BRINGING HOME THE BACON PG

India is seeing the emergence of an enthusiastic culture around pork

BBeing married to a pork lover isn’t a thing to be taken lightly. Once, at a party, a large ham made a brief appearance before the guests prior to being whisked into the dining room. My husband spent the rest of the cocktail hour lurking in the doorway, making eyes at its scored and clove-studded curves. I’m fairly certain our relationship turned serious the night I roasted a pork belly for dinner.

Sacks of frozen meatballs sent to friends, stockpots full of trotters and bones, packets of oily choriz and smoked meat smuggled in suitcases from Goa and Meghalaya, respectively— pork has its own gravity in the constellation of our social relationships.

Despite the swine’s entrenched associations with the gutter, we’re not alone. Consumption of pork is up. Online and offline clubs include

Porkaholics on Facebook, Bengaluru’s Pork Lovers Club, and Kolkata Porkaddicts, among others. While, historically, India’s pork-eating communities have sourced from small-scale unregulated producers, and our English breakfast-eating elite consumed imported meat, the past decade has seen the rise of farmers, producers and buyers who are pushing the market towards greater standardisation and quality control. And, fuelled by shows like this year’s Chef’s Table: BBQ, tastes are moving beyond bland frankfurters and anodyne bacon.

While, on the one hand, larger producers are emulating international-standard preserved meats, on the other, there is a tribe of professional chefs and home cooks curing, smoking and delivering pork. “The number of pork shops in Bangalore has gone up threefold,” estimated Jacob John, who sells small batches of bacon and other preparations under the Instagram handle ‘East of Bangalore’. Over the past two years, John has gone from a cardboard smoker to a brick one. Through the pandemic and lockdown in Bengaluru, chefs like Gautam Krishankutty (Gonzo Garbanzo) and Karishma Sharma (The Tenth Muse) have pivoted towards small-batch delivery, powered by social media, along with Coorg recipe specialist Curly Sue.

Similarly, there is the H Man BBQ in Delhi, converted from a tiny dining counter to a porkforward delivery kitchen, selling raw, cured and cooked meats. Sambaran Mitra, a chef and consultant in Gurgaon, started his service Meathead “on a lark” over two months ago because other work had stalled and “[his] smoker was just lying there”. He now smokes 20-plus kilos of pork every two or three days, using rubs and marinades from around the world.

In Mumbai, there’s Goan sausage company Pedro Pão and Joshua Pereira, who customises bikes and smokes hog at Incendiary Motorcycles and Incendiary Kitchen. Mumbai’s Kaavo and Gurgaon’s Smoke Freaks both offer small-batch hunks of meat, but through slicker websites and not just social media or word-of-mouth. In Kolkata, pop-ups like Pig Boss and charcuteries with strong online communities, The Whole Hog and Calcutta Deli, have replaced the legendary Kalman Cold Storage, which according to some reports shut shop early this year due to lack of new workers willing to handle both beef and pork. With intolerance now the bitter spice of life in India, as Artisan Meats co-founder Meherwan Bawa points out, “Pork is the new beef.”

Artisan, with the tagline “Eat Clean Meat” is among the crop of quality- and hygieneobsessed charcutiers, some of whom have scaled up to delivery through online portals or retail counters around the country. When your USP is ultra-hygienic meat, it’s not hard to extend this marketing to suit pandemic conditions. Primo

Foods (LionFresh.com) and Prasuma (selling via Meatigo) are two such purveyors. Lately, Japanese Standard Processing, a company related to the Japanese chain Kuuraku, is advertising its pristine, baby pink “Japanese Clean Room Technology” pork on Instagram.

These brands have adjusted to pandemic conditions with the whole-hog attitude. When Bengaluru’s Arthur Foods had to stall plans to open a Delhi counter for its German-standard, Indianproduced Meisterwurst brand, its representative in the capital, Harathi Reddy Rebello, decided to just convert her basement to a cold storage and start delivering from home. “I would say, 80 per cent of the people I speak to, like me, didn’t eat pork in India,” says Rebello. “And I have a nice long extended conversation with each of them.”