Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Read Online Free PDF Page B

the imports of beef from South America have risen by 70 percent in the last year alone?' I'min Bonner's, Ilminster's champion butcher's shop, on a Saturday morning in October and the shop, as ever, is heaving with
     life. The queue for the meat counter stretches out into the street, and inside the store people are jostling between the deli
     area and the meat counter, picking up food for the weekend. As always, it feels good to be in this shop. The Bonner family
     is headed by Clinton Bonner, known to me as Mr B. Thirty years ago, when the elder Bonners arrived from Kingston-on­Thames,
     there were five butchers in the town. Now we just have Bonners. The noticeboard to the right of the cash registers lists the
     provenance of the meat, game and poultry on sale that morning. Everything is local, everything is sourced. The pork has come
     from a farm that Mr B has known all his life, the chickens come from Mr Cracknell's and the lamb from Ashill Farms. I am looking
     forward to the day when Mr B chalks up that the Gloucester Old Spot was reared at Dillington Nurseries, as we've decided to
     call our smallholding.
    As ever, Mr B is in fine form. If you had to paint a picture in your mind of what a classic butcher would look like, an image
     of someone looking uncannily like Mr Bwould float into your mind. He's red-faced, with a smile that stretches ear to ear.
     On his head he wears a white cap, to go with his white butcher's coat, which is usually speckled with red splodges of blood.
     He doesn't so much talk as boom, with laughter, advice and general bonhomie. Mr B makes entering his shop an experience, something
     much more than just buying a piece of meat and handing over the money. For a brief moment you sense that you've entered an
     essential and wholesome part of the old-fashioned ways of commerce where you, the buyer, are part of a chain that supports
     the local farmer, the local feed­producer, the local abattoir, the man who drives the van and the butcher. With the meat in
     your basket, that chain extends its way to your family and friends, who feast on the sum total of all those transactions.
    Importing beef from South America distorts and destroys that chain. Ina globalised world, supermarkets can buy from countries where labour costs are far lower, meaning that farmers here in Britain
     today have increasingly less control over what they can charge for their livestock. The buying power of the big supermarkets
     is so great that they can dictate the prices, with little regard as to how much it has actually cost a farmer to rear a chicken
     or a cow, and if the farmer can't produce beef (or lamb, or pork or chicken) to meet that price, tough. Until 1990 Brazil
     produced only enough beef to feed itself. Since then, its cattle herd has grown by some fifty million and one region is responsible
     for 80 percent of the growth in beef production: the Amazon rainforest. In2004, 26,000 square kilometres of rainforest were burned to clear ground to grow animal feed, primarily destined to feed cows
     in North America.
    But, more sinisterly, no one quite knows where in the UK the beef is being sold or how hygienic it is. The big super-markets
     profess not to stock it, or only in minuscule quantities. George Monbiot wrote recently in the Guardian that the high levels of corruption in Brazil, where he reckons some 25,000 workers are employed on the beef-producing ranches,
     mean that farm hygiene standards are lax. Foot and mouth is now endemic in the Brazilian Amazon, yet certificates can be easily
     bought from officials caught up in the gravy train. When the disease hit Britain in February 200I, the government blamed it
     on meat imported by Chinese restaurants. But Monbiot's investigation revealed that the farm where the outbreak started, Heddon-on-the-Wall
     in Northumberland, had been taking slops for its pigs from the Whitburn army training camp near Sunderland. And some of their
     beef had come from Brazil and