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A GLASGOW shopkeeper who caused a stink by rearing pigs for slaughter in a city park has come back for a second bite - with a family of swine.

Reuben Chesters, who runs ethical foodstore Locavore on Glasgow’s south side, is rearing six piglets to be butchered and sold in his shop in the city’s Strathbungo.

Protestors were furious last year when his pigs were sent for the chop after becoming a popular fixture with passers by in the city’s Queen’s Park.

Eager customers have already signed up for their bacon butties which Reuben is now rearing in a market garden in Neilston, East Renfrewshire, pledging donations of £50 each to help fund the porcine purchase.

But not everyone is happy at his organic meat production scheme.

He said: “We’ve had some angry messages on our Facebook page when pictures went up of the new pigs. But we’ve already had an order in from a restaurant and plenty of people donating to help us purchase these pigs.”

Despite the fuss created last year, he has expanded the project to a larger patch of land for a mother and six Berkshire piglets.

Reuben said: “It’s a lot more practical this time. The pigs help get the land in good shape and they provide a good quality product at the end. It’s all part of a sustainable system.

“The idea is you keep the mother, raise the kids to six months, they go off to slaughter and then she has more. That way we produce the amount of pork we need to stock the shop.

“The most important thing is that we can be quite visible about that and show people that this is the best way to produce pork.”

Meanwhile, Locavore, which started as a tiny shop in the city’s Shawlands before moving to larger premises, have launched a crowd-funding campaign in a bid to open a social enterprise supermarket to take on giant retail food chains.

Reuben is hoping to raise £200,000 in crowd-funding, ethical loans and investment bonds to set up his supermarket and has already secured almost £20,000 for the ambitious project.

He said: “What we eat impacts our health, but also everything else in the world with issues as wide ranging as deforestation, climate change, animal welfare, public health, exploitation of the global poor.

“Big corporations exist to extract as much money as possible from customers for the benefit of their shareholders. With supermarket chains in the UK holding 97% the grocery market it’s not much of a surprise that things are in such a dire state.

“We think that by replacing shareholders with social enterprise values we can build a the type of food system which is better for society and the environment.”

He added: “The food we choose to eat has far reaching impacts which shape our landscapes, streetscapes and local economic situations. What we eat impacts our health, but also everything else in the world with issues as wide ranging as deforestation, climate change, animal welfare, public health, exploitation of the global poor.

“We think at the root of many of these big overwhelming global and local problems is the basic model of the big corporations who run the food system. They exist to extract as much money as possible from customers for the benefit of their shareholders.

“With supermarket chains in the UK holding 97% the grocery market it’s not much of a surprise that things are in such a dire state.

“We think that by replacing shareholders with social enterprise values we can build a the type of food system which is better for society and the environment. We want to take what we’ve learned over the last few years to scale up and trade in the same marketplace as the big corporates, but to our own rules, with our own end goals.

“Instead of spending profits on TV ads and shareholder dividends we’d like profits to go towards helping local growers and developing fairer supply chains.”