Summary
How much do we know about what we're eating? Farmer and BBC television presenter Jimmy Doherty reveals the amazing tricks behind the manufacture of everyday groceries, and argues that only by learning where our food comes from can we appreciate its importance . .
It was like every child's dream: I was in the largest ice-cream factory in the world. I felt as if I'd won one of Willy Wonka's Golden Tickets. As ice creams of all shapes and sizes whizzed past me on conveyor belts around the Unilever site in Gloucester - just some of the four million the factory produces each day - it all got a bit much. 'How do we get to the control room,' I asked the factory manager, 'through a river of chocolate?' This was just one stop on a journey I made for the BBC to find out exactly how our food is produced. At the ice-cream factory I wanted to know why it is the only frozen food we can eat straight from the freezer. Surely there must be a secret ingredient? But I also had questions about our other everyday supermarket foods: why are mushrooms available all year round when they appear naturally only in autumn; how is it that we never find a bug or caterpillar in our ready-bagged salads, and why do we never have a layer of cream on top of our milk any more? Most of us buy our food in supermarkets, yet how much do we know about the way it is produced? Even I, as a farmer, was astounded at some of the methods developed to give consumers what they want.See the full content of this document
Extract
Scared Mushrooms, Hot Salmon: How Farmers Fool Nature
One of the more surprising was how mushroom farms bizarrely use the element of 'danger' to make their crops grow all year. In climatecontrolled sheds that mimic the cool, damp, dark conditions of autumn, sticky wh...
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