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.

After it was revealed that the US's largest pork producer engaged in some highly questionable agricultural practices - to put it very mildly - when it came to raising the move than 25 million pigs they slaughter each year, there was an outcry. Smithfield Farms, with 187 farms in eight states, was known for keeping pigs in "gestational cages," free from straw, sunlight, or room to move for their entire lives and after years or criticism from groups like the Humane Society, as well as a 2 year long privately conducted study, the company has finally agreed to stop using the cages. The cages, which are sometimes referred to as stalls, were designed to maximize efficiency in the pig raising process by confining the pig to the minimum size that it would need to remain alive, but the interest in where our food comes from has now gotten to a point where even large corporate consumers, like McDonald's, are unwilling to overlook such conditions.

The cages will be phased out over an undetermined period of time. The company did not say how much the process would cost, but it is likely to be expensive for them as they try to find places to keep all their pigs that allow for cleaner, roomier living conditions.

[thanks, Elise!]

On the heels of a great Harpers article about the business of pig breeding, Wired recently ran a piece about the sequencing pig genomes. Once the process is complete, breeders will be able to determine which pigs will taste best prior to slaughter as well as which will have the best yield and be less prone to disease. From there, these qualities can be built upon and accentuated.

The gist of the Harpers piece (which I don"t think is available on-line) is that there"s currently a movement among some of America"s largest pork producers to move back to a less lean, more complexly flavored type of pork. This move away from what the author calls "the chickenifaction of the American pig" is done by introducing stock from pigs (via pig sperm banks) that have not been bred so intensely.

Both are definitely worth a read if you"re interested in the fine tuning of livestock.

[Wired article via The Food Section]

Sometimes I think I want sleek. Sometimes I think I want geek. Tonight, I want my salt and pepper shakers to squeak. Like little pink pigs.

These are the cutest salt and pepper shakers I have seen yet, except for the little porcelain ducks I swiped from my parent's garage sale. I love that the pink bodies are made of hand blown glass, but they are made from Pyrex, so no need to be all too delicate. The snouts are brass (and they don't really squeak).

The pair is $65.

British supermarket chains, such as Asda, Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsbury's and Waitrose, are rethinking their pork supplier. The Polish pig farms that produced much of the supermarket pork products have been condemned for "'appalling' animal welfare practices."

The farms in question are in Poland and have been run by Animex, a subsidiary of the American company Smithfield Foods, since 2002. An undercover investigation revealed industrial factory farms, conditions where hundreds of pigs were crammed into light-less barns with dead companions rotting underfoot. The investigation also found that "powerful cocktails of drugs," including a cocktail of antibiotics that is banned or considered to be a growth-promoter in other countries. One such drug is Tylbian 20%, a form of the growth promoting drug Tylosin, which was banned by the European Union in 1999. Local residents showed investigators large open-air cesspits of pig waste and farm detritus that included syringes and needles.

Waitrose has already pulled the products supplied by this producer. No wrong-doing has been shown on the part of Smithfield Foods and a Smithfield representative denied knowledge of such conditions, assuring the public that it would investigate thoroughly.

Scientists in Taiwan have bred, through transgenic engineering, three glowing pigs. Not only do these pigs glow, they glow green due to jellyfish DNA inserted into the pigs' embryos. Other labs have produced partially green pigs, but these are the first completely colored ones, with everything from green organs to green-tinged eyes and skin. Scientists intend to use green pigs such as these for research purposes, because genetic material taken from them will be easy to spot, due to its color, in ordinary pigs.

Admittedly, these pigs are not currently intended for eating, but suddely "green eggs and ham" seems like more of a possibility, doesn't it?