Everything I Found on the Beach Read Online Free PDF

her up and took the fillets he had cut and his water bottle and rowed the tender over to the slipway and got out. There were mullet pecking at the slipway. Around all the motors of the boats there were little rainbowed pools of oil like liquid peacock feathers lain on the water. Hold could still taste the fish in his mouth. It was a hell of a fish this way. It made it a shame to cook it.

    The waste was difficult to accept. He thought woefully of how his grandparents would be horrified by the wasteful policies of the place, of the perfectly good meat that was thrown away here.
    â€œThis is a comfortable culture,” Grzegorz thought. “It is a comfortable culture and a culture that doesn’t have time for food that takes hours to prepare. People here can choose not to eat meat. They are actually comfortable enough to be able to say ‘I won’t eat meat.’”
    He thought of the feet, the cow’s lips, all the slow-cooked things of his upbringing, with the better cuts being sold. He saw all these unwanted organs throwninto bins and dye tipped over them, things perfectly good to eat.
    â€œIt is not what we do in this country,” he told himself. “There is enough here.” He thought bitterly of the useless farm back home, the place he had always imagined himself staying. Felt the dagger of his naivety in that. “We have to move on. Get more sophisticated.”
    Most of the farms round here were small. Not by Polish standards, but they were small and they sold through organizations that had contracts with the big supermarkets. For most people, there was no getting away from that if they wanted to make the farm work.
    When a supermarket put in a big order for something they wanted to sell on offer, they got the animals they needed in and took just those parts and threw the rest of the animal away. The supermarkets, for example, would want lamb chops, so they’d extract the chops and send them on down to the packing line and the rest of the sheep would be tossed, and the dye thrown on it. Then the chops would be driven for hundreds of miles around the country.
    The suppliers and the farmers would have to take the financial hit on the offer or risk losing the supermarket contract, and if any of the product was left unsold when the offer ran out, the supplier had to buy it back.
    Grzegorz thought of the animals butchered in the old kitchen, the pig hanging from its sinews by the big iron hooks and his grandfather’s saw cutting down throughthe ribs, the collected pudding of the blood, the rich, powerful smell of the fresh offal on the wood-fired stove. “This gratefulness to an animal,” he thought, “is what’s gone here. There is a sorrow for it, as there always is, but it is without gratefulness and eventually you just go numb to it. It’s the way you have to feel about crowds of people, about strangers. You can’t care for them. You can’t let yourself. There’s too many of them.”
    Much of the meat that should have been destroyed went missing. You couldn’t work in that wastefulness and go home and see people eating poorly, counting their pennies. That was one thing about the house, despite the lack of ready money—they ate well. At least, they ate richly from the cuts the men could bring. Last week a whole truckload of chops had come back. They’d gone all the way through, through the packing lines and onto the truck and the hundreds of miles to the supermarket depot and they were rejected because the rind of fat was half a centimeter too thick. They had to be destroyed. The supervisor came out to oversee that one and they had to watch the whole lot go to waste. It was perfectly good meat.
    He thought tiredly of the dressing down again. The bullying, as it was, by his line manager. “Maybe I attract it,” he thought. “Maybe I attract that kind of thing. They think I’m weak because I’m quiet. I’m not a