Forget about bare hands in factories. Here's what's truly worrying about some shop sarnies Read mor

Forget about bare hands in factories. Here's what's truly worrying about some shop sarnies: So-called meats made from animal blood plasma, phoney sauce and additives to keep bread soft for days

Thousands of readers reacted with horror to pictures in yesterday’s Mail

They were taken inside a Nottinghamshire factory that supplies millions of sandwiches to British supermarkets

Never mind the bare hands, what about the rubbish inside some sarnies?

For example, so-called meats are actually a mush of pulped pork, starch, animal blood plasma, water, salt, preservatives and flavourings

By ROSE PRINCE FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 00:39 GMT, 9 June 2015 | UPDATED: 00:50 GMT, 9 June 2015

Though it is nice to know your lunchtime sandwich is handmade, how many hands is that, exactly? Thousands of readers reacted with horror to some startling photographs in yesterday’s Mail taken inside a Nottinghamshire factory that supplies millions of sandwiches to British supermarkets.

They were outraged that workers — an army of them — were smushing and smearing gloopy fillings with their bare hands onto slices of bread, chugging by on a conveyor belt.

Fingers, thumbs and palms all over your lunch, not least the factory workers’ sleeves taking a dip in what looked like chicken mayo. Yuck. No polythene food-safe gloves, no tongs, just the odd sauce-squirter shooting a blob of salad cream smack into the centre of the bread. Bullseye!

Scroll down for video

Assembly line: Workers making sandwiches at Greencore's Nottinghamshire factory which supplies millions of sandwiches to British supermarkets

Factory owner Greencore, which supplies High Street giants such as Waitrose, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Co-op, Asda and Boots, insists that the use of bare hands is, in fact, a hygienic and safe way to produce the nation’s favourite lunchtime convenience food. We have to take Greencore’s word for it that strict hand-washing regimes are a better deterrent against cross-contamination.

How they make your lunchtime sarnie: It's very hands-on at...

Now e-cigarettes could be banned in public places: Welsh...

SHARE THIS ARTICLE

But never mind the bare hands; what about the rubbish inside some sarnies?

Whenever I see production on a vast scale such as this I worry that the quality of the ingredients being slapped into mass market meals might not just be poor, but created to maximise profit at the cost of nutrition.

The UK sandwich market is worth approximately ￡3.6 billion, with consumers buying an estimated two billion sandwiches each year. A survey last month of 2,000 office workers revealed that the nation’s favourite lunch was the humble cheese sandwich, with 32 per cent of those surveyed saying they’d had one for lunch every day for the past four-and-a-half years.

Speedy: Factory owner Greencore insists that the use of bare hands is a hygienic and safe way to produce the nation’s favourite lunchtime convenience food

I do not know about the quality of the Nottingham factory’s ingredients, which may not be beset by the problems elsewhere. Greencore prides itself on operating to the highest standards. But I do know that we should be wary of convenience foods — and many of the shop sarnies found on the High Street today. We are often talking about food that is downright fake and overpriced.

For example so-called meats that are actually a glued-together mush of pulped pork, starch, sometimes proteins made with animal blood plasma, water, (lots of) salt, preservatives and flavourings.

On packaging this rubbish is identified as ‘re-formed ham’. It has a noticeably rubbery texture but manufacturers disguise this by slicing it very thin. You may as well finely slice some rubber gloves and eat them instead.

On packaging this rubbish is identified as ‘re-formed ham’

Phoney sauce is another likely ingredient found in the mass-market sandwich.

Mayonnaise, which when properly made should be eggs and vegetable oil with a touch of lemon juice, can contain as little as 9 per cent of those two core ingredients by the time the food giants have made their versions of it. The remainder will be bulked out with starch mixed with water, vinegar, stabilisers, gums, colouring, flavouring — oh, and of course, lots more salt.

The starch, so often used as a bulking ingredient, is simply a flavourless material, usually derived from maize, that is a cheap means to add weight to sauces, dressings or cheese-flavoured spreads. It can make sauces so thick you cannot tell that there is a stingy serving of meat in coronation chicken, for example.

Use your loaf: A factory worker spreads a filling on to slices and, in this case, the worker's blue sleeve - and their bare hands - but starch is often used to add weight to sauces, dressings or cheese-flavoured spreads

Modified maize starch is a carbohydrate — a sugar — adding calories to the sandwich. It is outrageous that shoppers are being deceived, thinking the only carbohydrate in their sandwich is in the sliced bread and that the lean meat or natural sauce in the sandwich will balance the meal.

But we also need to talk about the bread. Now, I love biting into a tender egg sandwich, my teeth sinking into soft white bread. It is the texture beloved of childhood teatimes. But once again, the ingeniousness of the food industry cares less about the nutritional quality of the bread and more about the ability of bread to survive for days while being trucked to every corner of Britain.

Modified maize starch is a carbohydrate — a sugar — adding calories to the sandwich

Softness, the ultimate sign of freshness in modern yeast bread, is faked with the addition of enzyme softening agents.

These additives keep bread soft for several days — real bread would harden even more as shop sandwiches must be refrigerated.

There is very little information as yet as to possible health problems caused by baked enzymes, but they are known allergens and it is irksome that they enter our digestive system, which has its own delicate balance of natural enzymes.

Bread is also adulterated with additives that help it through an unnaturally fast fermentation. Made this way it also contains far too much of our old enemy, salt.

Given the vital importance of refuelling mid-way through the day, it is highly questionable whether the mass-market sandwich is the right choice, nutritionally.

Pressing issue: Prawns are pushed on to lines of mayonnaise dispensed on to slices of white bread by a machine as part of the process

Bread and butter: A worker puts together a chicken and bacon sandwich which is later sold at supermarkets and stores such as Boots

One might deliver a surge of energy immediately, helped no doubt by those hidden refined carbohydrates, but you will know how this can be a temporary energy ‘spike’. By 3pm, many office workers crash, eyelids drooping and desperately fighting the urge to nod off.

Then there is the high calorie content. For example, a Tesco cheese and onion brown bread sandwich, weighing just under 200g, contains 505 calories including 28.4g fat and 1.7g salt, nearly a third of the recommended daily allowance.

A Marks & Spencer Cornish Brie and applewood oak smoked bacon sandwich contains 39.9 grams of fat per pack (57 pc of daily intake), 16.2g saturates (81 pc), 2.55g of salt (43 pc) and 16.6g of sugars (15 pc). The number of calories comes to an incredible 715; more than a McDonald’s Big Mac, which has 508.

Softness, the ultimate sign of freshness is faked with the addition of enzyme softening agents

It is not a problem with these brands only. Sandwiches with too much salt, unnecessary sugars, high fat content and huge calorie counts are common across the board.

This is not to say avoid sandwiches, but know what is in them.

Supermarket sandwiches have to be labelled, though ingredients are often listed in a muddled fashion and you cannot be sure what component part of the sandwich is problematic, or if all parts are adulterated in some way.

One way to avoid this is to make your own and bring them into work. For centuries, the packed lunch has sustained workers. That enormous factories are busy around the clock producing more than 900 types of sandwich to serve millions every day says a lot about the way we now live and eat.

We have adopted the idea that we are just too busy to spend ten minutes making a packed lunch with the good ingredients of our choosing, and fill a thermos, before leaving the house.

Instead we put up with ludicrous mark-ups — often paying at least ￡3 to buy a sandwich that likely cost a lot less than ￡1 to make — and buy our morning tea and coffee for about ￡2.

Greencore claimed there had been no redundancies at Manton Wood for over ten years and announced it is creating 70 new jobs on the site - meaning more cheese sandwiches

Foreign employees: Half of Greencore’s workers are from outside the UK, and many at the Manton Wood factory, near Worksop, are Polish

Our meals have become snatched overpriced snacks, sandwiches and ready-meals either eaten at a desk or in front of a TV. This is so much the norm that it seems the majority of people work on autopilot, no longer questioning why this is the case.

We’d be healthier, and certainly wealthier if we returned to homemade. The price of a BLT from Waitrose — four tiny slices of extra thin streaky bacon, two slices of tomato and a handful of lettuce — is an exorbitant ￡2.60.

You could make it for a third of the price using the finest ingredients and all it means is a little forward planning and setting the morning alarm a few minutes early.

Somehow we have dropped into a culture where giant, nameless, faceless, dystopian factories take care of lunch. It is much too important a meal for that.

Yes, watching someone squash prawns into your sandwich with their bare hands might make you baulk, but what goes into some sandwiches and the price we are paying — healthwise, socially and financially — is what really makes my stomach turn.

本站仅提供存储服务，所有内容均由用户发布，如发现有害或侵权内容，请点击举报。