A wonderful, magical animal

Tom Colicchio, David Chang and others on the virtues of the hog, the importance of ethical farming and why true pork lovers are not ignorant pigs about their meat.

Editor's note: The Discovery Channel has Shark Week. Here at Salon, we bring you Pork Week. This is the last in a weeklong series of stories about that most polarizing of meats.

By Sarah Hepola

Read more: Environment, Animals, Cooking, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel, Sarah Hepola, Pork Week

July 11, 2008 | The chefs and pork experts I interviewed for this story have strong feelings about pigs. They have deeply held convictions about breeds and ethical farming. They believe big pork factories are evil and that, if we care about our meat, then we should care enough to find out where it comes from. And, of course, they are happy to hold forth on the deliciousness of pork itself, from that sumptuous, buttery belly to the bladders and the bones (yes, you can use them, too).

Below is a collection of condensed interviews with pork lovers pushing back against the American notion that convenience and cost should trump all else. The future of pork, if these experts had their way, would look a lot like the past: consumers buying from farms and collectives, pigs allowed to forage in the woods and raise their young rather than being bloated with antibiotics and degraded in wall-to-wall pens, and all of us making more, better use of an animal's body. It's not cheap; important things rarely are.

By the way, if you don't live near a farmers market, these experts recommended the following online sources: Caw Caw Creek, Debragga, Bev Eggleston's Eco-friendly Foods, Flying Pigs Farm, Heritage Foods USA, , Niman Ranch and Vermont Quality Meats.

We wanted to have Pork Week because, yes, we love pork. But we were also fascinated by its increasing role in our lives -- whether as a pop-culture fetish, a culinary trend or as a way to find a more meaningful connection to our own food. As we acknowledged at the beginning of this series, pork is a polarizing meat, and it raises complicated issues -- not just about religion and carnivore culture, but also about animal treatment. Our first reader e-mail about Pork Week was unambiguous. ("I'm absolutely revolted," it read.) So was our second. ("Pork week! Good fun!") And so it went, all week long, but I like to think the passion on both sides is an indication of how much more there is to say, the way the pig touches so many parts of our lives.

A certain "Simpsons" quote feels apropos right about now. Lisa has announced her decision to become a vegetarian, to which Homer scoffs, "Lisa, honey, are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon? Ham? Pork chops?"

"Dad!" Lisa replies. "Those all come from the same animal!"

"Yeah, right, Lisa," says Homer, with a chuckle. "A wonderful, magical animal."

"A nice pink in the center"

Tom Colicchio is best known as the evenhanded mentor and judge on Bravo's popular cooking reality series "Top Chef." But as the force behind New York's Gramercy Tavern and the Craft series of restaurants, he has also been an influential proponent of locavore eating and sustainability farming. Oh, and the man knows his way around a pig. GQ once voted his pork belly its favorite meat dish.

"I like all pork. If I had to choose one cut, I'd say the belly. It has the most amount of flavor. You can roast it or grill it or fry it.

My favorite breed is probably the Ossabaw. It's more like pig and less like 'the other white meat.' It wasn't raised to taste like nothing. Commercial pork, they bred the taste right out of pigs. The pig was bred to be very lean, because people didn't want to eat fat. People didn't want that big white fat on the outside of a pork chop. That was a great ad campaign, 'the other white meat' -- we all remember it -- but it was mass-produced pork. Mass producers like Smithfield? They're disgusting. There was an article in Rolling Stone about Smithfield. They're gross.

Everybody thinks pork has to be cooked well-done, because of trichinosis. Listen, we haven't had a major case of trichinosis in this country in more than 40 years. Don't overcook pork. It doesn't have to be rare. For mine, I prefer medium, a nice pink in the center."

"Big pork companies are no different than big tobacco"

David Chang is the closest thing the pork world has to a rock star. For me, the outrageously delicious dishes at his Momofuku restaurants in Manhattan have done for pork what the Beatles did for pop music. They are as brilliant as they are varied and crowd-pleasing. Chang doesn't need my praise, or anyone else's, really; his most recent venture, Momofuku Ko, received a rare four stars in New York magazine. The best pork that Chang's ever had? "I'd have to say the pork belly at [Wylie Dufresne's celebrated Manhattan restaurant] WD-50, about two years ago."

"The only part of the pig that I dislike is the pork chop. Depending on the pig that it's from, it can still be delicious. But the traditional American way? Dry pork chops with applesauce? That's pretty gross.

Pig is not supposed to be a white meat. That was the fault of pork producers and it's the reason pork chops taste like crap, because Big Pork producers bred out all the flavors, in the same way you breed a dog to be tall. The pigs are treated like shit, too. I always say that big pork companies are no different than big tobacco companies. Everyone's so into the breed of pork, but what's more important is how it's raised.

To buy good pork, you should go local if you can. But it's harder and harder to find local pork. In fact I don't think you can find good pork in the supermarket at all. I think "certified organic" is a bunch of bullshit. There's a right way and a wrong way to raise animals, that's all. If you go two hours upstate, there's this beautiful farm -- I'm not gonna name it, but it's a place where they raise pigs and ducks and they feed them well -- it's not certified organic but they show a lot of love for the animals. You can buy from Niman Ranch -- people give them a lot of shit, because it's a natural American reaction to start hating on something once it gets big. But someone has to do this kind of traditional hog farming on a larger scale [Niman Ranch is a network of more than 500 family farmers].

Here's the thing that's happening. Big pork companies have realized the new thing is heirloom pigs or Berkshire pigs, so they're also doing that. I won't name the companies, but they're using families as fronts, and you gotta be careful."

"The pig is funny, but the pig is delicious"

John Currence is the co-owner of City Grocery in Oxford, Miss. But when I spoke to him, he had just opened up a breakfast spot based entirely around pork. At one point during the restaurant's development, he tells me, "We decided we had to build a smokehouse. And I suddenly realized, oh, there was a void in my life. I'm going to have a smokehouse!"

"Being from the South, there's a tremendous amount about pork that just rings familiar. It's wonderful because it's a double-edged thing -- the pig is funny, but the pig is delicious. Every facet of my life that has to do with the South can be connected to pork-- cooking ribs when I was in college, my father taunting me with pickled pigs' feet when I was a little boy, so much bacon and sausage. I remember going to a barbecue chain when it first opened, and they had this smoked brisket, and I went, well, why? It's an interesting idea, but why would you wanna do that when there's pigs' meat?

The best pork I ever had would probably be that crazy pig-and-oyster thing that David Chang does [the Bo Ssam]. I remember eating pork at this insanely delicious dim sum place in Chicago called Phoenix. There's Ben Barker's crazy pork dish at Magnolia Grill in Durham, N.C. Ricky Parker's Whole Hog BBQ in Lexington, Tenn. I could go on. But you almost have to break it down to each individual cut."

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