When Pigs Fly

When Pigs Fly

    Boy, don't they (the pigs) wish that they could.  It's an old phrase in the U.S., one meaning something that is impossible, similar to the phrase, "that'll be the day."   But pigs and their resulting products are slowly gaining ground in this world, reaching number three in our meat consumption index, right behind chicken and ducks (rabbits are currently number four but rapidly gaining on pigs as far as the meat humans eat).  Think about it...bacon, pulled pork, baby (really??) back ribs, brisket, pig ears for dogs, Black Forest ham, barbeques and of course, Spam.  And while overall beef consumption has dropped nearly 40% in the U.S., pork is steadily making a gain back to its old days.  One restaurant chain, Applebee's, saw an "instant hit" when it brought its Triple Hog Dare Ya sandwich, loaded with pulled pork, ham and bacon, into its menu offerings.  Said Bloomberg Businessweek in a report on restaurants' increased usage of pork: The amount of pulled pork at U.S. food-service establishments has risen 13 percent a year on average from 2013 to 2015, up from a 6.4 percent growth rate from 2011 to 2013, according to data compiled by researcher Technomic for the National Pork Board.  And there were 57 limited-time pulled pork offers at the top 500 restaurant chains this year through August, Technomic says (but) still hasn’t returned to the peak reached right before the Great Recession.

 From Bloomberg Businessweek October 2015

    All of this sounds rather attractive to both restaurants and home chefs for pork is relatively easy to cook, and overall is relatively inexpensive.  This proves especially good news for poorer countries just now reaching the age of regularly affording meat for their meals, and the resulting demand has not been lost on the ears of the pork industry.  But if you're only used to seeing the packaged chops or ribs or hams in your grocery store, you're light years away from how the industry views this "commodity."  Here's a brief excerpt from another piece in Bloomberg Businessweek on the booming industry of exporting pork, in this case to the Philippines: Three hundred thirteen-five is a beauty and sure to have beautiful babes, too.  Born on March 30, the fifth piglet in litter 313, she’s an elite sow, bred to produce several generations of breeding pigs that will ultimately produce delicious piglets—a lot of them.  She’s a Yorkshire, a breed known for strong maternal traits, like the size of their litters, the birth weight of their piglets, and a relatively short interval between litters.  The best ones grow up fast and produce lean meat, too...Even among Yorkshires, though, 313-5 comes from exceptional stock.  Her father, a boar with the romantic name BTI4 the Unit 30-6, was ranked, as of Dec. 15, sixth in the U.S. among Yorkshires on the “sow productivity index,” a measure of maternal traits, and fourth on the “maternal line index,” which combines maternal traits with edible traits, like stores of back fat and muscle.  Her mother is a descendant of the late Wisconsin Steel, the champion boar at the 2009 Wisconsin State Fair; the name is a play on the relatively cheap price, $2,500, paid for the boar—a “steal” for such a productive stud. In short, 313-5, her children, and even her grandchildren will be bred to breed and enhance a widening gene pool.  Her great-grandchildren, though, will be raised for slaughter.  And though she doesn’t know it yet, she’s going global.  She’s headed to the Philippines...One evening in May, several men weighing 313-5’s fate gather in a conference room in rural Albion, Ind., for a sales presentation on a “customizable approach to genetic improvement.”  The room is in the basement of Whiteshire Hamroc, a 20-year-old company that specializes in swine genetics, the porcine equivalent of rose breeders crossing hybrids to yield a singular flower...Mark Brubaker, an applied geneticist, works through a PowerPoint presentation that rates the farm’s pigs with statistical precision—feed-conversion ratio, estimated breeding value, terminal sire index.  He boasts that the data paint a picture of “pounds of pork through a system” and “how efficient that system is.”...

    Despite all of that, pig output was down 1.3%, says the same magazine, partially due to a devastating virus that swept through many of the factory farms raising piglets.  And if you've missed (or don't want to know about or watch) what goes on in the modern pig farm, you'll find very few humans, as few as six running an operation that is raising tens of thousands of hogs.  Almost everything today, from feeding to inoculations, are done robotically.  Today's modern piglet will likely never see daylight or straw or probably, a human...and sometimes, not even at the slaughterhouse where they are quickly guided into a large elevator-type container, then electrocuted en masse, then dropped off a level down, a process that takes about 5 seconds (the elevator quickly returns to the upper level, ready for the next several dozen pigs to enter).  On average, this happens to nearly 100 million pigs a year in the U.S. (2015 figures, because of the virus, reduced that number to just over 92 million pigs slaughtered in the U.S.).  At an average weight of over 220 pounds, each pig is steadily gaining in weight and at a faster pace which should mean lower prices for consumers (my local grocery had pork loins down to just under a dollar per pound).  And why is that happening?  One could mention Eli Lilly and its Elanco division which concentrates on animal "health."  One of their drugs is ractopamine, which "has been used in raising as many as 80 percent of U.S. hogs," says another piece in Bloomberg Businessweek.  In the article, it was pointed out that president of the company, Jeff Simmons, has a different view of why the company's growth and muscle enhancing drug is necessary: Simmons’s aggressive argument is that the world’s growing demand for meat, milk, and eggs is a more urgent priority than American consumers’ desires for food that is organic, antibiotic-free, or pasture-raised.  Industrial farming is not only necessary, he says, but also a moral imperative to feed an estimated 9 billion people by 2050.  “We don’t need more animals,” he said in May at a regional Rotary conference in Indianapolis.  “We need productive animals.”  The world's largest hog producer, Smithfield Foods,  has said it will stop using the drug.  China, Russia and the European Union have already banned the drug (which is still being used in the U.S.).  Elanco's worldwide sales in 2014?...$2.4 billion.
   
    WIRED featured an almost too-cute history of the pig and it's effect on our religious cultures through the ages; but another issue had a reader write in to one of its regular columns asking, " are there animals that are just too intelligent to eat?"  And part of their answer came back:  These days, it seems, everybody wants to know how smart their meat is...sheep can remember and recognize as many as 50 human faces without making a mistake.  Pigs excel at videogames played with special pig joysticks.  And even opossums --yes, some people eat them-- turn out to be excellent maze runners.  One study ranked opossums' "probability learning" skills second only to humans and higher than dogs.'

    When a major pig producer began to study the habits of pigs, it realized what many cultures already know: 1) pigs are highly social and very protective of their young; 2) pigs are highly intelligent, not only the semi-joke videogames but rather in natural recognition of the best place to shelter and how to build such; and 3) pigs will poop far from their living quarters, given the chance (which is not so given in the factory farms).  Pigs have shaped our cultures for generations, some peoples loving them and some reviling them, all of which has made its way into our religions and our diets.  But given the opportunity, one would have to think that IF pigs could fly...well, they likely would, and far away from today's world of humans.