Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

ch-scene - Re: mmmmmm, Durham

ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: RTP-area local music and culture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Fikri Yucel <fikri_y AT yahoo.com>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: mmmmmm, Durham
  • Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2006 07:43:39 -0800 (PST)

RE: "a bias in favor of the consumption of meat in general, and pork in
particular."

A little something apropos:

http://www.slate.com/id/2155422/

Slate.com

Some Pig
The development of the piggy confessional.
By Sara Dickerman
Posted Thursday, Dec. 14, 2006, at 11:09 AM ET

There was a time, some years ago, when I worked at Alice Waters' famed
restaurant Chez Panisse. Each afternoon, if our chef had no concrete
assignments, we cooks would peel garlic as we caucused in true Berkeley
fashion to determine who would work on what for dinner. An informal system
for making headway was in place: Inevitably, while discussing a dish, someone
would suggest, "How about doing some braised bacon with the beans?" or, "We
could wrap the monkfish in some pancetta … " By invoking the pig, that cook
had placed dibs on the course. She had "called bacon on it."

The pig has powerful mojo in the world of cooking. We enjoy eating every bit
of it: flesh, blood, and skin. We adore it for its versatility—for its fat,
for the way it flusters anhedonists. One of the chicest things a chef or
committed foodie can do today is pick up a whole pig from an organic farm and
portion it out, cooking its defrosted chops and trotters for months to come.
Perhaps that is why, over the past year or so, I have noticed the development
of what I call the piggy confessional.

In the piggy confessional, a dead pig—usually killed, butchered, or eaten by
the author—provokes a meditation on the ethics and aesthetics of eating. In
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan hunts and bags a wild pig. At the time
of the kill, he reeled with disgust, but he later found a circle-of-life
resolution in a meal of it. There is also Peter Kaminsky's wonderful 2005
eulogy to the ham, Pig Perfect; and in his cooking memoir Heat, Bill Buford
studiously dissects a whole pig that he hauled from the green market to his
apartment. On TV, tough guys Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay have both
broken down after watching pigs die (in Bourdain's case, at the tip of a
spear he was wielding). On the Web, Seattle chef Tamara Murphy documented the
life of a litter of pigs from birth to banquet. And in a less culinary mood,
both Pete Wells, the new dining editor at the New York Times, who wrote a
2005 piece for Oxford American, and Nathanael Johnson, who wrote for Harper's
in May, have offered harrowing glimpses at the lives of industrial
pigs—raised in secrecy and so alienated from their brethren that some have
died of shock after a door slam.

Why pigs? Unless you abstain, pork is hard not to love. >From the crackle of
its skin to the strange chew of an ear, from the velvety threads of pork
shoulder in confit to the blood that fills a minerally black sausage, pigs
are edibility incarnate. (Of course, other animals are consumed in their
entirety, and Asian cuisines more fully embrace meaty esoterica like beef
tendon, duck tongues, and chicken feet, but here, we are more likely to eat
odd bits of a pig than other animals.) Chefs of the pro-offal school idolize
London chef Fergus Henderson, whose cookbook The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail
Eating is a manifesto of sorts, with recipes for pig's head and spleen that
function as a form of tribute to the dead animals we eat. "It would seem
disingenuous to the animal," writes Henderson, "not to make the most of the
whole beast: there is a set of delights, textural and flavorsome, which lie
beyond the filet." And so a sensitive-butcher aesthetic has developed, with
respect for the animal emerging at knife's tip. Henderson applies it to all
manner of beasts, but it is a pig that graces the cover of his book, and it
is only for a pig that he provides both recipes for the nose and tail of the
subtitle.

The rampant edibility of a pig doesn't begin to explain its symbolism,
though. Why does swine seem to carry more weight among food writers than cows
or chickens? Why, for that matter, are there so many symbolic pigs in
fiction, particularly message-heavy children's and young-adult literature?
Think about the various sacrificial pigs in Animal Farm, A Day No Pigs Would
Die, Lord of the Flies, and Charlotte's Web, opening this week as a
live-action movie. (Speaking of movies, there is the magnificent Babe, which
conceals a dark meditation on the soul of the farm beneath a dreamy pastoral
fantasy.) Pigs, it seems, are inclined to serve as a grunting mirror of our
own beastliness.

Part of it, no doubt, is the whole Leviticus (and Deuteronomy) thing—those
biblical passages that define pork as taboo for believers. While pigs have
been cultivated by humankind for ages (one theory in Kaminsky's book suggests
that pigs were the first domesticated food animals), somewhere along the
line, as made explicit in the Old Testament, and later in the Quran, they
became taboo in the Middle East. Why?

There is the old trichinosis theory, which posits that pigs were a source of
the disease, but that has been largely discredited. One of my favorite
justifications—at its heart hedonistic—is that since pork was the fattiest,
most delicious meat, it was prohibited to steer the weak willed away from
gluttony. In her book Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas says
that because pigs are cloven hoofed, but not ruminants like cows, they veered
from the ancient Israelite conception of wholeness and holiness, and as such,
were deemed untouchable.

Regardless of the source of the laws, Jews had a hard time disentangling
themselves from swine. In European society, the very thing that Jews
assiduously avoided became associated with them in the most hateful of
anti-Semitic practices and images. In her book The Singular Beast: Jews,
Christians, and the Pig, French anthropologist Claudine Fabre-Vassas
exhaustively documents how Jews were taunted—19th-century French boys twisted
the edge of their garments into what looked like pigs' ears, shook them, and
grunted at Jews in the street, and more gruesomely, in the Middle Ages, Jews
convicted of murder were hung upside down, like dead pigs.

Even today, a secular Jew like David Rakoff views pork differently than other
meats. In perhaps my favorite piggy confessional of the year (buried in a
writerly supplement to Gourmet), he writes that of all treyf, the pig packs
more symbolic weight than other proscribed foods. "Shellfish is nowhere near
as freighted as pork. Many a Dungeness devotee would never dream of touching
swine." Rakoff loves pork, but it is a sad mnemonic: "As a Jew Who Eats Pork,
extolling the boundless perfection of the baby pig at Great N.Y. Noodletown
on the Bowery necessarily requires a simultaneous split second of silent
acknowledgement along with my blithe rhapsody that this is the meat of my
grim history. Otherwise, I'd just be a guy eating pork."

Beyond Biblical prohibition, there is the sense that as much as they can
disgust us, pigs are rather like us, too. Among regularly eaten beasts, pigs
are probably the closest to human. They're intelligent, social, relatively
unfurry—and they resemble us on the inside. When Pollan looks at his dead pig
in the woods, he is swept with revulsion. "I'd handled plenty of viscera in
the chickens I'd gutted on Joel's farm, but this was different and more
disturbing, probably because the pig's internal organs … looked exactly like
human organs. Which is why, as I recalled, surgeons hone their skills by
operating on pigs." Indeed, the boundary between human and porcine seems
uncomfortably blurred in folk and literary traditions across the centuries:
Odysseus' gang was turned into pigs by Circe, a baby turns into a piglet
(shown here on a baby tee) in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and chef-pig
statuettes are a not-insignificant category among kitsch collectibles.

This ambiguous quasi-human quality, coupled with an ancient tradition of
taboo, is what makes pigs so symbolically rich. While the animal rights
movement may garner its biggest headlines with luxury products like foie gras
and caviar (although this comix pamphlet is pretty harrowing), for the
philosophical foodie, there seems to be more resonance—a certain gallows
empathy—in examining the death of the far more ordinary pig.

Thanks to Bruce Cole of Edible San Francisco and Peter Parshall at the
National Gallery of Art for their bibliographical help.

For years, Sara Dickerman worked as a restaurant cook; she is now the food
and dining editor at Seattle Magazine.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2155422/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC



----- Original Message ----
From: grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>
To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2006 6:24:19 PM
Subject: Re: mmmmmm, Durham


I'm with you 100%, though I'd point out that nobody was actually
celebrating foie gras here. Celebrating a damnfine restaurant that
apparently occasionally serves it, yes.

Meat in general, well, that's something else entirely. You will find
that this list, or at least many active posters thereon, tends to
exhibit a bias in favor of the consumption of meat in general, and pork
in particular. Maybe it comes from being located smack in the heart of
BBQ country. Or maybe it's all Hepler's fault. I suspect the latter.

However, and in any case, I think you'll also find that none of the
aforementioned active posters are the sort of people who'd ever give
vegetarians or vegans a hard time. Even Hepler eats soy, the queer.

So, not to change the subject, but goddamn, isn't "Unable" by Suburban
Lawns the best fucking song ever?

xo

Ross

Mz. Binge & Sir Beloved wrote:

> Grady ... re; the list you sent - I was just discussing this very thing
> with a friend (whom I won't mention to avoid another Emily Post
> violation). We react to what is immediate (such as a kid being kicked
> in the street), which isn't always the most effective. But I think it
> is important that if the majority is celebrating a meat product on a
> discussion string on this list, the minority is able to express their
> (non- celebratory) view - though, let me tell you, it isn't easy...as
> no one wants to be a Debbie Downer...but that crap is just too cruel
> not to say anything.
-- ch-scene: the list that mirrors alt.music.chapel-hill --
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/ch-scene

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page