Making Bread

A dozen or so years ago I was temping and was offered some shifts at a bakery that had just opened in the town. It was owned by Budgens and they'd relocated from Slough to be near their distribution centre in Wellingborough. Apparently the Factory Manager had chosen Kettering over Wellingborough because staff costs were cheaper. That didn't bode well for me, but I turned up on the first shift at the unearthly hour of two in the morning. I was given an overall and hairnet, shown the toilet and canteen and then we made our way onto the factory floor.

I've worked in a lot of food factories over the years and it is my assertion that our hospitals would not have anything like the infection rates they currently or historically have had if they had to observe the hygeine rules that apply to food production. I regularly see hospital staff walking around town in their work uniforms, even in theatre green gowns.
Anyone leaving the bakery premises for any reason had to remove their overalls. Food contamination is a big deal. So why are hospitals so lax?

I was introduced to my supervisor and was given a job to do. I think it was passing baking trays through a scrubber/greaser. Any bake waste was cleaned off and a film of oil applied. The bakery got through thousands of trays in a shift and some may have been used more than once.

The bakery produced loaves and rolls, plus doughnuts, apple turnovers and hot cross buns. They also produced "part bake" french sticks that, as the name implies, were part baked and then frozen. They were then delivered to the store and finished off in the instore bakery. Sometimes the smell of fresh baked bread isn't always what it seems.

The bakery had two types of oven. One was a conveyor belt when the "raw" loaves were loaded in one end and the baked loaves taken off at the other. The work work was very hot and potentially dangerous. I still have a scar or two on my arms from where a hot tray touched aginst my bare arm.
The other ovens were turntable type. The product was wheeled into the ovens on rolling racks and then rotated until they were baked. Each oven held three racks. I made sure I never worked these ovens. It was far too hot, the racks were too heavy, and it was too dangerous for me.

The reason for my early start became apparent. Each product was produced on a production line. The raw ingredients were loaded into a huge bowl which was then mixed and loaded into a hopper. The machine then extruded the dough according to the specifications and the dough passed through the machine, being neaded and rested until it emerged at the other end where the individual rolls dropped onto the greased trays. These were then loaded onto a rack and then into a proving cabinet. After a while they were ready to bake and they went through the ovens and on to the packing area. It took about 5-6 hours from raw ingredients to packed product.
The main bottleneck was the ovens, hence the staggered starting times. The roll plant started at two in the morning and the bread plant at six.
Over the next few months I worked in every department of the bakery, always as a temp, despite their overtures to join on a permanent basis.
In the run-up to Easter we made so many hot cross buns I was sick of the sight of them. I was working on the packing line loading the trays ready for despatch and we'd be packing them for hours.
Another time I worked on the Part-Bake line. I also worked on the conveyor oven, the bread plant, the doughnut plant, packing the frozen french sticks into boxes. I even worked in the despatch area, picking the individual stores requirements.
My favourite (?) job was when I was asked to produce a product called "Bun Rounds"

They were similar to the illustration except they were covered in icing and topped with a glace cherry. I had to do every part of the process. I loaded the dough into the moulds, into the prover, into the oven, then applied the icing and the cherry before packing them, labelling them and taking them to the despatch.
It was hard work but I enjoyed the challenge of having a deadline to work to.

I can't remember how or why I came to leave. I'd been working on and off for almost a year. I must have had a better offer, or went on holiday and came back to find someone else in my place.
That's what happens when you temp.

Management part one

After a few months at the factory in Northampton I moved from production planning and took a job in the factory. I was the manager of one of the rooms in the factory, responsible for scotch egg and saveloy production and packing. I was in my mid twenties, more interested in making a success of my rock band, and without any training for the job I had to do.
I was an abject failure.

When we all relocated from London to Northampton to work in the factory we tended to cling together for friendship and support. There was a distinct barrier between the incomers and the locals, partly fuelled by the fact that we'd been given brand new houses by the Development Corporation and that we were generally earning London wages rather than the local rates, which were a lot lower.
The new factory was very spacious, with big open plan offices and a coffee lounge just for the office staff and management. We'd sit in there and talk about how much they had to drink the night before, and who was shagging who. We'd talk about how much work had to be done, but we never actually did much.
The factory staff just got and did more or less what they liked. I was very green, very anxious to be liked and to be everyone's friend, and consequently a pushover.
I had no authority and wouldn't know what to do with it anyway.

We never once hit our production targets and the quality of product was poor. But this was 1975, so it was OK. The unions ran the country and there was a crazy pay scheme in place where we got a wage raise if inflation reached a certain point. My wages increased almost every week, but our output didn't.
It was a train wreck in slow motion and I didn't know how to avert it.

So we sat in the coffee lounge when we should have been trying to get the factory working and we mouthed platitudes about how it would take about five years before the factory was running to its full capacity. And all the time the firm was leaking money like a seive and losing customers daily.

I was a fish out of water and totally unsuited to the job. I was more interested in my music and fraternising with the young female staff (naughty boy!)
And so after less than a year I left for pastures new.
And I didn't know what or where that was.

Sausages, saveloys and burgers

Sausages, saveloys and burgers. We eat loads of them without once thinking about what goes into them. If you don't wish to know then stop reading this.

The first thing you need to know is that the legal definition of beef is everything that comes off a cow's carcass. When you bite into a big mac that you paid 99p for you are not buying into minced steak. That burger probably cost 5p to make. It probably cost more to transport the burger to the shop than it did to make it.

If it's off a cow and is at all edible, it'll be used in food production. When I made burgers the gristle and cartilages were cooked in a big vat and allowed to congeal.Then they were run through a mincer and added to the recipe as part of the meat content. Since then they've got even cleverer and can now remove every trace of anything remotely edible from the bones and turn it into food.

The next thing you need to learn is that burgers, sausages, scotch eggs etc are all produced by squirting the meat out of a machine. In order to get the meat to go through the machine the structure of the meat has to be destroyed. It is turned into a slurry that may only be 30% meat. The rest is soya and rusk, with additives to improve the flavour, hold the product together when it's cooking and some vitamins.
As Crocodile Dundee said "It tastes like shit but it'll keep you alive."

It's quite a sight to see a burger machine stamping out the patties on to the conveyor belt. In our factory the belt went through a freezer so that the burgers were frozen within minutes of being produced. The ingredients were mixed in a large drum according to a finely worked out recipe. We produced several grades of burger with different ingredients. If a modern day big mac style burger is considered the top of the range, I shudder to think what goes in the cheap range that you see in Chav City (the shop that has slebs advertising party nibbles)

We also made scotch eggs. They were quite labour intensive. We had an egg boiler, a machine that you loaded with fresh eggs at one eggs and boiled eggs came out of the other. Someone had to peel the shells off the eggs and keep up with the machine. I used to be able to peel an egg one handed, one in each hand.

The outer covering of the scotch egg was extruded as a flat round patty and as it travelled along the belt someone would place an egg on the patty. Then a girl would mould the scotch egg by hand and place it back on the belt. You'd need six or eight girls to do that. At the end of the belt the egg would pass through a batter curtain and drop into a tank full of breadcrumbs. The eggs would rotate as they climbed up another belt and be covered with crumb. Then they would drop into a conveyor fryer. When they emerged at the other end they'd be placed in trays to cool down before they were packed. That's a fairly standard way of producing food.
When I worked at the bakery, the method of making rolls was virtually identical. We even had a conveyor oven as well as several turntable ovens. I still have the scars on my arms where a hot baking tray touched my arm as I unloaded the ovens.

Saveloys. When I lived in London they were the after-pub food of choice (much like the kebab is today) and with as fearsome a reputation. My department used to produce them. What went into a saveloy? Do you really want to know?

We used to bake all the pies before they went out to the chip shops. These days most chippies buy frozen pies and cook them as required. Back then there were few freezers, so the chippies would buy them in ready cooked. There was a certain percentage of pies that leaked when they were cooked off and we'd recycle them by mincing them up and including them in the saveloy recipe. The saveloys were extruded from a machine with a piston that forced the slurry out through a tube. The saveloy skins were pigs intestines that came in a huge barrel of salt. It was a horrible job getting the skins out of the barrel, soaking them in cold water to make them pliable and then loading them onto the nozzle. It was quite a skilful job to make saveloys and one that attracted a fair amount of ribald comment from the lads as they watched a woman working a machine with a left hand action that would give a great hand job.
The completed (but still raw) saveloys were then cooked in dye filled tanks. This gave the saveloy its red skin. If a saveloy burst or wasn't up to standard for packing, it was recycled into the next batch of saveloys.

So it was conceivable that there was a tiny tiny fragment in a saveloy that was bake waste, turned nto saveloys, minced up and turned into saveloys, minced up and turned into saveloys etc etc.

Needless to say I haven't eaten one since.

Food glorious food

I've had quite a few jobs working in food production. The experience changes you.

I had two summer jobs working in a banana factory. One of the perks was that you could eat as many bananas as you fancied. I fancied a lot. I reckon I ate several pounds of bananas a day when I worked there. After I left I didn't eat another banana for about ten years.

When I moved out of London I worked for a meat products factory, initially in the production planning department. I missed the hustle and bustle of the sales office, and the pace of life in Northampton was very slow compared to London. I got bored very quickly and when a vacancy occured for a department manager in the factory I applied and was taken on.
The first change was that I had to have a haircut. I couldn't get it all in the hairnet. When you work in the food industry you take hygeine seriously. If you don't, here's what can happen.

When I was a schoolboy there was a typhoid outbreak in the UK, caused by the South American factory cooling the corned beef tins in the local river water.
About fifteen years ago there was a huge rise in food poisoning that was traced to a firm passing off condemned chicken meat as fit for human consumption. The meat found its way into meat products all over the UK.
And there are numerous outbreaks of e-coli poisoning that are traced back to bad housekeeping and hygeine.

Then there are the foreign bodies that turn up in food, like this recent instance

http://www.droitwichadvertiser.co.uk/news/local/5010493.Wire_brush_found_in_burger/
" A DROITWICH teenager got more than he bargained for when he bit into a burger - and found a wire cleaning brush inside.
The Chicken Legend burger was bought from McDonald’s in Kidderminster by Janet Stephens and taken home for her son Brett.
But when the 18-year-old tucked into the burger he made a shock discovery.
The pair say the five inch wire bottle brush was running through the chicken part of the burger. "

Hmmm. Not sure about that one. Nor the apocryphal Kentucky fried rat. But I do know of a couple that happened.

When I worked at Olympia the catering firm also had the Wimbledon tennis contract. The sandwiches and scotch eggs were made in the kitchens under Olympia and they took on student labour to do the work. After a day of making sandwich after sandwich, the temptation to be creative became too much. There was the sin of omission, making a sandwich with the smallest possible sliver of ham showing, so the unlucky customer bit into plain bread and butter. Then there was the scotch egg with a ping-pong ball filling.
Ho ho ho how they laughed at that.

When I worked at Telfers sales office there was a tale doing the rounds of a steak and kidney pie handed back to the salesman. The customer had bit into and found a piece of paper. On it were written the words "Help, I am a prisoner at Telfers meat pie factory". I like that one. very creative and destructive at the same time.

I learned the difference between a uniform and an overall. When I worked in a bread factory a few years ago I was told quite bluntly that I had to wear a clean overall every shift. (The fact that there weren't any was neither here nor there).

The reason was that overalls were to be worn not to keep one's clothes clean, but to stop the food getting dirty.

I used to drive past the hospital on the way to and from work and I'd see the staff walking around outside wearing their uniforms, including the green that signifies theatre staff. In the food factory you had to remove your overalls if you left the factory floor for a smoke or to use the toilet, and you had to wash your hands when you went into the production area. If you didn't, you got shouted at by the other workers. We took hygeine seriously. You never saw food production staff walking around the town centre shops in their overalls, but I see plenty of NHS staff in their work clothes.
It's a pity that the NHS isn't run by food industry professionals. If the NHS was regulated as tightly as the food industry it'd be shut down long ago.

Live to work, or work to live

I discovered the joy of making music at about the same time as I started work and except for a six year from 1984 until 1990 when I "retired" from making music to concentrate on raising a family and building a career, they've had almost equal importance in my life.
I've had a couple of "pro" music jobs in recent years, touring the UK. One was a theatre tour playing bass in a Patsy Cline tribute show and another was a tour or northern clubs and festivals with Nicki Gillis, an Australian singer/songwriter. It's interesting working with some professional musicians. Playing music is what they do, is all they do, and in some cases it's all they can do.
My working life has been a bit more varied, but for the most part, music has been very important. In fact, if it wasn't for playing music, either for fun or for pay, I wouldn't have stuck at half the jobs I've done.

I used to attend the free festivals in Hyde park in the late sixties. I saw a lot of good bands there, at the old site next to the Serpentine. The last free gig to be held in that location was when the Rolling Stones played in 1969. I went along but was amazed at the number of people there. There were at least twice as many as usual,and I couldn't get near the front. I couldn't even get to the top of the slope to look down on the stage. I remember the event for two reasons.
The first was hearing King Crimson play during the afternoon. I couldn't see them but they sounded special. They were playing at the Marquee the following weekend so I went to see them there. I was blown away and went back the next week to see them again. Stunning. So good that I contemplated throwing my guitar in the bin. I almost gave up playing. Fow a few days anyway.
The second was meeting a girl who became my first serious girlfriend. I was soon besotted with her and would bunk off work to spend the day with her while her parents were out at work. Naughty boy!
While it was acknowledged that the bank payed badly, the benefits compensated. For instance, you could get a mortgage at a staff rate. I knew a lot of staff who only stayed for that. Then there was the sick pay. If you were ill, as long as you rang in sick before 9.30 you still got paid. Very generous. Especially for a horny teenager who didn't like his job much. I don't know how many times I rang in (or got my mum to ring in) saying I had flu. It was about one day a fortnight by the time I left.

After I left the frozen food company where I was an invoice clerk, I ended up working at Olympia, a big exhibition complex in West London. I had a job working for the company that did the catering, trying to make sense of the accounts. This company was a subsidiary of J Lyons & Co and were losing money hand over fist, according to the accountants. They appointed me to take the chits issued by the various stores scattered around the vast labyrinth of tunnels under the halls, and make some sense out of them.
On the first day the lad who was to teach me what to do got talking and the subject turned to music. He was a drummer and the end result was that we spent all day and every day talking about music. We never did work out a system to track the goods in and out of the site. They continued to lose money.
My new found friend joined my circle of musos and we formed a band and played a few gigs around West London. When we weren't playing or rehearsing we'd go out and watch a band. There was great music every night of the week. In the list of priorities it was music first, girlfriend second, going out with the lads third and the job a distant fourth.
Even when I moved jobs and changed girlfriends (and got married the first time)my priorities hardly changed. I got tired of the prog rockish music I was making, and having seen King Crimson and realising I could never match their musicality I was ready for a change. I'd played a few folk clubs and liked the portable nature of the music (no amps to lug around) so when I visited a different pub near to where I lived and found a full blown traditional Irish session in full swing I was captivated. My favourite band Fairport Convention had just released "Liege & Lief" and folk rock was born. This was new and exciting. I sat in with the band one evening and stayed for nearly two years. Some weeks we played every night. It was great. My day job at Telfers was stimulating, and my evenings were spent in good company making good music all over West London and occasionally venturing out to the country. We played Cambridge folk festival in 1972, although I was too drunk to remember any details.

Girlfriends came and went, but the music was constant. My then girlfriend (later my first wife) and I moved to Northampton in 1974, almost the first thing I did (once I'd got out of commuting to London every day)was to advertise for musicians to join or form a band. Out of the first abortive rehearsals I teamed up with a guitarist called Jack and we formed a rock group called Left Hand Drive.

I was working as a production planner in a food factory. My job was to liaise with the sales office and the warehouse, checking the order requirements with the stock in hand and planning the production runs, ordering the raw materials and packaging, and checking that production targets were achieved. I sat in an office with half a dozen other staff and I hated it. The sales office I'd come from was busy busy busy, with the phones ringing constantly. The planning office was like a morgue in comparison. Two of my colleagues were rugby players and another was a boastful arsehole. I hated it.
I'd much rather be playing music.
After a few months there was a vacancy for a junior production manager in the factory so I asked for a transfer.
And so I entered the world of food production.