I’ve seen pigs rolling through the mud, digging through garbage, even sedated on an operating room table. I’ve sliced through them on the operating theatre, but I’ve never been so intimate with a pig as the dead one on my dining table. It is only half a pig, but one cleanly bandsawed down the middle makes for a startling profile shot.
Clocking in at 150 pounds live / 110 pounds dry, this half-pig was a beast to butcher. Never mind the fact that it was our first attempt, or that we lacked a bandsaw that EVERYONE ON YOUTUBE HAS, after 3 hours of slicing and hacking, and with the invaluable help of a friend, we butchered it just enough to fit in our freezer.
Turns out there is more to a pig than just pork. While Dariya is the expert in this field of pig butchering, having seen her family do it many times over in Bulgaria, I am a complete novice to all things pig. The extent of my experience is eating ham sandwiches, and buying cuts of meat at the butcher. So as we sliced off various parts I began to connect the dots between what I see at the market and what I see being ripped out of the flesh of this dead animal on my dining table.
It is incredible how much life can be sustained by the death of one animal. This half-pig is expected to provide sustenance for about six months. While some of its mass is its skeleton, the majority of the weight is meat and fat. When you have a dead animal on your dining table, it is immediately clear that you are responsible for its death, and that wasting any part of it is an insult to its life. The bones will be boiled for stock, and the fat will be turned into lard:
I wonder how much less meat we would waste if we met our animals at a farm instead of cut up in a supermarket. I have written earlier about such a powerful experience, but this is the next level. It is easy to purchase a whole chicken and use it up (bones/feet to stock, organs to pâté), but an animal orders of magnitude larger provides context for the simple packaged cuts of meat you get at the store. Purchasing an animal well raised and having it ethically slaughtered adds a dimension to meat-eating that is lost in the 20 McNuggets for $5 special (cheaper than 20 years ago!).
There is much more to write about this porktastic experience. Stay tuned.