Is a gang of rillette thieves currently raging in Sarthe, a department whose reputation is second to none in the making of this pork-based preparation? Installed in rural municipalities, no less than three vending machines intended for the sale of pork products were vandalized in the space of ten days. In Solesmes, May 27, in Saint-Jean-de-la-Motte, May 1er June, and in Saint-Vincent-du-Lorouër, on June 6, the robbers used the same procedure to break the window with a crowbar or a sledgehammer, in the middle of the night. Properties of breeders or butchers, the machines – connected to bank card terminals – were emptied of their loot (raspberries, asparagus and apple juice also filled the distributor of Saint-Jean-de-la-Motte ). Entrusted to the gendarmerie, the investigation has yielded nothing for the moment.
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Who did it, and why? Are they anti-species activists condemning animal exploitation? Party goguettes unable to repress a sudden desire for candied fat? From receivers to the small week? Or simple consumers, stunned by soaring food prices? “To people in need, however, we are used to offering a pot of rillettes or a bag of apples. All you had to do was ask us”, explains Thomas Ouvrard, the farmer from Saint-Jean-de-la-Motte whose distributor, installed in 2017, has just been ransacked for the fourth time in a year. At Solesmes, the Fortin family automaton (La Jaluère farm) had only been in operation for ten days. In Saint-Vincent-du-Lorouër, the thieves hit the nail on the head: rewarded with a gold medal at the 2019 Agricultural Show, the rillettes of the butcher Patrick Lehoux are among the most famous in the department.
The sixty pots of 250 grams (4 euros each) and the forty pots of 500 grams (7.20 euros) that he had deposited the day before the theft were almost all taken away, the same as the fifty batches of rillons, d sausage and sausage with garlic. He doesn’t understand either. “Stealing pots of rillettes is petty and petty”condemns Patrick Lehoux, refusing to imagine that the looting of food products from pigs can be claimed in the name of religious convictions – which would be a great targeting error: does he not also make rillettes made from beef and duck fat, intended in particular for those who do not eat or do not like pork?
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