With the kick off of the new mrW Office section, “Farming, Fishing and Food” we turn our informational gaze to food processor workers. This is a group of hard working individuals who literally and figuratively touch our lives every day. For every kind of food we slice, dice, bake, cook, grill, broil, boil or nuke in the microwave there has been a long line of food processors standing behind the product to make sure it’s just what we ordered. We all got to eat which means we’re always going to need food processors.
Our food chain begins down on the farm or under the sea. All of our food needs to be harvested, caught or slaughtered; there’s just no way around that. Food processors step up to the line once these items have been brought into the particular processing plants. These jobs can be broken down into to basic categories: baking or cutting.
On the baking side, the food processors could be sorting the produce, mixing the ingredients, baking the mix and then adding the final frosting touches. Depending on the quantity this can either be a true hands on job or more of a hands on pushing a huge cart of dough kind of job. Every pre-packaged item we buy at the grocery store has in essence gone through some form of a baking process. Whether that is bread, crackers, pickles or potato chips there has been a level of transforming the raw ingredients into those delectable items we enjoy.
A more direct version of this type of food processor can be find at your local grocery store’s bakery department. These bakers are following the same kinds of recipes as their factory counterparts but on a much smaller yet varied scale. In other words, if you’re a baker at the Oreo factory you’re just going to be making Oreos but the baker at the grocery store will be making breads, muffins, cakes, cookies, etc. What would be more interesting for you?
Running parallel to the baking side of food processing is the cutting side. This would include the processing any form of beef, chicken, pork, fish or other meat producing animal. The first phase would be slaughtering and meat packing. These are very important jobs as the food processors working in these zones are truly the front line of all our great meals. After the meat is processed at these levels it moves onto the local butchers where specific cuts are created and packaged. It’s the same line of processing for chickens, fish and pork. The critters need to be cleaned, cut, packaged, frozen and shipped.
Food processing is a field of work where it’s more about the specific training as opposed to classroom studying. For small bakery operations you could enter into an apprenticeship program by working along side a master baker. At the meat processing centers, you’ll simply be trained to join the line. All of these food processing jobs require a level of following instructions and manual dexterity. You can find out about the bakers union at the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union. On the cutting side check out the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. You don’t always have to be in a union to work in these fields but those websites are good place to start researching job training and availability. Joining this proud field of workers could mean that if someone were to ask “what’s for dinner?” you could always reply “something I made.”
— Meyer
