The Visibility and Invisibility of Pigs: Posts for the Humane Research Council

I have contributed a couple of short articles to the Humane Research Council blog (HumaneSpot.org) that concern my ongoing interest in "how distance and concealment operate as mechanisms of power in modern society," as Timothy Pachirat has succinctly put it in the introduction to Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Yale, 2011), his important ethnographic study of the modern industrial cattle slaughterhouse. The first of these two posts (here) deals with the visibility of pigs in cities. The second post (here) looks at the changing status of slaughter and the slaughterhouse. I hope you find them both interesting.

This image is a lithography depicting White's Great Cattle Show and Grand Procession of the Victuallers of Philadelphia, which took place on March 15, 1821. After displaying "improved" cattle, hogs, and sheep during the week prior, more than 86,000 pounds of meat was paraded through the city for a crowd in the tens of thousands. A pretty remarkable example of the visibility of meat production at an earlier moment in American history.

Pig Wings?

Perhaps the perfect testimony to the transformation of modern pork is the "discovery" of the Pig Wing, a two-ounce piece of pork cut from the fibula of a ham shank. Once upon a time people presumably understood that a ham had a bone in it, one often used to flavor soups and stews once the ham was carved and eaten. But because consumers expressed a preference for the spiral-sliced and boneless hams that were marketed to them by the industry as more convenient meat, pork processors started removing the shank before processing, creating the possibility for the return of the repressed as a new product to market.

The food writer John T. Edge of, among other things, the Southern Foodways Alliance, wrote a great article on this development in his recent "United Tastes" column for The New York Times (here) on November 30th in the "Dining" section, where I learned that a big challenge has been coming up with a more pleasant sounding name for these ham shanks. Already in play are "pork hammers," "sluggers," squealers, and, of course, "Pig Wings." Look for them to perhaps be one of the breakthrough pork products in the next year or two.

I was particularly pleased with the illustration by Xaquín G.V. (above) that accompanied Edge's article, as it serves as a reminder that ham comes from pig, a point one wouldn't think would need to be made much anymore, but that given the incredible modern disconnection between our meat and its sources in living animals (a subject I discuss in both PIG and in my contribution to the special issue of Antennae on pigs, downloadable as a pdf here), perhaps this was indeed "news" to some folks.

Jennie Cell, Butchering Day (ca. 1955)

It has been quite a while since I last updated this blog, which I started in order to share and keep track of interesting material as I worked on my contribution to the Reaktion Books "Animal" series. I am now in the final stages of working on PIG, which will appear in print this summer after a long gestation. A lot of material from this blog made it into the book, but given the immensity of the human-pig relationship and the small size of the Reaktion "Animal" series books, there's obviously a lot that was left out. I was just at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., where I discovered a lovely piece of folk art that would have been a perfect illustration for the book. This illustration by Jennie Cell (1905-1988) depicts a scene from everyday life that would have been quite familiar in many social environments throughout the world--traditional hog butchering and meat preparation. Her Butchering Day (ca. 1955) is the first of what I am sure will be many images that I wish I had found in time.

Bacon Explosion

I suppose it's an index of how busy I have been that I failed to notice that a recipe for something called the "Bacon Explosion" has been sweeping the internet. Thanks to a piece in Wednesday's New York Times food section by Damon Darlin (here), I now feel up to date. The "Bacon Explosion"--two pounds of pork sausage wrapped in two pounds of bacon--was created by Jason Day and Aaron Chronister of the Kansas-based BBQ competition team Burnt Finger BBQ. It contains about 5000 calories and 500 grams of fat, and is either something that will make your mouth water or turn your stomach in disgust. The NYT article is largely dedicated to the mechanics of the recipe's spread throughout the country via the internet and text messaging. More germane for my purposes, of course, is the recipe itself, which reflects both the surging popularity of bacon and a carnophallic backlash to vegetarians, the health conscious, and friends of animals. 

The image of the "Bacon Explosion" on the smoker comes from the bbqaddicts.com website where the recipe first appeared. The NYT also has lots of instructional photos and video in case you want to make one of these for Sunday's Super Bowl.

Meatpaper Magazine

I've been cleaning out the e-mail inbox lately while stranded on break in Florida and remembered that Mr. Sidetable had forwarded me an article from the New York Times that I hadn't gotten around to reading during the end of the semester craziness. The article (here) by Oliver Schwaner-Albright was about a new magazine, Meatpaper: Your Journal of Meat Culture. I haven't had the internet access to fully see what the magazine is all about, but you can find a link here. I'll be posting sporadically (as if that's not what I've been doing anyway) while in Coral Springs...