Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (20 page)

Change in the United States is less likely to happen through government intervention than through corporate buying power, as businesses respond to growing consumer repulsion over gestation crates. Burger King in 2007 became the first major restaurant chain to announce it would require its suppliers to phase out the crates, and many others followed suit, including McDonald’s, Denny’s, and Cracker Barrel. Retailers and wholesalers—Kroger, Costco, Sodexo, and more—announced similar moves. Under pressure from these major buyers, Smithfield and its rivals Hormel and Cargill announced that they would shift away from gestation crates, but only very gradually.
Early in 2014, Smithfield promised to be crate-free by 2022, to give its farmers time to make the switch.

Industry spokesmen tend to respond to animal welfare concerns with a mix of resignation and contempt. They insist that
gestation crates are humane but agree to comply with their customers’ demands: if McDonald’s wants to buy crate-free pork, then Smithfield will produce it.
“Their feelings aren’t rational,” an executive with an American meat company said of consumers, “but they are important.”
In the words of one European official, “One must concede the right of choice to the buyer, even when such a choice involves an element of gimmick and charade.”

Thanks to legal changes in Europe and consumer pressure in the United States, confinement hog operations are making minor modifications to their current methods. Instead of being contained in gestation crates, more sows are living in group pens. Instead of bare, slatted concrete floors, they have areas of solid flooring and some straw. The changes are significant, but for some they aren’t enough.
The EU, for instance, has a stricter standard for “organic” pork, which prohibits tail docking, teeth clipping, and growth-boosting drugs and also requires organically grown feed and access to outdoor space.
Producers in Denmark have created a special category called the “welfare pig”—a phrase that would carry rather different connotations in the United States—in which the animals are kept in conditions that split the difference between organic and conventional.
Similar standards in the United Kingdom qualify a pig as “Freedom Food,” a labeling effort that has found broad success, including a commitment from the British arm of McDonald’s to buy only pork that meets the standard.

The American Humane Association adopted the British Freedom Food standards and created the American Humane Certified label, part of a growing trend in the United States. Other private programs include Animal Welfare Approved and the Global Animal Partnership, which is closely linked to the upscale grocer Whole Foods.
The meat case at every Whole Foods store
grades each piece of meat on a five-step scale, progressing from “no cages, no crates”—the grocer does not sell any conventionally raised pork—to “enriched environment,” to “enhanced outdoor access,” to “pasture-centered,” to “animal-centered.”
The US Department of Agriculture maintains its own standards for “organic” pork, which prohibits antibiotics and requires that animals eat organically produced feed and have access to the outdoors, and “natural” pork, which refers only to a lack of artificial additives and has nothing at all to do with the way the animal was raised.

These certifications serve as marketing tools: they allow consumers to buy pork based not only on price and quality but also on the animal’s living conditions. Increasingly, consumers are demanding humanely raised meat. And in the United States, no one has more successfully filled this niche than Niman Ranch.

P
aul Willis, who created Niman Ranch’s pork operation, grew up on a farm in central Iowa, went off to college, worked for the Peace Corps in Africa, and then returned to the family farm. He liked pigs and wanted to watch them playing in fields, so he didn’t build the new-style barns.
Confinement farming is “not better for the animals, or for the farmers, or for consumers,” he said. He kept to the traditional Corn Belt way, growing his own corn and soy and keeping his pigs on pasture. Willis’s pigs had virtually nothing in common with conventional pigs until the end of their lives: they were sold to a Hormel plant, where they commanded the same price as hogs from confinement barns.

In the mid-1990s Willis met Bill Niman, who had been selling grass-fed lamb and beef raised by California ranchers, and the two struck up a partnership. Willis recruited like-minded farmers in Iowa, who at the time were more than willing to
listen. In 1998 and 1999 prices for conventional US hogs fell to historic lows, and farmers turned to Niman Ranch as an alternative buyer. Willis paid a premium for pork raised according to his standards and sold it to restaurants and grocery stores, as well as directly to consumers via mail order.
Eventually, his network grew to hundreds of farms.
“All our hogs are raised outdoors or in deeply bedded pens, where they are able to express their natural instinctive behaviors, like rooting and roaming,” Niman Ranch explains on its website. The pigs “express exceptional mothering abilities”—hence don’t need farrowing crates—eat a “100% vegetarian diet,” and are “never given hormones or antibiotics.”

Concern for the humane treatment of livestock has prompted the creation of organizations such as Animal Welfare Approved, which certify that private farms are raising animals according to certain standards. Promotions carrying pastoral images of pigs help persuade consumers that such pork is worth its higher price tag. (Courtesy Animal Welfare Approved)

Niman Ranch allows its pigs to be raised indoors so long as they have plenty of straw. Other, smaller producers insist that all pigs have access to pasture.
EcoFriendly Foods, for example, advertises that all of its pigs
can give free rein to their omnivorous appetite, eating “insects, larva, crayfish, lizards, medicinal plants and roots, grasses, seeds, nuts, legumes, fruits, etc.” Those foraged foods are supplemented with “a mixture of locally-sourced grains, legumes, root crops, nuts, fruits, berries, kitchen scraps, and salt and minerals.”

Consumers and farmers are realizing that raising old-fashioned hogs in old-fashioned ways pays dividends in taste as well as in animal welfare. Niman Ranch hogs are a cross of the Duroc, Chester White, and Berkshire breeds, while other farmers raise purebred Berkshire, Hampshire, Gloucester Old Spot, Tamworth, or American Guinea swine—traditional types now referred to as “heritage breeds.” Such pigs are adapted to life outdoors, and their meat, rather than being stripped of its fat, is well marbled and delicious. Because a pig’s flesh expresses its diet, an animal that lives on pasture and eats apples, acorns, and grubs will produce a more complex pork loin than one fed just corn and soy. In addition, muscles that get exercise develop better flavors than those that don’t. A chicken’s legs, which work to support its weight, have more flavor than its breast muscles, which are never used to fly. For the same reason, pigs that run around on pasture taste better than those packed into tiny pens their entire lives.

S
uch pork is becoming more popular, but the competition does not make Smithfield quake with fear. “Niche meat” is the industry term for animals raised in such alternative systems, and the niche is small.
A study at Iowa State University estimated that 500,000 to 750,000 niche-market pigs were slaughtered in 2005, compared to more than 100 million conventional pigs.
More recent statistics are not available, but even if niche
pork production has quadrupled in the past decade, it would still account for just 3 percent of the American pork market.

The key sticking point, as ever, is price. A consultant for Tesco, the huge British supermarket chain, experimented with a modified confinement system and found that it increased the cost of meat by 30 percent.
“Good welfare means that the base price of pork will inevitably rise,” she explained.
In fully pastured systems, with slower-growing heritage breeds, the prices climb ever higher.

Chuck Talbott, who has a PhD in animal science and now raises pigs near Charlestown, West Virginia, has seen firsthand the trade-offs between price, ethics, and taste. Talbott and two partners run a high-end curing operation called Woodlands Pork. The pigs—a blend of heritage breeds with some wild boar mixed in—spend their final months in the woods eating acorns and other wild foods.
Then his partners process and cure the meat, producing a pricey American ham to rival the best from Europe.

Talbott explains the dilemma of modern pork in these terms: “You’ve got the rich farmers feeding the poor families, and the poor farmers feeding the rich families.” Which is to say, big corporations run by wealthy executives sell bacon for $3 a pound at Walmart, while struggling small farmers offer it at farmers’ markets for four times that price. We see, once again, the pig’s ability to divide.

Epilogue

Virtuous Carnivores

T
he way pigs are raised has changed frequently over the centuries, but attitudes toward pork have remained largely the same. A 2013 food industry study found that 92 percent of Americans ate beef at least once a week, while only 64 percent ate pork.
When presented with a salad or burrito that came with a choice of protein, a third of restaurant customers chose beef, another third opted for chicken, and 12 percent picked fish. Then came pork, at 9 percent, beating out only the vegetarian options.
Recent figures from the US Department of Agriculture show that rural dwellers eat more pork than urbanites, southerners eat more than northerners, and the poor eat more than the rich. The situation, in other words, has remained unchanged since the 1950s, despite the best efforts of the Porkettes and the industry’s “The Other White Meat” campaign. And these eating patterns are not unlike those of 3,000 years ago, when the ruling classes of Mesopotamia and Egypt stopped eating pork.

In the United States today, as in the ancient Near East, many people, for many reasons, are avoiding pork. Some of those reasons—status, religion, disgust with the pig—are ancient. But there is also a new reason, and it relates to the brain inside the pig’s head.
In 2013 the activist group Mercy for Animals released footage recorded inside a Minnesota hog barn that showed runt piglets being grabbed by their back feet, slammed onto the concrete floor, and tossed into an overflowing bin of dead and dying piglets. This sort of footage has become disturbingly familiar, but one thing set this video apart: James Cromwell, human star of the movie
Babe
, appears onscreen as the narrator. Cromwell’s appearance draws an unspoken contrast between brutalized pigs destined for slaughter and the adorable pig named Babe who avoids that fate by learning to herd sheep. In the movie, Babe controls the flock not as the dogs do—through threat of violence—but by learning the sheep’s language and making polite requests. Babe treats sheep not as dumb brutes but as smart, sensitive creatures. Babe’s owner, played by Cromwell, follows a similar learning curve: he slowly comes to recognize intelligence, even in a pig.

The world learns this lesson again and again but never fully absorbs it. Though the pig’s cleverness has been noted at least since Roman times, it seems that each era must make the discovery anew.
Recently, however, as cognitive and behavioral scientists have confirmed the pig’s talents, the contrast between the animal’s intelligence and its living conditions has become harder to ignore. Critics don’t have good things to say about any type of industrial livestock farming, but they tend to agree that hog production is the worst. Pigs are the most intelligent, the most human-like, of the farm animals, but they are kept tightly caged and never see daylight from birth to slaughter.
British chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall calls pigs “the most abused of all
our farm animals” and says that when he looks at supermarket meat cases, he sees “strip-lit morgues for millions of miserable pigs.”
Activist Gail Eisnitz, who has investigated all types of animal cruelty, found herself most troubled by the hog barns she’d visited, “especially seeing all those caged sows—waving their heads, chewing the air,” she said. “It’s like an insane asylum.”
These sows, Jonathan Safran Foer writes in
Eating Animals
, “often will develop quarter-sized, blackened, pus-filled sores from chafing in the crate” and “must lie or step in their excrement to force it through the slatted floor.” Pig feed, Matthew Scully points out, often contains the processed remains of other pigs.
That means that sows, after giving birth to eight or more litters over a period of four years, will be “slain and rendered into feed for their progeny to eat.”

These writers hit many of the same notes used to criticize pigs for thousands of years: pigs wallow in filth and eat disgusting things. But the target of outrage has shifted. Unlike Saint Francis and other medieval moralists, modern critics don’t blame the pigs. They blame, instead, the corporations who raise them this way.
“The pigs are treated like shit,” chef David Chang said. “I always say that big pork companies are no different than big tobacco companies.” Tom Colicchio, another prominent chef, echoed that view, describing large pork producers as “disgusting.”

These critics are making a plea for compassion. But they are also creating a new language of pig disgust—one that has nothing to do with pigs being gluttonous or lustful, garbage eaters or trichinosis carriers, and everything to do with the way that people treat pigs.

Many people see problems with the way hogs are raised, but they tend to disagree on solutions.
A few animal scientists have proposed—in a
New York Times
op-ed, among other
places—breeding a new type of pig with compromised mental abilities, a genetically lobotomized animal that could endure industrial conditions without stress. This idea, thankfully, has made little headway. Most American hog producers, under pressure from consumers, have started to follow the example of those in the European Union: they are making incremental adjustments—group housing rather than gestation stalls, straw bedding rather than bare floors—to address the worst problems of confinement. Another option is to refuse to eat meat altogether.
That’s the position taken by Cromwell, who in the Mercy for Animals video advocates “leaving pork off your plate and adopting a vegetarian diet.”

Other producers choose a middle path. They are disgusted by industrial pork but entranced by pigs raised on pasture, or in the woods, or at the very least in a barn on a deep pile of straw. They are the new pig haters and the new pig lovers. They reject the swine of modern agribusiness but embrace the breeds they find by digging deep into the history of swine.
In addition to working with the more familiar heritage breeds like the Berkshire and Tamworth, a few are experimenting with exotic varieties such as Mangalitsa, a Hungarian lard-style pig with curly hair, and Ossabaw, descended from a population of feral pigs that survived on a Georgia coastal island for hundreds of years. And thousands of small growers are adding pigs of various breeds to their mixed farming systems because it makes sense, just as it has for thousands of years: they buy a couple of feeder pigs for $50 a head, raise them on whatever waste they have on hand—damaged vegetables, whey, stubble in the fields—finish them on barley or corn to harden the fat, and then sell the pork at farmers’ markets.

Chefs have been the key allies of these old-fashioned farmers.
The Roman historian Livy noted in the second century
bc
,
“The cook, who had formerly had the status of the lowest kind of slave, first acquired prestige, and what had once been a service-industry came to be thought of as an art.” That’s not a bad description of what has happened over the past two decades, as cooking has moved into the mainstream of popular culture. And pigs have been one of the prime beneficiaries.

Modern chefs, like those in ancient Rome, love pork—an inordinate number have pig tattoos on their shoulders—and they are enamored of exotic preparations.
No restaurants have resurrected the Roman recipe for roast udder of lactating sow, but chefs have cooked guinea hen in pork bladder, while roasted pig snout and fried pig ears have become almost common at farm-to-table restaurants. At the New York restaurant Maialino, the menu featured half a young pig’s head atop a salad.
It sold well—“perhaps because of the shock value,” chef Nick Anderer speculated.

Pork has always had higher shock value than other common meats. That’s partly because the pig’s feet, ears, and other odd parts find their way onto the plate fairly often. Pork also shocks simply because it is fatty, offering forbidden pleasures that flout mainstream health guidelines. The pork industry has played both sides of this fence.
Even as pork marketers flogged lean pork chops in the 1990s, they also urged fast-food restaurants to top their burgers with precooked bacon slices. This campaign, executed with far less fanfare than “the other white meat,” ultimately enjoyed more success:
sales of lean pork stayed flat, but demand for pork bellies surged. Burgers began to seem naked without a slice of bacon or two—or even six, as on the Wendy’s Baconator. By the 2000s bacon had developed its own cult whose adherents bought bacon-themed toilet paper, bandages, and water bottles (with the slogan “Bacon Squeezins. Refreshing!”).
A couple of cooks in Kansas City found Internet fame
by cobbling together a monstrosity called the “Bacon Explosion”: slices of bacon woven into a mat, covered with sausage, and rolled into a log. A photo of a young women wearing a homemade “bacon bra”—strategically draped raw slices—showed that the link between pork and sex, which dates back to ancient Greece, remains unbroken.
Dozens of cities hosted bacon festivals. And in perhaps the surest sign that the trend had gone mainstream, Denny’s advertised a “Baconalia,” although Bacchus—Roman god of wine celebrated at the riotous Bacchanalia—would have been disappointed to learn that Denny’s most decadent offering was a maple-bacon sundae.

In the bacon festival—and its more venerable cousin, the barbecue festival—one can hear faint echoes of Renaissance London’s Bartholomew Fair. Then, the delight was rooted in roast pork’s symbolic association with gluttony and lust. Now, the transgressive pleasure derives from thumbing one’s nose at fat-fearing dietary scolds. Josh and Jessica Applestone—authors of
The Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat
and founders of Fleisher’s, a Hudson Valley butcher shop that has become something of a finishing school for new-school butchers—call pork “the sexiest of all meats.”
It’s an indulgence, they write, that prompts their customers to sidle up to the counter with a “furtive look” and whisper, “Have you got any lard?”

But one must indulge carefully. The title of the Applestones’ book contains a warning: most pork—including that featured at bacon and barbecue festivals—is not “well-raised.” Ethical dining requires that the hedonist and the puritan embrace. This isn’t the first time people have seen the need to change their dining habits for the good of society: in ancient Rome and medieval times, authorities passed sumptuary laws to try to limit excessive feasting, which was seen as detrimental to good social order. The new pig lovers have seized the moral high ground
for themselves. For many consumers, it’s acceptable to spend a great deal on pork and to indulge in exotic preparations as long as the pig is treated well before dying at a welfare-certified slaughterhouse.

The world of humane farming has produced a new tribe: the virtuous carnivores.
“We have been raising happy, healthy pigs since 1994,” a farm in Pennsylvania claims on its website, targeting exactly this demographic. Such pigs are easy on the palate as well as the conscience.
EcoFriendly Farms reduces it to an equation: “a happy pig = a tasty pig.”

Every tribe defines itself by comparison to others, and the virtuous carnivores are a tiny group compared to the vast army who choose meat based on price. But this new group wants to recruit, not exclude. This is partly out of concern for the animals and partly out of self-interest: as more people eat well-raised pork, economies of scale will cause prices to fall.
If public concern drives further agricultural reforms—better animal welfare, stricter environmental controls, less use of antibiotics—factory farming will become more expensive, and the price gap between Sam’s Club pork and farmers’ market pork will narrow, a development that will benefit pigs and people alike.

I
n the spring of 2012 I got a glimpse of this new meat economy at a workshop called “Advanced Meat Curing” taught by chef Craig Deihl at a community college in Asheville. Sixteen of us—mostly chefs and butchers, as well as one farmer—sat on high stools gathered around a stainless steel table bearing the carcass of a two-hundred-pound pig. Deihl sawed through the pig’s neck and then boned out the head with speed and precision. When he was finished, the table held a mostly bare white skull and a single piece of skin and flesh—complete with
ears and snout—that might have been mistaken for a gruesome Halloween mask. The entire piece would be rolled, tied, cured, and slow-cooked to create
porchetta di testa
, several pounds of amazing meat derived from a part of the beast that’s often rendered for dog food.

Deihl, executive chef of Cypress restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, has become a cured meat guru. He built a special temperature- and humidity-controlled room for aging and started an “artisan meat share,” serving up monthly portions of local cured and fresh meats to subscribers. This is not Walmart fare. Buying into the share program cost $50 a month, and Deihl and the others chefs at the workshop work at restaurants where appetizers ran $15 and entrees twice that. They talked of cold-smoke guns, fermentation cultures, immersion circulators, and Cryovac machines. Their world is high-tech and high-end, dedicated to pleasing the palates of the upper crust.

But there was another goal as well. The meat-curing workshop was part of a larger conference on “whole-animal utilization,” hosted by a state-sponsored group dedicated to helping small-scale farmers. Casey McKissick, who organized the conference and also raises hogs and cattle in Old Fort, North Carolina, told me what inspired the event: “Chefs have to understand that if they want to take on local meat in a big way, they have to take on the whole animal.” That’s because the cuts most grocery stores and restaurants sell—steaks, roasts, rack of lamb, pork chops—make up only a small portion of the carcass. Small meat producers don’t slaughter enough animals to satisfy a restaurant that wants to serve eighty pounds of center-cut pork chops a week. But if more chefs bought a whole hog, cut it themselves, and learned to cook, cure, and sell every part of the animal, there would be more well-raised meat to go around.

The market for this type of meat is growing, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy way to make a living. Heritage-breed pigs grow more slowly and require more feed than the genetically engineered factory-farm variety. It’s more expensive to raise pigs by the dozens rather than the tens of thousands, to keep them on pasture rather than in confinement barns, and to slaughter them at small plants rather than enormous factories. Until virtuous carnivores get their way and well-raised meat becomes mainstream, the only way to keep prices reasonable is to wring a profit out of every last part of the beast.