working in a frozen food factory at the very bottom of the labour ladder.

I had no idea what to expect, but I suspected it would be tough. It was. In 1977 – the summer before I went to university - I secured a summer job at a place called Northray Frozen Foods. We "casuals" (or "bloody spongeing student *!#*s", as the "regulars" preferred to call us) were expected to work a minimum of five eight-hour shifts per week. These shifts rotated on a weekly basis: one week on mornings (7:00 – 3:00), the next on evenings (3:00 – 11:00) and the third on nights (11:00 – 7:00). The reality was that this was the busiest time of the year; the gentle arable fields of Lincolnshire were bursting with ripe green veg, and the peas (and later, beans) needed to be harvested, processed and packed as quickly and efficiently as possible. 12-hour shifts were routine and we generally worked Saturdays and often Sundays, too. The good thing was that this was proper, union-backed labour so we were paid for every bit of overtime we did. As temporary student workers desperate for cash we were all keen to get as much of this lucrative overtime as possible, even if the work nearly killed us. During the height of the harvest this was no problem; there was more than enough for everyone. But as the season drew to a close the overtime gradually became as sparse as the denuded pea fields. It then became clear that the supervisors were far from averse to playing "favourites" in allocating overtime - one of my first experiences of worker exploitation, comrades!

The factory was situated out in the Lincolnshire countryside so I needed to take a company bus to get there and back. Night shifts were especially tough because I had to curtail socialising with my friends in the pub so that I didn't miss my 10:00 pick-up. The 45-minute ride to the factory was eased a little by having had several pints of beer to blur the edges, but this was somewhat negated by also having to contemplate the drudgery ahead, and the irksome knowledge that one's friends would still be whooping it up until time was called.

By the time the bus reached Grimsby's dismal limits it would be so full of cigarette smoke that your eyes would sting and, if you'd overdone it on the ale, you'd be feeling slightly sick. You had to cope with this for another half an hour as the bus made its way through Lincolnshire's bland landscape and then the harsh white lights of the factory would loom out of the darkness and the bus would bump down the unpaved track that led to the factory gate: a sinister iron arch with the words "Arbeit Macht Frei" engraved on its hellish, rusting facade.

Okay, I'm lying about the last bit, but it sure felt that way, sometimes. We'd stumble out of the vehicle in a cloud of cigarette smoke, then cough and grumble our way to the clock punch to make sure we got our cards stamped before the hour passed (if you missed that by even one minute you'd have your pay docked by a full quarter hour). Then we'd head to the changing room, don our battered, ill-fitting white overalls and grubby caps, and get to our posts to relieve the guys on the previous shift. It was almost exclusively guys on the line. Women – including the relatively few female student casuals - were generally found in the offices or the canteen. The seventies weren't exactly enlightened times.

What did we do, exactly? To answer that, I should probably describe the main stages of the veg-freezing line.

1. Open-topped lorries would roll up at the factory yard and unload into large metal hoppers.

2. The load would be transferred via conveyor belt to a preliminary sorting device – basically a wide, perforated metal plate which vibrated so that the peas would pass through the holes, and larger foreign bodies would fall off the sides as waste. The principle was very like the old game of Escalado (for those of you old enough to remember that) except instead of cute little painted lead horses being rattled along a cloth "racetrack" we had stones, twigs, bat heads, bisected rodents etc being shaken off the edge of the plate into waste bins.

3. The "filtered" peas advanced onto a first "picking line" where actual human beings would eyeball them and remove the more obvious things the shaker had missed. That was what they were supposed to do, anyway. Frequently they'd be catching up on sleep or having a chat instead.

4. Some sort of washing process happened next. My memory of the details is sketchy because I never worked in that area. I do know it helped remove most of the remaining foreign objects.

5.Blanching. This was done to seal colour and flavour and, I suppose, to kill germs. All I remember of this part of the line is large metal cylinders belching steam, and plump, slightly pallid peas pouring out of the end onto yet another conveyor belt.

6.Cooling.

7. Freezing. The inside of a working freezer unit is a brutal environment. I once donned a "freezer suit" and stepped inside one while it was running. It was like being injected with liquid nitrogen, everywhere at once.

8. Loading of the "palletainers".  Pallets, for those who don't know, are those rectangular, slatted wooden stacking bases you see used in factories and warehouses of almost every kind. What we called a "palletainer" was basically a large cardboard box which fitted exactly over the pallet and stood about six feet high. This was lined with a huge black plastic bag and filled with the newly frozen peas as they poured out of the freezers.

9. Each filled palletainer would be sealed, then transferred to cold storage by a forklift truck.

That was the end of the actual  freezing process. The factories used to claim that they could get peas from vine to freezer in two hours, which I still find pretty impressive.

We students were mostly allocated to numerous tasks supporting this initial freezing sequence. There was also another process – repack. That was the name given to transferring the peas from palletainer to the familiar packets you see in the supermarket. It was during this stage that the serious "picking" went on. The most boring job in the entire factory was the repack picking line because this was the last chance for foreign bodies to be spotted and removed prior to final packing, so you had to really pay attention. The supervisors on this line were, understandably, extremely vigilant. Anyone found slacking here would maybe get one warning before being sacked. We all know what can happen to a food company when someone finds an unwelcome piece of field mouse in their veggies...

The work available to us at these various stages was surprisingly varied. You could be assigned to make up the palletainer boxes. This was thoroughly boring and tended to result in bad card-cuts to the hands (unless you wore a pair of festering, protective rubberised gloves which had seen at least ten previous owners) but it had the advantage that you were indoors, warm and dry. Similarly, being assigned to any of the picking lines meant you got to sit down and be indoors, but the level of mind-crushing tedium associated with the task reached levels which only those who have actually done this work can truly appreciate. You needed to take a break every hour (this was actually stipulated as a health and safety requirement) and you could still see steady movement before your eyes for several minutes after you looked away from the belt. It was quite trippy, actually, but not in a good way. People who had spent too long on the picking line tended to have strange twitches and a faraway look in their eyes. You generally had to repeat everything you said to them before they'd respond. They scared me, frankly.

The task I really fancied was to work on the Hygiene team. After being a forklift driver (not an option for the "casuals"), this was the coolest role. You got to wear an outsize green rubber outfit and terrorise people with a high pressure steam hose when the supervisor wasn't looking. Naturally I wasn't lucky enough to do this. I was given the job that was widely regarded as being the lowest of the low. I was the lorry unloader.

Doesn't sound so bad, you think? Wrong. It was horrible in many ways, and unbelievably hard physical work. For one thing, we were stuck out in the yard, so when it was cold we froze. When it was hot, we sweltered. When it rained we got drenched. The option to go and shelter for a bit was not open to us because the lorries arrived in a constant stream, and had to be dealt with without delay. At the height of the season they stacked up in the yard as we raced to get them unloaded. The drivers hated us when this happened because they were paid by the load so they wanted to dump and go back for more immediately, but when our three hoppers were full this was not possible. They had to wait, and they got angry and took it out on us.

As a result, it could be dangerous. The pressure to move the loads along led to many abuses of health and safety rules, and our supervisor invariably turned a blind eye to these abuses. Firstly, we had to guide the lorries onto the ramps. The easiest way to do this was to stand on top of the ramp and wave the driver back. That was also the most suicidal way to do it because the drivers would carefully get their rear wheels onto the ramp and then slam the lorry back at high speed with no concern about whether or not we got out of the way in time. This did wonders for the reflexes but played hell with the nerves. I became very adept at hurdling the rim of the hopper and landing in the soggy peas. But that was okay, because the next thing we had to do was to frantically shovel those peas from the end of the hopper under the tailgate to the end near the offloading conveyor belt.

The hoppers were perhaps 20 feet long, 8 or ten feet wide and eight feet deep. Once the driver had backed into position and his tailgate was positioned over the edge he started to raise the load, simply assuming we would unhook the tailgate so the peas could slide out. If you failed to do this smartly enough, tough luck. The driver would keep on tipping so the load piled up. A point would then be reached where the weight of the load would effectively seal the tailgate – there was too much pressure on it to be able to unhook the bolt. You were then screwed. The driver would continue to tip until the mass of peas cascaded over the tailgate in a huge slimy green tsunami which would spew over the opposite side of the hopper and all over the ground. The driver didn't give a damn about this. All he cared about was the fact that he'd tipped and was able to go back for more. Meanwhile we were left to shovel the mess up. And yes, most of it went back into the hopper; only the hopelessly crushed stuff went into the waste skips.

Shoveling wet vegetable matter up and over an eight-foot hopper wall is much harder work than standing knee-deep in wet vegetable matter and shoveling it horizontally to one side, so you can be sure we did our damnedest to avoid spillages. We stood in that hopper and worked like crazy to clear space as the lorries prepared to unload. We kept doing it even as they tipped, and the mountain of fresh peas swelled menacingly in front of us. Dicing with suffocation in heaving pea quicksand seemed preferable to having to shovel a ton of spillage off the floor. I was relatively sensible about it; I quickly learned the signs of an impatient, careless driver and I made sure I wasn't so mired in peas that I couldn't get out of the way swiftly. My workmate was more reckless. He used to see it as a personal challenge to leave it until the last possible second before leaping clear of the wet green wave. One time he misjudged it and the peas were up to his waist before he started yelling for help.

I jumped the eight feet to the floor and ran to the driver's cab, screaming at the top of my lungs for him to stop tipping. I shall never forget the look of dopey unconcern on the guy's face, even as I gasped out that my mate was about to be submerged. It was only after I shouted a string of creative and wildly threatening obscenities that he roused himself to flip the switch. I edged up the ramp to see if we were in time. The peas were still pouring out of the back. I yelled "Lower it, LOWER IT!" to the driver, who was peering back at me with mild curiosity. He didn't move. Once again it was necessary to hurl a stream of vituperative cursing at him in order to get a reaction. He finally lowered the back, and the vegetable tide receded and trickled to a halt.

I hardly dared look down. When I did, all I could see of my workmate was his cap.

"Mike... you okay? Mike?"

The cap tipped back and with great relief I saw that he was only buried up to his chin. He looked mildly vexed, and his voice was perfectly calm and steady.

"Fresh overalls required, I think."

I grinned.

"Uh.... because of the pea stains, right?"

"P-E-A stains, yes. Dig us out, would ya mate?"

Ten weeks of this did a number of things for me. It gave me an inside understanding of what factory work was actually like. It gave me insight into worker politics and pecking order. It showed me that the sort of bullying and clique-forming I'd been wearily resigned to at school still existed in these workplaces, only overlaid with a thin, cracked veneer of pretence that it didn't. It made me aware that when you buy a pack of frozen food, you're taking something of a risk with your health yet – all things considered – probably low enough of a risk not to be worth worrying about too much. It also – for the first time in my skinny-runt life - gave me hard muscles and broad shoulders.

I worked at Northray again the following summer. On that occasion I walked out of the job after only seven weeks, after rowing with one of those supervisors who was particularly unfair with the overtime allocation. That year I learned – or rather, was reminded - that I had a very highly-developed sense of fair play, a hot temper and a willingness to throw caution to the winds no matter what the consequences, if pushed far enough. I made a mental note that this might cause me problems in future. It certainly meant I wouldn't be going back to Northray the following summer.

So, for my final two summers I worked at Birds Eye. This was actually better for me as the factory was within walking distance of my home. No more miserable, smoky bus rides! The work was pretty much the same - as was the tomfoolery and disrespect for health and safety rules - but the great thing was I managed to get myself a job with the QC (Quality Control) division where the work involved things like taking samples, making measurements and doing some very elementary analysis of results. This meant no more hard, physical labour. Instead I sat (yes! We had chairs!) near the palletainer-filling stations, took occasional samples of the frozen produce and did various grading exercises, noting the results for transfer to the lab (where all the serious testing took place). After my experiences at Northray this was positively cushy, even when I had to examine samples of fish as well as the familiar vegetable products. I could write another whole essay on this but I'll spare you the stories of stench and slime and the grisly business of performing skin, bone and blood clot counts. Instead let me just give you a single piece of advice which I learned during this period, thanks to an experience involving a block of thawed fillets and an alarming quantity of maggots. Never, ever buy "economy" fish fingers. Some economies are simply not worth it.

I don't think you can ever actually enjoy low-level factory work but at Birds Eye I believe I came as close to that as is possible. So I had rather mixed feelings when the old place shut down in 2005 - another victim of the fairly relentless decline of my old hometown and of its once-thriving fishing industry. And then at the end of 2007 the disused shell of the factory was burned down and is now no more.

And on that rather final, funereal note let me assure you that the next episode of "BTALF" will feature far more discussion of food, and that food will be a lot more interesting than frozen peas. Towards the end of my third season on the lines I was feeling exhausted and pretty depressed. I needed a total change of scene. I craved light, space, beauty, elegant buildings and, above all, food that wasn't slimy, soiled or frozen. I was about to be in luck. I received a call from an old schoolfriend.

"Hey, I've seen this great deal on a trip to Paris, and I wondered if you'd be..."

"When do we leave?"

(Previously) Bad Teeth and Lousy Food: Eating Out

Comments

[PaulR]

Another great installment to BTALF; I've been wondering when one would come forth. I'll try be sure that MA heeds your caution about economy fish fingers.

[Manggy]

"one of my first experiences of worker exploitation, comrades"
"... I had to curtail socialising"
HMMM!

Gosh Jack, I looked up the Auschwitz reference *before* I read the next paragraph. You sent chills up and down my spine!

While I've always thought that the work I used to do, aside from military training, was pretty bad, there were still plenty of bright spots. That just sounds extremely hellish (and NO, it's not because of any fear of muscle-pumping manual labor on my part! Okay, maybe partially). I'm not the type of person to be naive about the source of my food and its processing, but "bat heads, bisected rodents etc" did me in (for now). Really?! (No, wait, don't answer that. Let's hope the blanching did its job.)

I can't wait for the next part, Jack! (By the way, are those your pictures?)

[adele]

Damn. And I thought I had some bad summer jobs.

"Economy fish fingers" sounds like the frozen equivalent of "discount sushi." (Which has to be one of the most alarming phrases in the culinary lexicon, right next to "Spam casserole.")

[Sophie]

I loved this one! Especially the image of your friend almost getting smothered by peas.
What a hellish summer job.

[giz]

I promise I will never EVER complain again about the crap jobs I had to do. Mine pale in comparison...like picking burnt crisps off a burning conveyer belt (yucky finger blisters) and washing hair in a beauty salon (in the days of bea hives with a gazillion bobby pins to fish out of ugly dirty hair. All this in the name of money. Three cheers for education.

[Jack]

Paul - yes, I've been a bit slow getting this episode out, for a variety of reasons (only a few of which are very good ones!) The next one should arrive after a much smaller interval. Glad you're still enjoying them!

Manggy - oh yes, comrade, I've long been something of a socialite :-).

I'm afraid the stuff about finding pieces of small animal in the freshly-vined produce was not exaggerated but honestly, the processing did seem to do a very good job of getting all the foreign bodies out. It's still pretty rare to find something that "got through" in your packet of frozen peas.

Adele - I've never seen "discount sushi". If I ever do I certainly won't be buying it! The very thought...

Sophie - it was pretty hellish at times. But character-building!

giz - there were times when it was all I could do to drag myself in for the next shift, especially when I hadn't had a day off for a couple of weeks, but this is one of those things I'm really glad I did. I think even at the time I knew it was an oddly formative experience. Everyone should do a really crappy job at least once in their lives :-).

[Zenchef]

What an experience! Seeing someone buried in peas up to his chin can be somewhat traumatizing. haha. That would make a great horror flick scene. Thanks to you Jack, I will never look at frozen peas the same way ever again. :-)

[Johanna]

great reminiscences! makes me feel a little wary of buying frozen peas which I love! I thought my experience in a cardboard factory on kibbutz in Israel were bad until I read your stories of unloading the trucks!