Sausage factory
What's the difference between top-of-the range and economy? Is it just ingredients or are the animals treated differently, too? Felicity Lawrence investigates
Saturday May 10, 2003
All pigs are equal but some pigs are more equal than others, especially by the time they have been turned into sausages. In fact the gulf between the toothpaste tubes of flavoured pink fat that pass for economy sausages and the best made bangers could not be wider. Yet in the Orwellian world of food regulation and labelling it can be hard to tell them apart. Mass produced, dependent on the industrialisation of livestock, the origin of its ingredients frequently unidentifiable and debased, the cheap sausage is a classic product of our system of 21st century food production.
Last year we consumed 1.7bn meals of sausages at home, according to market analyst Taylor Nelson Sofres, and our appetite for them is expanding. Many more were sold by caterers.
Until a few years ago manufacturers put all sorts of unmentionables into their sausages. Diaphragms and spleens, tails and lips all counted as meat. But since the trauma of BSE there have been much tighter restrictions on which parts can be used for human consumption and processors have moved on. The industry is now polarised between those leading a revival in top-of-the range sausages (made with what most people would recognise as meat for those who can afford around �3 a pound) and those operating at what producers refer to as "the arse end" of the sector where sausages sell for 50-55p a pound or for even less to caterers. Those who most need the best - growing children, the elderly, those in hospital - nearly always eat the worst.
The secret of the successful "economy" sausage these days lies not so much in strange offals but in fat and protein engineering. Pig rind is an essential ingredient in the protein engineer's toolbox. Frozen, imported, chopped to a slurry and soaked with hot water, it produces a bargain blancmange which can make up 30-35% of the sausage and still be called meat. Manufacturers' handbooks recommend rind emulsion because its high protein content boosts the nitrogen counts which are the basis for tests to determine the meat content of products.
The cutting edge now, however, is in fat technology. Fat is seriously cheap and with the help of additives you can make it eat with a bit of chew, just like meat. You can buy thick rectangular slabs of pork back fat for about 50p a kilo to make your economy sausage. But if you want to cut costs even further, the cheapest stuff on the market is something called flare fat. This is the highly saturated fat that collects around the vital organs of the pig such as the kidneys. It was traditionally rendered into lard because you couldn't put it into sausages without it running straight back out again when they were cooked. It also clogs up your arteries. But now food scientisits are developing ways to make it hard so it doesn't ooze out.
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Here is a recipe for a school sausage, given to us by a manufacturer who prefers to remain anonymous. It is for what he described as a "pork product" made "down to a price" to win a local authority contract. The sausage contents: 50% "meat", of which 30% is pork fat with a bit of jowl, and 20% mechanically recovered chicken meat, 17% water, 30% rusk and soya, soya concentrate, hyrolysed protein, modified flour, dried onion, sugar, dextrose, phosphates, preservative E221 sodium sulphite, flavour enhancer, spices, garlic flavouring, antioxidant E300 (ascorbic acid), colouring E128 (red 2G). Casings: made from collagen from cow hide.
Bernard Hoggarth is a sausage manufacturer at the top end of the market and he can't quite make sense of it. "We feed our pigs the best possible wheatgerm, the best milk, the best soya. Yet people feed their children rubbish. Funny, isn't it?"
Felicity Lawrence Guardian UK May 10, 200320 ways to change the food system
