Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

ON PIG FARMING AND PORK

Some pork. Around 250kg of it, in fact, in the back of my car. Readers of my account of a virgin amateur gentleman swineherd in the current issue of  Intelligent Life might recall the pork's first trip in the back, when it was alive and en route to three months of determined foraging, feeding and occasional escaping in my back garden. My experiment with pig farming has transformed this patch of land into a fair imitation of the battlefield at Passchendaele.

Such slaughter was much on my mind as I returned from the abattoir, where my four ginger Tamworths, Henry, Fred, Winston and Hucknall, had departed for the happy grunting grounds. Not for nothing, I realised, had our medieval ancestors evolved the terms "pork", "beef" and "mutton", which lend respect both to the extinction of life and to what is left, in plastic bags, in the back of the car.

My thoughts on the way there had been less likely to stray into St Thomas Aquinas’s lucubrations on the souls of animals, or to those "Circle of Life" views espoused by the heirs to Walt Disney in "The Lion King". Instead, I was relieved at the comparative ease with which we had lured the feisty beasts from our rotavated garden into a trailer kindly driven by Richard Casemore, a prize-winning pig breeder from nearby Mells, jewel of the eastern Mendips. There had been much talk of pigs needing several hours to be persuaded to take up their one-way ticket to the big snore, of final looks back for reassurance before entering the trailer. In the event, they mercifully trotted on without that backward glance.

So it was, too, at the slaughterhouse (a better word than abattoir, a Victorian borrowing which in this case conceals what all meat eaters should carefully consider). My pigs made their way to the holding pen perkily; I felt a flush of pig-keeping pride at their sturdy, russetty, rude and lively selves. “Pretty fine pigs, eh?” I said to Jim, one of the slaughtermen. “They’ll look finer on a plate,” said Jim, in that Somerset way.

The way to the plate is not pretty, and pretty bloody. It involves electricity, sharp knives, hot water, hooks, chains and indignity–but not, as far as I could judge, too great a pain. Easy for me to think, I know. I am also suspicious of the way I felt less than I feared: we are products of breeding, too.

You, of course, will have a further pressing question. The taste? Fantastic, actually: succulent, mouth-watering. We sold three pigs at a small profit and kept the fourth for ourselves. We had sausages first, and the rest is nestled in our freezer. We had wanted to dry-cure some ham, but I forgot to have the butcher leave the leg attached for hanging, and I found myself glad to be without such an evocative reminder. This, along with a reluctance to visit their former stomping grounds, makes me doubt I shall be pig farming again. Perhaps I am a far too sentimentally confused non-vegetarian displaced townie to be intimately involved in producing meat to die for.

~ CHARLES NEVIN

Picture credit: jonny.hunter (via Flickr)