Real Pigs: Shifting Values in the Field of Local Pork - Softcover

Weiss, Brad

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822361574 ISBN 13: 9780822361572

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In addition to being one of the United States' largest pork producers, North Carolina is home to a developing niche market of pasture-raised pork. In Real Pigs Brad Weiss traces the desire for "authentic" local foods in the Piedmont region of central North Carolina as he follows farmers, butchers, and chefs through the process of breeding, raising, butchering, selling, and preparing pigs raised on pasture for consumption. Drawing on his experience working on Piedmont pig farms and at farmers' markets, Weiss explores the history, values, social relations, and practices that drive the pasture-raised pork market. He shows how pigs in the Piedmont become imbued with notions of authenticity, illuminating the ways the region's residents understand local notions of place and culture. Full of anecdotes and interviews with the market's primary figures, Real Pigs reminds us that what we eat and why have implications that resonate throughout the wider social, cultural, and historical world.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brad Weiss is Professor of Anthropology at the College of William & Mary and the author of The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World: Consumption, Commoditization, and Everyday Practice, also published by Duke University Press, and Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global Fantasy in Urban Tanzania.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Real Pigs

Shifting Values in the Field of Local Pork

By Brad Weiss

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6157-2

Contents

PREFACE, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
INTRODUCTION, 
CHAPTER 1 Pigs on the Ground, 
CHAPTER 2 Pigs in a Local Place, 
CHAPTER 3 Heritage, Hybrids, Breeds, and Brands, 
CHAPTER 4 Pigs in Parts, 
CHAPTER 5 A Taste for Fat, 
CHAPTER 6 Farm to Fork, Snout to Tail, 
CONCLUSION Authentic Connections, 
NOTES, 
REFERENCES, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

PIGS ON THE GROUND

From Pigs in a Parlor to Ten Million Confinement Hogs

The geographical focus of this book is the North Carolina Piedmont, a region that lies in between the Coastal Plain and the mountains of Western North Carolina. More specifically, my research has been centered on two primary regions: the Triad and the Triangle. The Triad is formed by the three cities of Greensboro, High Point, and Winston-Salem. It lies roughly seventy-five miles to the west of the Triangle, which is formed by the cities of Durham; Chapel Hill; and the state capitol, Raleigh (map 1.1). There are important demographic differences between these two regions, which include urban centers as well as many rural and agricultural towns. As I indicated above, my work here included discussions with pastured-pork producers throughout the Piedmont as well as with restaurant chefs and staff members; vendors and customers at a number of farmers' markets; and academics, advocates, and activists working on behalf of this niche market in "real pigs." In this chapter I want to briefly discuss some historical features of hog production and consumption in North Carolina; describe the radical changes in pig production in the state in the late twentieth century; and give a somewhat more detailed account of the origins of the efforts to revitalize and, in some instances, invent outdoor hog production in the state, which has really taken off only in the past twenty years. This overview is intended as background for the practices that are discussed in more detail, and are accompanied by more ethnographic evidence, in the chapters that follow.

Raising hogs has a long and diverse history in North Carolina. While pig farming today is concentrated primarily in the eastern Coastal Plain, as described above, the enthusiasm for raising pigs across the state has been well documented. In 1982, John Raymond Shute, a politician and author, was interviewed for "Documenting the American South" and talked about his experiences growing up in Monroe, just to the southeast of Charlotte (at the very western end of the Piedmont). Born in 1904, Shute described farms in Cabarrus and Stanly Counties when he was young:

[Everyone] raised their swine and their chickens for their meat. As soon as the first frost came, that was the time to slaughter pigs and hogs. They would render their own lard; they'd make their own soap; they'd make their own sausage; they'd cure their own hams. Every house had a smokehouse. They'd burn hickory logs to cure the ham, and that ham was salted down along with the other [pork]. The sausage was put up in corn shucks. And you talk about something good to eat. Now you take sausage out of a corn shuck six months later with fresh eggs, and you've really got a breakfast. But as towns developed, they usually enacted ordinances prohibiting the raising of hogs or swine within the city limits. ... Consequently, you can see how it would develop as a separate industry located out where it was not offensive to anyone. You had what later became known, oddly enough, as "pig parlors." That's where they raised them and would slaughter them and cure them and everything. So that developed the swine business as really a separate industry from ordinary farming. But even so, every farm still had swine.

This account of a set of subsistence practices might seem romanticized, but it provides an image — though not an actual practice — that endured across North Carolina for most of the twentieth century (figures 1.1 and 1.2).

In 2009 an African American man in his twenties who had grown up on a farm in the far northeastern corner of the state — near Elizabeth City, in Pasquotank County — told me that he had only recently returned to his job near Burlington after "taking down the pigs back home":

There were five pigs from three families, and they got the whole thing done in four to five hours. The whole thing [killing and processing the hogs] takes two full days. You season the meat for a day and then you grind sausage. You take the joints [rear and front legs of the pig, or "hams" and "shoulders" in pork parlance], then there are middlings — fat back bacon and bellies — and you salt them and put them up in the smokehouse. After the joints are cut out, then the girls come. They season the meat and grind up the trim for sausage.

I heard similar reports from farmers in the Piedmont who had in very recent memory participated in such collective hog-killing practices. Some of them were still raising pigs in family "parlors" and using their pork for subsistence or, as the expression goes, as "money in the bank" — pigs typically raised to be ground up into sausage for quick and easy sales to neighbors and friends.

On the whole, however, this kind of practice has been almost completely displaced by industrial hog farming in the state — indeed, by confinement operations in the three counties of Duplin, Bladen, and Sampson (see map 1.2), where more than five million of the state's roughly ten million hogs are raised (Factory Farm Map n.d.). How North Carolina went from pig parlors and neighborhood slaughtering and packing facilities to Smithfield Packing's processing 28.5 million hogs in fiscal 2013 is a story that has been told in more detail and with more rigor than I can offer here. My purpose is not to offer a thorough critique of this historical process but to emphasize some of the ways in which this process of animal confinement, the financialization of livestock farming, and the megaconsolidation of the industry contributed to and helped shape the development of the pastured-pork niche market at the very end of the twentieth century.

While I would not suggest that the image that I sketched above of subsistence pig producers on small-scale homesteads was an unchanging model that operated throughout North Carolina for over a century, I would argue that there were a series of momentous changes in the final decades of the twentieth century that substantially changed the pork industry throughout the world. These also had profound ramifications for the pig farmers and pork consumers with whom I worked in the Piedmont.

Here is what a former attorney general of North Carolina, Robert Morgan, wrote about the radical transformation in the state's hog industry. I quote at length since Morgan offers a concise summary of the extent of these transformations:

In 1984, there were more than twenty thousand hog farms in North Carolina populated by 2 million hogs. More than a fourth of these farms, mostly in the east, had fewer than five hundred hogs, and only a small fraction of these more than two thousand. A decade later, the number of hogs catapulted to over 7 million, but the number of hog farms fell below five thousand. In little more than a decade, the number of hogs produced nearly quadrupled, while the number of farms dropped by three-fourths. Hog farming suddenly became big business as only 2.5 percent of these...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822361574
• ISBN 13: 9780822361572
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 308
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland