CONSUMER CHOICE

[Stanley]

CONSUMER CHOICE

Written 23 January 2001

This weeks subject has been boiling up for quite a long while and I suppose you’d be quite right if you decided I had a bee on my bonnet. That’s OK, but recognise that the things I talk about are the things I’ve seen with my own eyes. Quite a lot of it dates from nearly fifty years ago but the evidence we have had recently persuades me that things are just as bad now.
In the days when my beard was black I was a long distance wagon driver ‘on the tramp’. This meant that I looked for my own loads. If Kelbrook Metal Products at Sough Bridge Mill sent me to Glasgow with a load of roof flashings for a new factory I went and did it and as soon as I unloaded I went into the middle of Glasgow to Clyde Street and after parking the wagon, went to the office of a man called Jimmy McCall. This was what we called a clearing house and Jimmy would give me a load for somewhere else in the country. If there wasn’t one I would settle into an easy chair in the office and wait until one came in.
We carried anything that came up and never argued with Jimmy or his clerk, Norman Crerar. One of these days I’ll tell you more about this system but this week I want to concentrate on some of the stuff we moved about the country, all will become clear as we get into the story. Being a big conurbation, Glasgow and its surrounds consumed a lot of meat so the meat by-products industry was very important. Once an animal had been butchered there was a lot of abattoir waste that had to be dealt with. The old joke about pig-killing on the farm used to be that nothing was wasted except the squeal! Believe me, the same applied to cattle.
I once took a load of ‘greaves’ From Newcastle on Tyne to a factory at Paisley. Greaves was the trade name for the residue left over after scrap meat and fat was partially rendered down for the tallow or dripping. It was stacked in piles and left to decompose and then could be subjected to a further rendering which got the last of the fat out of it. At the plant in Paisley where I delivered the load wagons full of butcher’s and abattoir waste were being brought in, tipped on to a concrete apron and men with wooden hay rakes sorted out the bones from the intestines and the heads and hooves from the sinews and everything went into holes in the floor which were the lids of giant pressure cookers below. I remember at the time thinking that this must be one of the worst jobs in the world.
When I’d unloaded I asked at the office if they had any ‘traffic’, that is a load out that I could carry for them. They gave me a load of skins for a factory further up in Scotland so I took it. When I delivered the skins I found I was in another hell-hole. Large notices on the wall surrounding concrete tanks full of skins soaking in some form of alkali before being stripped of their hair warned me to ‘BEWARE OF ANTHRAX!’. Once again, I asked for a load south and they gave me ten tons of ‘Best Scotch No 1 Pale Skin Oil’ in 45 gallon steel drums. I delivered this to Crosfield’s at Warrington the next day and as I was unloading I asked the bloke who was helping me what they used it for. He told me it all depended on which line was busy, it either went into toilet soap or margarine!
Remember, this was almost fifty years ago, things might have changed now but I’ve never seen a pack of margarine that tells you exactly what goes into it. The point I’m making is that there was a highly organised industry dealing with the waste and making a profit out of it. They were known as ‘converters’, because they converted a waste product into something useful.
A common load I carried was ‘meat and bone meal’ which went to cattle food manufacturers. I also carried bagged broiler chicken muck to the same manufacturers. Both of these were high in protein and adding them to the cattle food allowed the manufacturers to bulk up the food with low cost ingredients like chopped straw whilst keeping the analysis figures high.
Fast forward 35 years and I’m working for a firm which repaired large industrial boilers. I was given the job of commissioning two very big boilers at a converter’s plant near the Scottish border. While I was working there I took note of what they were doing and asked a few questions. The raw material they worked with was mainly the waste from poultry processing plants and consisted of everything that was left over after you kill a chicken, even the feathers, beaks and claws. This was minced up, boiled and converted into a coarse powder which was called ‘protein granules’. If you look at a tin of pet food you’ll see that one of the ingredients is ‘animal by-products’. You’ve guessed it, protein granules no less.
The thing that struck me about this place was the smell and the flies. The contents of the wagons that came in was putrid. The smell when it was boiled up was so bad that the steam was collected and injected into the combustion chambers on the boilers to kill the stench. Any that couldn’t go by this route was discharged through a chimney that had a gas-fired furnace in it to do the same job. So, when you buy a tin of pet food, recognise that it’s odds on that this is what you’re giving your friend.
Another place I went to was a fat refinery in Lancashire. I called this place the ‘Miracle Factory’. The first thing I noticed was a container with a pile of square khaki-green coloured tins stacked outside it. I looked in and there was a bloke in there with an axe. There was also a 45 gallon barrel with the top cut out and a small electric pump connected to the bottom of the drum, a pipe led away across the ground into the factory. On top of the drum was a steel mesh and what the bloke was doing was taking the tins, putting them on top of the barrel and slashing them open with the axe, the oil out of the tins dropped into the barrel and was pumped away. The thing that struck me was that there was absolutely no pretence of hygiene whatsoever about this process.
Curious as ever I had a look at the tins and found they were full of vegetable oil out of EEC Intervention Stocks. They were clearly marked as such and all had dates and batch numbers on them. The average age was between ten and fifteen years. Later I saw another wagon come in and after it was unloaded I took a look at what was being brought in. It was butter and cheese from a famous supermarket chain and was evidently well past its sell-by date. Later I found out that the butter and oil were combined, processed and left the plant as ‘Baker’s Shortening’ with a sell-by date six months forward! The cheese became ‘mozzarella’ and went for pizza toppings.
One more example, ask any farmer whether he knows of a way to harvest lanolin off a sheep’s back and he’ll tell you no. So where does all the lanolin come from that goes into cosmetics and hand creams? Good question, I can’t be sure what they do now but I do know where it used to come from and I can’t for the life of me think of any other way. When wool is scoured as part of the process of preparing it for spinning much of the lanolin is washed out and goes down the sewers. The sewage works at Halifax, Bradford and indeed, anywhere in the heavy woollen districts extracted the lanolin from the sewage and sold it to the soap, cosmetic and hand cream manufacturers.
So what’s the point of all these horror stories? Believe me, I could tell you a lot more! My point is that we trust industries to look after our interests and provide us with products that are clean, wholesome and won’t damage us. This trust is not necessarily well-placed. I realise now that when I was delivering animal by-products to cattle feed manufacturers I was actually aiding the genesis of BSE. I don’t think anyone can defend some of the practices I have outlined above but they still go on. Waste food is recycled into the food chain and my point is that it’s odds on we are building up trouble for the future. So what can we do about it?
Twenty years ago I took an American friend called Ethel Sussman into a tea shop on Skipton High Street. It had been busy, every table was scattered with the evidence of the last customer. I sat down at a table near the window but Ethel didn’t join me. She gathered all four corners of the table cloth, lifted the whole shebang, dirty ashtray, bits of food and crockery, the lot and took it across to the elderly cashier’s desk in the corner. She dumped the whole thing in front of her and said ‘I’ve bussed the table, can we order please?’ (‘Bussing your table’ is the American equivalent of what we call ‘clearing’.) I sat there aghast but then realised that Ethel was quite right. The look on the cashier’s face was a picture, she had never had this done to her before. In short order, a waitress came in, cleaned and laid our table and we had a very pleasant afternoon tea.
So what can we do about sub-standard food and service? Take a leaf out of Ethel’s book. Question, complain, read the labels and use your head. Ask yourself why supermarket meat has to be packed in ‘A Protective Atmosphere’ when Geoff Riley’s doesn’t need it. Ask your friendly chip shop owner or restaurant what happens to their used frying oil. Ask the supermarket what happens to out of date stocks. Write to your MEP and ask what happens to old intervention stocks. It’s not impolite, it’s called consumer choice. We can’t rely on agencies like the new Food Standards Agency to protect us, we have to do it ourselves. When a label says ‘Fresh’, ‘Pure’ or ‘Natural’, ask yourself what they mean. Millions of pounds are being spent on persuading us to consume food on the grounds that it’s healthy, surely we expect this anyway.
As I said when I started this piece, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about this, but I think it’s a pretty good bee. I bake my own bread and cakes and I never buy anything that has been through the hands of the food processing industry unless I know exactly what is in it and approve of the ingredients. I have this funny feeling that if everyone did the same, some of the unexplained ailments which we see on the increase in our children might start to abate. We are what we eat! Go forth and practice Consumer Choice!

23 January 2001