The first thing you noticed walking through the front door of H. Forman & Son was the smell: the pervasive, unmistakable aroma of smoked fish, poorly disguised by the brash floral notes of an industrial-grade air freshener. Along with the sombre tiling, and beatifically uplit sides of salmon in a viewing window, it gave the foyer an almost funereal vibe, like you’d walked into an undertakers, rather than an active factory in London’s industrial heartland. Not that I could smell the fish anymore: on some days, I’d come home and my boyfriend would look up and say, ‘you’ve been in the factory today’. Within a few weeks of working there I was totally nose-blind.
Just before I started at Forman’s in 2016, my interest in sustainable farming and small-scale food production had led me to coordinate the fruit and veg box delivery for an organic community farm and co-operative – a job which, despite its progressive credentials, paid me a meagre wage and left me physically exhausted, clinging to my sanity. While staffed exclusively with well-meaning people, the co-op was full of unspoken expectations. I shouldn’t buy my lunch at Tesco. I should spend my break talking to volunteers. I shouldn’t show too much enthusiasm for making the box scheme profitable – in fact, I shouldn’t use the word ‘profit’.
When I raised the fact that unpaid work wasn’t in the job description, I was told quite tartly that my willingness to go to the pub after work but not work (unpaid) open days had been noted. My job was terminated. Shortly after, I found out Forman’s home delivery subdivision, Forman & Field, was looking for a sales manager at its premises, a large, fish-shaped new build the colour of salmon, located, aptly, on Fish Island in Hackney Wick. I knew Forman’s well – the well-worn lore is that it’s been operational since 1905 and is the oldest smokehouse in London – so I applied, excited at continuing to work in the artisan food space and the ability to reliably pay rent. I met the owner, Lance Forman, who hired me at once.
Most people know Lance one of two ways: either for his political activity (he’s a prominent Brexiteer, former Brexit Party MEP and extremely active on Twitter) or because they’re interested in salmon. A short, charming man with an easy sense of humour, Lance gave the impression of being permanently amused, often at himself. Despite wearing braces in a salmon scale pattern and salmon-coloured ties, he exuded an air of eminent reasonableness and was unfailingly polite. If you asked him what his favourite food was, he’d laugh and say ‘salmon, of course!’
Lance did actually love salmon, and his enthusiasm (‘smoke is a process, not a flavour!’) changed my conception of what it should taste like. Most salmon is cured chemically, using a strongly flavoured liquid smoke that is either heated into a gas or brushed directly on the fish (a process Lance compared to spray tanning). Forman’s salmon is salted within 48 hours of being pulled from water, then hot- or cold-smoked in large smokers with oak chips, the salt hardening into a crust, the pellicle, which is sliced off, revealing tender fish with a hint of smoke flavour. Pellicle used to be a waste product until Lance thought to sell it as ‘salmon jerky’ (I used to nibble it at my desk until I realised it made me murderously thirsty).
Though my responsibilities at F&F were ostensibly that of a manager, I soon learned there was little to do but show up. Because the majority of orders went out in the three weeks before Christmas, we were only really needed to keep things ticking along for the rest of the year. Just two of us took orders, managed customer service, organised product photoshoots, made sales calls, printed the delivery manifests and ensured the parcels made it onto the courier’s van at the end of the day. In the long hours of spring and summer downtime, I taught myself coding and digital marketing and made a great number of eBay purchases.
Then, at peak time, the work became relentless, with the phone ringing non-stop. Courier troubles let us down repeatedly, with harried drivers jettisoning hundreds of pounds of food over random fences and boxes of caviar being held in eternal limbo at sorting centres. We prided ourselves on our customer service, so I remember the painful time I had to call up a woman on Christmas Eve and explain to her that, despite our repeated efforts, none of her family’s festive dinner would make it and to go to the shops before they closed. When the factory got overwhelmed, we’d head down to help pack box after box, readying them for dispatch, stuffing them with shredded paper and carefully wrapped packets of food in freezing temperatures.
As for the customer calls, they were like dispatches from another time. A large portion of the customer base was elderly and upper-class, seemingly confined to their estates in far-flung reaches of England, befuddled by the changes happening around them. They would unfailingly answer the phone by stating the final digits of their phone numbers with shaky voices in received pronunciation. One odd thing happened quite frequently: rather than adhering to standard phonetic code (N for November, etc.), callers would instead creakily spell out their addresses saying ‘it’s N… like for nobody!’ Some were confused about the orders they had placed. One customer with suspected dementia put in so many lavish orders in quick succession that we intervened to check if the food was really needed (it was not). They were quick to complain and expected freebies and refunds for the tiniest mishaps, such as the food arriving cool (and fine to eat) but not ice cold. Couriers enraged them, particularly ones they suspected to be foreign. Shortly after Sadiq Khan’s mayoral victory, I received a number of calls that started off with an angry aside about London not being London anymore because a Muslim was in charge. Sometimes, if I couldn’t steer the conversation back to food, I would gently place the phone back in its cradle and let someone else pick it up the next time it rang.
