From Farm Yard To Dinner Plate

Packaging machinery has been a god-send to all of us queasy people who cannot bear the thought of where our food comes from.

It’s great to go the farms and zoo’s and see all the lovely furry, fluffy animals. You can pet them and feed them and coo over how cute they are. It’s also just as nice to go home and enjoy your piece of steak or bangers and mash. Not many people will put a great deal of thought into where it came from and this is probably best.

To know that the furry cow with the huge black eyes and long eyelashes has been taken to a slaughter house, lined up with all its brothers and sisters, stunned with a bolt to the head and then gutted and skinned before it can be prepared through the use of packaging machinery is quite an unsavoury thought for most of us.

Essentially though, the slaughterhouse is the beginning of the food chain and without it where would be for our meat? In the US alone, there are 5,700 slaughterhouses and they employ a total of 527,000 staff. That in itself keeps the economy flowing quite nicely thank you very much. They need this many staff to cope with the 10 billion animals slaughtered every year and the 28 billion pounds of beef consumed in that one country every year.

If the average packet of meat contains 2.2 pounds, that’s 12.72 billion packets that have been through the meat packaging machinery.

A further 300 million animals will be slaughtered in the European Union every year and so the cycle is repeated around the world. Most people like the obscurity between farm animal and dinner on the plate but think about the bigger picture. You have literally thousands of people employed around the world just providing our food, let alone cooking it too.

There are the farm workers, the slaughterhouse workers including skinners who have the gruesome job of removing an animal’s skin in preparation for the processing system. There are all the factory workers who will be involved in the mincing, chopping and mixing aspects of it and whole factories full of packaging machinery dedicated to seeing this product presented in a more palatable way.

There are also all the designers, developers and factory workers involved in making packaging machinery itself. This is a big business and all sorts of innovations have been created from mincers to slicers and choppers to prepare the food onto electronic, computerised machines that seal, wrap and label the food itself.

Food packaging has made headlines since activists have been shouting about global warming and the drive to provide food in more environmentally friendly ways. However, I for one, do not wish to have my meat wrapped in brown paper and be subject to flies and maggots. I subscribe to the modern man opinion of drape it in cling film and sit it on polystyrene pretty side up ready for when I pick it up from the supermarket.

And for all those vegetarians out there who would prefer to see us all eating greenery and saving the animals, where exactly do they suggest all these millions of people work when they lose their jobs in the animal food industry and where do they suggest we keep all those extra animals that will invariably do what comes naturally and multiply to the point of taking over?