Recently I’ve seen a lot of videos floating around the internet of food being made, familiar foods that we have known for years. The story behind the fish finger, how Krispy Kreme donuts start their life, and how are frozen pizzas made to name a few.

It’s very interesting to see such giant sized business at work. It’s amazing to wonder just how much money was invested in monster machines that roll out 1000’s of pizza based a minute. It’s mind boggling to think that every one of that sea of packets of chicken nuggets has a consumer demand that drives its mass production.

But what it doesn’t do? It doesn’t make me hungry. Seeing the bandsaw cutting huge breeze blocks of frozen cod doesn’t make me fancy a fish finger. Seeing the sea of needles that pump liquid solution into chicken breast doesn’t make me fancy a chicken Kiev. Seeing a wave of uniform donut batter rings plummeting into a reservoir sized vat of oil doesn’t make me fancy a donut. It reinforces just how far removed mass production has become from a product that is created with pride. It shows me how little love and care there is that goes into the churning out process. It shows me how wasteful the ‘uniformity’ process is, when every pizza has its picture taken and any ‘defect’ detected, like uneven topping or non uniform base thickness leads to a jet of air blasting it off the production line and into a waste bin!

Seeing food made this way makes me sad, makes me feel a bit sick and ashamed for ever buying a cheap frozen pizza in the past. I like food to be real. I like it to have more well done bits, that show me the oven was hotter at the edge. I like the icing to be spread on with an experienced hand and not a pre set machine. I like vegetables that have bumps and curves and I like every batch of something tasting slightly different. I like to know my food was made by people, and they care what it tastes like and not how many can be produced in 30 seconds with a little human involvement as possible.

Thinking of this, I wondered if perhaps seeing the production process gave me a bad impression of these foods. After all, seeing something mid way through its life is probably the worst time to see it, and I could be forming an unfair perception. So I took some snaps in the bakery- mid production, with mess around me, and without tidying anything up or positioning it nicely for the picture. And…I still fancy a home made cake!

Maybe I’m a dinosaur and if it tastes good and it’s cheap then I shouldn’t read more into it? Or maybe there’s other people with me here? People that long to see things go back to days before food was made in factories, and it was made in kitchens?Maybe you make most of your food from scratch now to avoid factory foods? Let me know what you think!