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in the ditch. Trapped inside, the pigs were in an uproar of fear
     and confusion. It took a few more hours to get the show back on the road and the pigs to their final destination. When Val's
     friend came to eat the pork, she found it had a slightly bitter taste. The vet explained that animals in fear release adrenalin
     into their bloodstream which affects the meat and its subsequent flavour.

    I've no doubt that Bramble and Guinness's piglets will grow up to become fantastically tasty pork roast and sausages, and
     I will eat them with enjoyment and the knowledge that they had a good life and as humane a death as possible. We'll eat every
     bit of them too. At his home in Great Tew, my old friend John Mitchinson keeps pigs. He well remembers the night he took his
     first two pigs to slaughter. They spent their final night sleeping in a comfy trailer and John went with them on their journey
     to the abattoir. Over the coming weekend, they processed every scrap of meat from the pigs. 'They had done a good job for
     us, and I wanted to do right by the pigs,' he says. 'That means not letting anything go to waste. We made stock out of the
     bones, brawn from the head, pate from the liver; we ate brains on toast, grilled ears, and we kept the fat for lard. We also
     made chorizo, salami and hams which will be ready to eat in three months' time at Christmas. Rearing animals should be based
     on respect, not exploitation. I liked our pigs - if you gave them a football they'd play ball with you.'
    Luckily for us, David's other skill, apart from gardening and animal husbandry, is as a butcher. On the site where the small
     Ilminster cheese shop, Sarah's Dairy, now operates there, used to stand Bellew's Butchers, owned and operated by David's uncle.
     When David left Holyrood Comprehensive in Chard in 1984, aged sixteen and armed with seven 0 levels, he went to work in the
     family business. He didn't last long: in late 1985 he chopped off his finger while slicing up a ham into bacon rashers. It
     took the doctors in Taunton's Musgrove Hospital five hours to stitch it back on. He moved on to a job boning pigs at Hygrade
     Meats in Chard. Pigs would arrive as carcasses, ready to be turned into tinned and packet ham. Once boned, the meat was shovelled
     into great big tumblers made of stainless steel. Water and brine would be added and the whole lot churned up into what David
     describes as a 'load of pink mush'. The mush is then fed into square metal moulds, cooked, carved and sealed in plastic bags.
     'I never ate processed ham or meat again,' he told me, as we stood watching Boris practise having sex with his male chums.
     'I could bone out forty-five legs of pork in an hour. I'd start at five in the morning and work until two. We were meant to
     get through seventeen in an hour, but if you could do more, it meant you could go home early. Most weeks, I'd take home three
     hundred quid, although you earn more on piecework. Sometimes I'd work on quarters of beef. We were paid six quid for each
     one and I could do four in an hour. But you need to have a good steady input of cows to make that profitable.' David grew up
     with animals - chickens, geese and sheep - and before long he couldn't take Hygrade Meats any more. He left to become a gardener:
     now he's part-owner of his own farm, where all the animals have a life.
    Hygrade Meats processes pork and beef for Tesco. If there isn't enough local meat they buy it, frozen, from Holland. The big
     frozen slabs have to be chucked in water to thaw out. Given the way the majority of pigs are kept, it is possible that Hygrade's
     pigs have been born in farrowing crates (designed so the mothers cannot move during pregnancy) and kept indoors throughout
     their lives, in temperature-controlled, permanently lit units, so that the pigs eat solidly, twenty-four hours a day. The
     babies are weaned from their mothers at three days old, at which point the mothers are put back to the boar. A modern