"pigs" news and stories

Prosciutto from Big Boy the pig. Photo: Rebecca Winters.

"What happened to the rats on your property?" someone asks urban farmer Novella Carpenter.

"I have a theory that my pigs ate the rats," Carpenter says. Realizing that her audience has been munching on slices of said pig's hindquarters, she laughed. "So enjoy some delicious prosciutto!"

Farmers are reputed to have a tough streak. They step over piles of excrement, battle gargantuan hogs and, of course, have to earn a living. Carpenter, author of "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer," seems no exception. She lives in the city, not the country, "so I can get Chinese food at 2 a.m."

The two 300-pound hogs she raised in what she calls the Oakland, Calif., "ghetto," also enjoyed Chinese takeout. She read about her adventures in urban farming on a Brooklyn, N.Y., rooftop adjacent to a 6,000-foot, 30-crop rooftop farm built by Goode Green and tended by farmers Annie Novak and Ben Flanner.

Dumpster diving, fish guts and the cost of rooftop farming, after the jump.

One of the things I enjoy most about eating pork is tasting the different breed varieties. For almost two years, I have been obsessed with Berkshire ham. It's like no other ham I have ever eaten before. That was until I tried Red Wattle ham.

Red Wattle ham is by far the most juicy, tender, and succulent ham. After taking a bite of this mouthwatering meat, a billion different recipe ideas starting going off in my mind. For starters, this would be great ham to use in a Cuban sandwich.

Red Wattle is one out of the many dozens of pig varieties in the United States that are at risk of becoming extinct due to industrial agriculture. Farmers stopped breeding the different varieties, because customers stopped buying them. The only way to prevent Red Wattle from extinction is to support the farmers that still breed them. Read on to find out Red Wattle's origin, history, and where you can purchase it.

We've talked a lot about bacon here recently, and for many readers bacon (or even just the taste of bacon) is sort of a religious experience. This post is for you.

The Sublime Stitching site held a Sublime Stitchmas contest over the holidays, and this contestant made one that Slashfood readers might like. It has a picture of a pig, with each body part separated by dotted lines and the words "the candy of meat."

Regular readers will remember this recipe for a few weeks ago.

[via Boing Boing]

I hate to be known as the food blogger who cried weird, but this has got to be one of the stranger ethnic junk foods I've come across. You read that headline right folks. Just look at that packaging, a porcine Gene Kelly hoofing away in top hat and tails accompanied by his own musical score. Sarah, my fellow blogger and West Coast connection to all things Korean, tells me those yellow characters translate to dae bah, or pork bar. For some reason, I'm more comfortable referring to this frozen treat as crunch ice.

There are two types of people when it comes to Crunch Ice, those who are disappointed to learn that it's not a frozen treat composed of cracklin, lardo and boudin noir and those who are relieved. I fall into the latter category, I enjoyed Crunch Ice for what is, a vanilla ice cream pop encased in chocolate crunchies with a strawberry center. I'm pretty sure my dear friend Mr. Cutlets was disappointed to learn that Crunch Ice was not a pork-based frozen confection when I gave him a package for his 40th birthday last week. Ah well, pearls before swine; maybe swine before pearls is more apt in this instance.

Meatpaper is the self-proclaimed "journal of meat culture," and judging from what's up at their site, they're correct.

The site is filled with several articles on the "arts and ideas about meat," including pieces about the dry-aging room at New York's Master Purveyors, pig slaughter in Italy, why Filipinos eat Spam, and getting over the guilt of eating meat. There are also links to various food blogs.

The site itself says that they "like metaphors more than marinating tips," which I take as an indication that they're going to be talking about the world of food and not recipes and kitchen advice. They're taking subscriptions now, so you might want to check it out.