It was mothers day 2016 and so the entire family wanted to go out and celebrate with a fancy brunch. We packed up the whole family, make arrangements of when and where to meet and off we went. We were so organized that we showed up at the hotel before my inlaws and that gave me time to wait impatiently compose myself for the upcoming brunch. It also gave me time to mill around the lobby and find the current copy of the “Frankfurt daily”. I have no idea if this magazine is really published 365 days a year but in this particular issue was articles about the IFFA which is apparently a trade fair for all things in the food preparation industry.
I had no idea just what kinds of articles would be covered. When I think of food, I guess I think of the advertising that is all over the television. I am a bit of a skeptic and when they show how a particular brand of chocolate is being poured into a tiny mold by a clean cut person in a lab coat. I have a chuckle when I see a family in a small village and how they eat their evening meal with a traditional meat spread, which coincidentally also is made in a local butcher shop.
No the reality of food processing is a much different picture. The food doesn’t come in the door in a small hand held basket but rather in semi-trailers full of livestock or vegetables and they are processed with modern assembly lines into can of corn, the steak or spare ribs.
From what I have read in this paper, the IFFA is all about meat and meat processing. I suppose these machines are pretty exciting labor saving devices if you are taking big pieces of cow and turning out hamburgers, but they didn’t do much for me.
I brought home this paper and was trying to decide which of the impersonal machines should I add to this article to reinforce that food preparation is not what you see in the advertising. Before I could find a good picture, I saw the following comments on the messe frankfurt site.
IFFA is a trade fair, open to trade visitors, access is not available to private visitors.
On the whole exhibit ground photographing, filming and carrying of cameras is only allowed with the approval of the Messe Frankfurt.
This makes it sound like either the Messe Frankfurt or the IFFA is not real keen to have people see what kind of machines, treatments or casing are being used in their food.
To get around any problems with either the IFFA or the Frankfurt Messe, I have a few links to some of the assembly line machines. To be honest, they do look to be amazing works of engineering that might look just as at home in a clean room of a computer chip company.
These links bring you to the machines and in some cases even include video’s showing their operation. I am guessing that some organizations are very conscious of their public view and do not include any machines, nor much information. Instead they allow you to fill out a form and receive information about their products (i guess they are chicken).
I was a bit surprised at some of the high tech products that are being used by the food processing industry. One of them gave me a flashback to high school, as the machine that is being used to chop up my food, appears to be similar to the band-saws that we used in shop class. A runner up favorite tool appeared to be a common handsaw. Upon seeing this I kept thinking about the saw my father used to cut down the Christmas tree each December. I guess the final tool appeared to a slight modification to the common knife.
I am not a vegetarian but looking at these machines really took the fun out of my mother’s day brunch. Eventually, I will forget about them and go back to my normal 21st century food consumer but in the meantime I keep thinking of the slicer machine.
