inert gas such as argon) to kill the bacteria. In this way the lamb can be kept ‘fresh’ for 90 days after slaughter, although it loses its ‘freshness’ pretty quickly once the containers are opened. The need to keep the lamb at a precise temperature creates a so-called ‘chill chain’, which in turn is changing the way our food is transported. Old-style bulk-carrying refrigerated ships, or reefers, are being replaced by vessels fitted with ‘plug-ins’: individual docking bays into which the containers are slotted, like so many patients in an intensive care unit, each with a chart to log its journey and a record of its temperature on the voyage. Any variation in the latter means that the whole cargo has to be destroyed. Once the ships reach port (which in the case of food destined for Britain is usually Rotterdam), the containers are plugged into dockside bays to await transfer across the Channel by ferry. Most food entering the UK will make several more trips before it ends up at its final destination. A recent report by Defra reckoned that British food transport accounted for 30 billion vehicle kilometres in 2002 – 10 times further than a decade earlier and the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe 750,000 times. 8
To get some idea of what these international food dodgems actually look like, I can heartily recommend a journey up or down the M1, turning off at Junction 18 and ignoring the signs to Crick. I have nothing against Crick: it is a dear little town with a neat high street, a couple of decent pubs and a resolutely old-fashioned Spar. But the real attraction of Junction 18 lies on the other side of the road. Here, just a couple of roundabouts away from the cosiness of Crick, is the landscape of modern food supply – and a very bizarre landscape it is. The ‘other’ Crick consists of what can only be described as a series of thumping great sheds: vast boxes clad in off-white crinkly tin, so featureless that only the dozens of lorries crowding their loading bays, like piglets at the belly of some monstrous sow, give any hint of their true scale. These buildings could cheerfully swallow jumbo jets; but what they are actually handling at Crick is the cereal, eggs and milk that you and I are going to eat tomorrow for breakfast,plus some 20,000 different product lines besides, in a minutely timed international distribution operation about as sophisticated as the sheds are bland to look at.
Crick is a national food hub: one of about 70 similar sites up and down the country that between them manage the vast bulk of our food supplies. The airport-scale sheds are regional distribution centres (RDCs): vast warehouses that operate 24 hours a day, receiving thousands of pallets of food and other goods from ‘upstream’ supplier lorries, and sorting them into batches to be taken by ‘downstream’ ones to supermarkets. The pallets are manoeuvred by teams of forklift trucks and ‘pickers’ (men with electric barrows) in a constant race against the clock. Fresh food supply lorries are scheduled to arrive within half-hour time slots, with the aim of ‘cross-docking’ their goods directly into a delivery vehicle. Increasingly, food travels via specialist ‘consolidation centres’ in order to streamline the process. The entire mechanism is triggered every time you or I buy something from a supermarket, since the item’s bar code passing through the checkout sends an automatic order through to the RDC to ensure its replacement arrives just in time for the shelves to be restocked the following day. The bar codes also allow supermarkets to keep tabs on their goods, telling them when and where they are bought, and, if customers use loyalty cards, by whom.
Since supermarkets have no on-site storage, the burden of keeping their shelves fully stocked is passed up the food chain to their suppliers – no easy task, according to Fred Duncan, director of Grampian Foods, one of the largest meat producers in the
To get some idea of what these international food dodgems actually look like, I can heartily recommend a journey up or down the M1, turning off at Junction 18 and ignoring the signs to Crick. I have nothing against Crick: it is a dear little town with a neat high street, a couple of decent pubs and a resolutely old-fashioned Spar. But the real attraction of Junction 18 lies on the other side of the road. Here, just a couple of roundabouts away from the cosiness of Crick, is the landscape of modern food supply – and a very bizarre landscape it is. The ‘other’ Crick consists of what can only be described as a series of thumping great sheds: vast boxes clad in off-white crinkly tin, so featureless that only the dozens of lorries crowding their loading bays, like piglets at the belly of some monstrous sow, give any hint of their true scale. These buildings could cheerfully swallow jumbo jets; but what they are actually handling at Crick is the cereal, eggs and milk that you and I are going to eat tomorrow for breakfast,plus some 20,000 different product lines besides, in a minutely timed international distribution operation about as sophisticated as the sheds are bland to look at.
Crick is a national food hub: one of about 70 similar sites up and down the country that between them manage the vast bulk of our food supplies. The airport-scale sheds are regional distribution centres (RDCs): vast warehouses that operate 24 hours a day, receiving thousands of pallets of food and other goods from ‘upstream’ supplier lorries, and sorting them into batches to be taken by ‘downstream’ ones to supermarkets. The pallets are manoeuvred by teams of forklift trucks and ‘pickers’ (men with electric barrows) in a constant race against the clock. Fresh food supply lorries are scheduled to arrive within half-hour time slots, with the aim of ‘cross-docking’ their goods directly into a delivery vehicle. Increasingly, food travels via specialist ‘consolidation centres’ in order to streamline the process. The entire mechanism is triggered every time you or I buy something from a supermarket, since the item’s bar code passing through the checkout sends an automatic order through to the RDC to ensure its replacement arrives just in time for the shelves to be restocked the following day. The bar codes also allow supermarkets to keep tabs on their goods, telling them when and where they are bought, and, if customers use loyalty cards, by whom.
Since supermarkets have no on-site storage, the burden of keeping their shelves fully stocked is passed up the food chain to their suppliers – no easy task, according to Fred Duncan, director of Grampian Foods, one of the largest meat producers in the
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