Each co-product feed, often erroneously labelled as processing waste, is described precisely, allowing the reader to distinguish between grains and supergrains, peeled potato and potato peel, steep liquor and spent wash. It describes, for example, how sugar beet fields are audited to ensure good farming practice, how cooking destroys the anti-nutritional factor in raw potatoes, and chopping reduces the risk of choking and how the extraction of sugar and starch leads to higher energy value feeds. Guidance on feeding is provided, with cautionary notes for the farmer and pointers to the factory, where improved practices can enhance feed quality and increase demand.

Rosalind's childhood was little different from that of her school friends, except that she did not attend school very much. But home-life was not child's play either when you lived with a violent father, whose shadow lay across her childhood like the smoke that drifted and fell from every chimney. Set in a Yorkshire mining village, Rosalind's story provides an insight into family and village life in the 1910s and 20s in a community that could teeter on the edge of starvation but still absorb an orphaned family of nine. But looming over it all was Rosalind's father, a man as tough as any in the pit who felt the need to keep proving it at home.