Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (9 page)

Employment agencies were quick to exploit the need, placing advertisements in newspapers in European countries with areas
of high unemployment, offering jobs in Great Britain. In the case of Oscar Mayer's Chard operation, the spotlight fell on
Portugal. In return for employment, migrant Portuguese toiling on the conveyer belts in Oscar Mayer's chilly factory in Chard
receive the minimum wage of £5.05. While in the UK, the foreign workers are the sole responsibility of the employment agencies.
This means that though the workers' wages are indirectly paid by supermarkets, they can conveniently distance themselves from
the realities through this complex chain of out-sourcing.

I tracked down the local boss of the GMB for the West Country, Tony Dowling, who had been agitating on behalf of the Portuguese,
and we arranged to meet in the Phoenix pub in Chard's once-grand high street, which now looks down-at­heel and scruffy, with
charity shops vying for space next to cheap clothes shops. Chard was once a town of some significance, a major cloth-making
centre in the Middle Ages and a prosperous lace-making town until the early 1900s. Set in the heart of rich farmland, it was
a centre for small farmers until the post-war years, when farms consolidated and smaller players were forced out of business.
Ilminster folk visit Chard to shop in Tesco or Lidl, the German supermarket chain which sells products in bulk for very low
prices.

Tony is a friendly, engaging man with a black beard and bright, humorous eyes. In the late 1980s he worked at the Oscar Mayer
factory on the spice machines. His job was to assemble the specific bags of spices that were needed in each ready meal. He'd
weigh and measure, weigh and measure for eight long hours, day in, day out. To preserve the food, the temperature in the factory
is kept very low, making the air chilly and damp, like living in the cold food section of a supermarket freezer. Over a pint
of West Country bitter, Tony explains how the system works.

The Portuguese workers arrive in Chard unable to speak English; most have no money to their name. They live eight to ten in
small, rented two- and three-bedroom houses and are picked up by truck each day for their twelve-hour factory shifts. The
agency extracts rent, the cost of cleaning, transport, laundry directly from their pay packets. Tony suggested that there
were some migrant workers who pay £65 a week in rent alone, which, as the houses themselves rent out at only about £450 a
month, means hefty profits for the agencies. Added into their profit is the charge to Oscar Mayer: for each worker they claim
just over £7 per hour, so earning themselves a tidy £2 every hour, right round the clock, as Oscar Mayer operates twenty-four
hours a day.

Broke and unable to speak the language, the Portuguese are dependent on the agencies for their wellbeing. But their presence
effects the town. Locals who find themselves living next to a house full of disgruntled foreign workers with whom they can't
communicate turn into low-level racists. For Oscar Mayer, the immigrant workers are the perfect employees: they can't complain,
they don't belong to unions and they can be chucked out whenever the bosses want. And because the agencies don't subscribe
to British union rules, they don't have to pay overtime rates. The Portuguese put in extra hours, all on the minimum wage,
so the local employees no longer get the right to do extra hours at time-and-a-half when they need extra cash. Tony sees the
treatment of immigrant labour as an assault on all workers' rights. 'If you can employ them and pay them the minimum then
why bother to employ English people who demand more?'

I used to think that it was only the chickens and livestock who suffered in our never-ending quest for cheaper food, but it
is people too. The carpets in the Phoenix are frayed and there are cigarette marks on the wooden table we're sitting round.
At night the pub employs bouncers to kick out troublemakers. Chard isn't a wealthy town and Oscar Mayer is its largest employer;
the firm's continued success is crucial to the town's economic prosperity. Tony points out that the supermarkets operate by
comparing profits, and thus fixing prices among each other, not by considering what is fair and reasonable. Our cash-rich,
time-poor society has provided the platform on which the supermarkets have built the business of ready meals and convenience
foods.

Thirty-five years ago, all you could buy in the ready-meals line were Vesta curries, a dried concoction sold in an exotic looking
box which, every so often, my mother would dish up for dinner. I remember always being delighted by Vesta suppers, particularly
because we often ate them in front of the television. They were an alternative to my mother's rather monotonous meals. She
didn't like to cook, and I don't think she much enjoyed the business of eating. Her portions were always small, she didn't
like meat and she hated encountering something new and possibly strange. I have a vivid memory of my mother, father and me
going out to lunch in Denmark with some friends of my sister Collette's new Danish husband. The meal was long and lots of
small courses were served: cold pork, salamis, liver paste, stuffed rolled beef and at least five varieties of pickled herring.
Not a vegetable in sight. My mother kept refusing the various plates as they were offered. Then came a large flat dish on
which were arranged what looked like two or three packets of Birds Eye fish fingers, deep fried, golden coloured breaded rectangles,
garnished with lemon wedges and crisp lettuce leaves. She brightened and helped herself to three. I watched my mother trying
to cut off a bite sized piece, her enthusiasm giving way to horror as she realised that these breaded rectangles weren't the
same as those she so often dished up to her children, accompanied by frozen green peas and a dollop of ketchup. Our host spotted
her consternation. 'Fried whale skin, a great delicacy,' he said, smiling happily as he speared a hefty chunk on to his fork.
I could see her glancing around, clearly wondering where she might hide these fishy horrors. As our host launched into an
involved story about whale hunting in Greenland, I watched her slide two of the breaded rectangles off the plate, into her
hand, and from there into the leather bag at her feet.

I don't remember her ever saying that something was delicious, or licking her fingers after scraping something tasty from
the bottom of the pan. No effort was made to teach my sister or me to cook. Maybe she thought that school would take care
of such matters, but all the domestic science I learned at Cheltenham Ladies' College involved making a blue-and­white shift
dress and a grey shirt for my boyfriend when I was fourteen. At home we ate our way through a limited repertoire of dishes:
chops with two veg, baked fillets of sole smothered in breadcrumbs and Heinz tomato ketchup, the occasional roast chicken.
For dinner parties she became more adventurous: an egg mousse with a brilliant tomato-based hot sauce, a delicious coffee
meringue pudding and, for the main course, a boned shoulder of lamb in garlic, red wine and coriander, which she served with
green beans and mashed potato. It proved that Mum could cook and cook well when occasion demanded. This meal was a big hit
with Dad and their friends and in my memory it seemed that she always produced it whenever we had guests.

Over the winter months, Oscar Mayer manufactures 900,000 ready meals a week, and I think my mother would have loved them:
chicken ala king, beef bourguignon, Lancashire hotpot. They would have expanded her repertoire without the bother and mess
of handling raw meat. My mother was unusual among her peers in her dislike of things domestic, though in 1956, when Constance
Spry published her 1,200­page magnum opus of recipes and cooking tips, she noted that: 'Since it would seem to be the simple
duty of any woman with a home to run, of those with any civic conscience, to understand about food and cooking, it is strange
how low the subject ranks in the estimation of many academically minded people. The influence of good food in the bringing
up of children, its importance in the building-up of a strong people, the contribution it may make to the harmonious running
of a home, may be acknowledged theoretically, but there is still a tendency to consider the subject suitable primarily either
for girls who cannot make the grade for a university or for those who intend to become teachers.'

My mother, university-educated but frustrated by her subsequent life as a housewife, was clearly one of those who ranked cooking
as a lowly pursuit and she passed her lack of interest on to me. In my turn, I furthered the belief that cooking was a demeaning
pursuit for women who wanted to get on in a man's world. In 1972, when I was twenty-one, I co-founded
Spare Rib
magazine with an Australian friend, Marsha Rowe. The newly emerging feminist movement wanted to get women out of the typing
pools and away from the kitchen sinks and into the boardrooms of the land. I remember being particularly adamant in my belief
that the way to get ahead was to refuse to learn to type and to spend as little time as possible in the kitchen. As a subscription
offer for the magazine we printed a purple dishcloth, which, though tattered and a bit torn, is still in use in our home today.
Written on it are the words: 'First you sink into his arms, then your arms end up in his sink.'

By the mid-1970's, when
Spare Rib
was three years old, more than half of all UK households were equipped with the first wave of labour-saving electrical appliances:
fridge­freezers, Kenwood mixers, non-stick pans and dishwashers. Ours was an exception: till the end of her life my mother
always refused to have a dishwasher on the grounds that it was a waste of money. She would often start washing up a meal before
everyone had finished eating, a habit which I sadly, on occasion, find myself repeating.

Supermarkets such as Sainsbury's, with their efficient cold­storage distribution, fulfilled the demand for convenience frozen
foods, peas, pastry, pies and complete packaged meals. Liberated from domestic slavery by these modern miracles, women were,
in theory, no longer required to devote all their time to household chores. My generation of women wholeheartedly embraced
the workplace and it was just as well, since when it came to generating the necessary purchasing power to keep up with the
technological revolution, two incomes were certainly better than one. Influenced by American prosperity, the boom in advertising,
the arrival of credit cards (Barclaycard arrived in the UK in 1966) and built-in obsolescence in the gadgetry, the latest
fashionable must-haves were essential to maintain and improve a rising standard of living. With no one at home in the kitchen,
modern families willingly embraced the cultural revolution of oven-ready pre­prepared meals eaten not in the kitchen but in
the sitting­room, in front of the TV. By the 1980s - the decade of the super-woman who could work full-time, bring up children,
run a home and knock up a mid-week dinner party for eight­about a third of households owned microwaves, the ultimate gadget
to minimise cooking time. Kitchens equipped with a large fridge-freezer as well as a microwave ushered in the era of the true
'ready meal', and the untimely demise of the great tradition of domestic cookery in British homes. Sales of convenience foods
ballooned to til billion in 2001, and are projected to grow by 33 percent over the next ten years. In 2005, the
Guardian
analysed the contents of some of Britain's best-selling ready meals: Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Luxury Shepherd's Pie,
'based on the Ivy restaurant's recipe', and sold to the public as a healthy meal that you could have made at home if you'd
only had the time, contained sixty­nine separate ingredients, including a large range of chemical flavourings, preservatives,
hardened fats and laboratory-made additions like wheat gluten and dextrin. When I make shepherd's pie, I use just six: mince,
onions, tomatoes, potatoes, Worcester sauce and beef stock. Britain has the uneasy distinction of eating 49 percent of all
the ready meals consumed in Europe. For companies like Oscar Mayer, this trend is nothing less than a licence to make ever-increasing
profits.

We didn't devote much space in
Spare Rib
to food, although in the first year we ran articles entitled 'Greedy Picnics' and 'Edible Presents'. Neither involved cooking
and we certainly never thought that it was important to tell women how to feed their families. Within a year of its birth,
food vanished entirely from the magazine's pages. Today, cook books dominate the best-seller lists: in 2005 their sales grew
by 22 percent, while fiction increased by 5 percent. When Charlie and I merged our respective households in 1999, we ended
up with well over a hundred cook books between us. We actually use fewer than ten of them. They're a kind of harmless porn,
allowing you to fantasise about what you might, one day, get round to cooking. Of the two of us, Charlie is by far the better
cook, and at weekends he dishes up an endlessly varied selection of meals, made, whenever possible, from the contents of our
garden. So far we haven't eaten any of our own meat, but our eggs have yellow yolks the colour of sunflowers and taste delicious.