SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: SLAUGHTER POUNDER
Enjoy your barbecue this weekend? Our expose of the meat processing industry could change your mind
By Ryan Parry
Daily Mirror (online) . 11 August 2003
DRIPPING with blood and oozing thick layers of defrosting fat, 31 giant chunks of compacted "meat" trundle up the conveyor belt.
An unpleasant stench hangs in the air and I rip open yet another pallet crammed with boxes.
It's my first day on the production line of a meat factory, and I'm feeding a giant stainless-steel mixer with the vital ingredients for an Iceland quarter-pound burger.
But as I load another huge 20kg block of white fat into the machine the wholesome image of a juicy beef burger nestled between a golden sesame-seed bun is quickly shattered.
Sweating in the factory light, the fat is enough to churn the strongest of stomachs.
Every summer, the nation stocks up on burgers, sausages, steaks and chicken to cook on the BBQ.
The sizzling food goes down a treat on a hot summer's day and if it tastes good we take its contents for granted. But few of us really know what's actually in it.
With a team of workers, I empty box after box of what is labelled "body fat" and dump it on the conveyor belt.
One employee shouts to a forklift driver: "We're running short on fat and could do with another pallet of 70s" - blocks of meat consisting of 70 per cent meat and 30 per cent fat.
For Iceland's quarter-pounders, the mix for each batch comprises 15 25kg chunks of 70 per cent meat, 16 25kg blocks of 80 per cent meat, five bags of onions and seven 20kg blocks of body fat.
But perhaps the most shocking ingredient is three blocks of "rework" - a grotesque mush of burgers and meat that has at some point been rejected in production.
"No point wasting it," says a supervisor. "It's not essential to the mix, but we might as well use it."
The rework, which resembles and smells like dog food, is all thrown in as the continuous line of meat heads for the mixer.
I'm working in a small team in the de-box section of Wessex Foods, a meat firm in Lowestoft, Suffolk.
I've joined a staff of some 100, many of Portuguese origin, in the large factory as a mince operator. Earning £4.35 an hour, I'm working the 2pm to midnight shift.
Wessex Foods mainly produces burgers but also makes mince and other products. It has large contracts with Sainsbury, Iceland, Safeway and Aldi and is the main supplier of Burger King and Whitbread.
BURGERS are a British institution. We spend £1.26billion on them every year, devouring around 985,000 tonnes of beef. But just two hours into my shift I'm sick of the sight of them.
Another team feeds a mixer for a range of Sainsbury's burgers. The mix is slightly different from the Iceland range: 16 blocks of 80 per cent meat, 18 blocks of 70 per cent, eight blocks of fat. And no rework.
On my line, the last four blocks we are about to feed into the machine have blue polythene - freezer plastic - trapped in the meat.
I and fellow worker Terry hack away at the defrosting meat with knives, trying to free the plastic. But we need to feed the line quickly.
To my horror, Terry sends a block into the mixer with fragments of plastic clearly jutting from its side.
Believing we're on the Burger King line, Londoner Terry jokes: "I don't care what goes in - I eat McDonald's anyway."
Hygiene is generally good. Workers wear protective clothing, boots are washed in an anti-bacteria machine at the door and staff must wash their hands before entering.
New employees are taken through a comprehensive health and safety induction, but hygiene is not as airtight as it at first seemed. Staff wear black gloves known as "dirty" gloves to tear open boxes and cut plastic ties. The boxes have spent hours on a lorry, exposed to germs and bacteria. But often workers then fail to change to the hygienic blue gloves stipulated in the factory rules.
Terry says: "We're supposed to change gloves, but it's just not practical. The health and safety manager wants an extra person to push the meat through, but we haven't got the staff."
Moments later, one worker accidentally drops a block of meat into a large bin filled with polythene from the floor and discarded wrapping.
Red-faced, he quickly fishes the meat out and feeds it down the belt. By now, my confidence in the British burger is quickly waning.
After two stages of mixing, further ingredients are added, including preservatives and, vitally, flavouring.
The strong whiff of beef hits me as I lean over into a stainless-steel vat filled with light brown powder. Without this we'd be eating less meat with little beef flavour. Minced and mixed, the meat is extruded through a machine on to metal plates. The burgers are frozen in a nitrogen tunnel and finally emerge, to be caught by lines of workers in white overalls, yellow hats and white boots who stack them in boxes to be shipped out.
Above the roar of machinery, Graham, a machine operator on the mince line, explains that the company aims to make quality burgers with just 26 per cent fat.
But for budget burgers the routine seems to be less meat and more fat.
The industry is expert at presenting meat. Supermarket steak burgers have the look of juicy prime cuts straight from a joint.
But the beef has often been pulverised into a paste and shaped into individual steaks.
Sainsbury's peppered steak is just one example I saw. And the meat in the Iceland range of lamb in gravy has been squashed beyond recognition before being moulded into tubes of meat from which slices are taken.
"Meat" is never just meat. Under European laws for beef burgers, meat includes a maximum of 25 per cent fat and 25 per cent "connective tissue" - gristle. The percentages are different for poultry and pork.
MANUFACTURERS can add extra fat and gristle as long as they state how much on the ingredients list.
Nutritionist Patrick Holford is unimpressed. He says: "Burgers are generally a second-class type of meat, made with poor-quality meat and with a high fat content.
"There is a world of difference between buying fresh, good-quality beef and shredding it yourself and buying a processed burger.
"Some processed burgers give as much as 75 per cent of the calories as fat. When you bear in mind that the government recommendation is no more than 30 per cent, it shows what a sorry state a burger is."
Increasingly in Britain, the quality of meat we bring to the dinner table has been brought into question. Meat industry rules remain unclear and ultimately it is down to the supplier and supermarket to decide.
Food has to contain a minimum amount of meat to be called a burger, sausage or meat pie.
Pork sausages have to contain at least 65 per cent meat. Around 30 per cent is rusk or soya. The rest - labelled as fat - can be skin, rind, gristle and mechanically recovered meat, a pulp produced in abattoirs.
Processed chicken meat used for chicken burgers could contain beef or pork waste. And even what seems like a fresh, plump chicken breast may be only 51 per cent meat.
Until January, animal fat, gristle, heart and liver in burgers did not have to be listed in the ingredients. But now extra fat and offal in burgers must be labelled separately.
Last night a Wessex Foods spokesman said: "The regulations are absolute that the change of gloves when handling meat has to take place. Management is addressing the problem and will also look at other isolated incidents you have mentioned.
"Every burger is made to strict specifications related to price. It is clearly stated on burger and mince packs what the percentage of meat is and we maintain customer specifications to the letter.
"In terms of the mixing of fat, the objective is to achieve the percentage of lean in the product that is required for that particular burger and that is then accessed by chemical analysis. This is standard practice within the industry.
"Nothing would be added to the burger if it was not fully approved. Wessex Foods prides itself on its high standards and ensures all regulations are abided by, and we will investigate all the points you have raised."
Still, I won't be reaching for my barbie apron just yet.
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