table talk / By Joseph Byrd

The Death of Pork

Part I of an elegaic rant in memory of America’s lost meat

(Oct. 23, 2008)  Once upon a time there was a pork chop: nearly two inches thick, moist with tiny interior seams of fat, seared in butter in a heavy copper skillet; then a splash of Calvados deglazed the pan, and it gently braised until it was the color of burnished cherrywood. It arrived on the plate attended by fried sage leaves, tiny new potatoes and al dente green beans. On the fork, it was silken, more tender than a prime filet, and to the tongue it delivered extreme unction, an expatiation of carnivorous sins, a path straight to gustatory nirvana.

Oh dear. There I go, getting sentimentally involved with my dinner again. In this case, however, nostalgia is appropriate. Pork of that quality is no longer available to you or me, except in high-end restaurants and steakhouses, where a chop can set you back $45. And it will almost never be as good.

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We are, historically, a pork-fed nation. The pig was the ideal meat animal for the colonists; it required little care, could be a disposal for kitchen waste, foraged for itself in the woods and prospered on the corn it was fed while being fattened for slaughter. When butchered, it provided an amazing number of foods. Choice cuts were smoked or cured; ribs were roasted, belly made into bacon; liver, tongue and brain were often eaten fresh; and most everything else made into sausage, with the skin of the small intestine used as casings. Excess fat was rendered into lard, the kind your great-grandmother used to make flaky piecrusts. (Slaves even found a use for the whole intestine: chitterlings.) In the 1830s, Harriet Martineau, visiting from England, complained that there was “little else than pork, under all manner of disguises.”

To a cook who grew up near the Mexican border, pork was the meat I found most versatile, in carnitas (slow sautéed chunks in lard, spiced with only orange rind), or chile verde (stewed with tomatillos, garlic and poblano chiles).

“The new pork” has changed my cooking habits, and not for the better. Have you noticed that supermarket pork is now lean and mean, but also flavorless and dry?

How did this happen? The tale is cautionary, showing just how much we are pawns not only of skillful PR and industrialized agriculture, but also of fads and trends and pseudoscience, as well as our all-American cultural expectation to live forever young, thin and gorgeous.

Our story begins with a decades-long national paranoia toward calories from fat, fueled by the connection between saturated fats and cholesterol. We are still in that mode, as tabloids and pop magazines obsess over anorexic starlets, jeer at normally proportioned women as “fat,” and promote an infinite number of magical fad diets. The idea of temperance or moderation — that one can enjoy eggs or cheese or ice cream occasionally without risking cholesterol overload, diabetes or obesity — seems, for many Americans, impossible: It’s all or nothing.

In the early 1980s, when diet mavens began to change their focus from calories to fat content, chicken breast became de rigueur in processed foods as well as in restaurants. To this day, you cannot find chicken thigh meat in most restaurants or in most commercial food products, even though every chef knows it is more flavorful.

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