I had a summer job as a machine/line cleaner in the dying days of the 1970s in Millers Pies in Dorset - i.e. low quality, highly industrialised supermarket fodder. The only parts of the pig that couldn’t be rendered down to some kind of savoury sludge for pie-fillings and sausagemeat were the teeth and the oink!
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MRM…
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The deflensing machines were really summat - a whole post-butchery pig carcase (head and all), up to 30 hours in a kind of giant washing machine full of jagged metal teeth and some enzymes that could blister your skin in seconds = grey sludge that formed a worryingly high percentage of the filling in a lot of meat products.
Knowing 2024 me, I expect no-one to believe that I didn’t touch a pie or sausage roll of any kind again until the late 90s when I moved to Barnard Castle, and trusted the butcher there enough to partake again.
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This is really interesting reading!
Must say I very rarely if ever partake in this sort of food. Having read your post, I am fucking glad I don’t.
A lot of that type of food is grey in colour and tastes fucking horrible!
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Nearest thing existing now is Greggs and Ginsters - and trust me when I say their products may be gash, but they’re a fuckton better than Miller’s stuff was. The fact the company is long vanished tells you more than I ever can!
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I used to live opposite a pie factory. It was stories from more than one generation of workers there that put me off sausage rolls, pasties, etc…
The smell was very nice though. The 747 sized shitehawks less so…
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Yeah. It was all true, I bet cash money, every word of it.
Miller’s used to kill on-site. Old-fashioned manual killing floor. Worst though was the state of some of the livestock when they arrived, especially if they’d been on the road for a LONG time. Worse still if they were boated over from Poland or suchlike. Shocking. What stressed pigs will do to one-another in extremis makes concentration camp guards look like Mother Theresa. All went in the machines anyway.
Then there were the hygiene standards.
There weren’t any.
Forms were filled, boxes ticked, inspections ‘happened’, wads of cash fell into back pockets. But yeah, you know the rest.
You’ll meet jaded workers in many walks of life, but none so jaded as slaughtermen and butchers working in industrial food production.
Before the days of the internet people would always (understandably) call bullshit unless they’d worked in something similar, but now you can just go on YouTube or Reddit or whatever, and it’s all on there.
If I had a soul I’d probably be vegan.
It is better now, EU made the biggest difference. I’ve been round a fair few modern plants c/o Sam’s various jobs in the food industry, and it’s unrecognisably better, especially modern slaughterhouses.
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My stepdaughter’s father in law, if that makes sense, used to be an area manager for a chain of abattoirs. He fucked off and bought a black cab as he was so disgusted by the way it was going after 20 years. He assures me every cheap sausage has a little bit of pigs anus, not often cleaned that well, in it. Nose to tail, they don’t waste a gram of flesh/bone.
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Rooter to the tooter is the ‘merican version 
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New tagline?
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I’m not sure which end is which.
Again - tagline time 
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I visited a Shiphams paste factory and saw what went into chicken paste.
I wasn’t much of a lover of that stuff, paste sandwiches were real paupers food as kids, but since the factory visit I have never considered buying any such product.
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Oh fuck that stuff was horrible; reminds me of miserable packed lunches at school. 
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All this sexy abattoir talk has reminded me of the summer job I once had squeezing the shit out of sheep intestines with my hands. They used to kill the sheep about 15 feet from my chair. Still, it wasn’t as grim as the job that was advertised as “live chicken catcher”.
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I can think of an abattoir where the standards are still fucking appalling…
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Went through basic training with a guy who worked in an abattoir for 6 months before joining.
Some of the stories about what they used to do to the animals ‘for fun’ were absolutely mental, he said that some of them had been torturing and mistreating the animals for so long he was amazed that Hereford wasn’t the world capital for serial killers.
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Isn’t it? 
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What the flying fuck…