Walk the pork

I’m sure the Mad Butcher deserves his knighthood for the
charity work he has done but it’s hard to listen to him
rasping away on commercial radio telling us over and
over that the price of the pork he sells can’t be beaten
when you know that the pigs the pork came from must
spend part if not a good deal of their lives indoors. That’s
the only conclusion you can draw from the deafening
absence in his ads of the words ‘free-range.’ The other
conclusion you inevitably come to is that the meat’s so
cheap because it’s the product of no-frills industrialized
pig-farming.

Say it isn’t so, Mad B! What a power of good you could do
if you sacrificed a little of that much-vaunted cheapness
for the assurance to consumers that any pig slaughtered
to provide pork, ham or bacon for your shops has lived its
life in the open, snuffling about, mud-bathing, rootling
around or whatever it is that pigs do to occupy the
unforgiving minute. I am not a vegetarian. I like eating
meat. But I won't buy chicken or pork products that are
not clearly certified 'free-range' because I think farmers
and producers who don't qualify for that label are treating
chickens and pigs in a way that goes beyond the humane,
the sensible and the sane. A mad butcher could nail his
colours to the mast of humanity and sanity here. What
about it, Sir Peter?