I’ve never eaten something I’ve named…
Raising a pig to stock the larder seemed like a good idea. But is having second thoughts?
Ihave always loved pigs. Where we grew up, in a tiny hamlet in Oxfordshire, there were several on the small farm in the middle of the village. The farmer never seemed to mind it if he found us in his yard, looking at his pigs, touching their soft pink noses when they ventured, gingerly, forward out of their stall.
This small, mixed farm was a very real business, if a rather more romantic type of practice compared to the farming I witnessed later in life; the growing and keeping of animals on an industrial scale. The sorts of farms I visited as a grown-up food writer had signs on the entrance that suggested you were entering a nuclear reactor. The clothes you had to put on – special boots, coats, hair nets – and a strict briefing only confirmed that feeling.
But I’ve never had any difficulty connecting the pig and the pork. Growing up mainly in the countryside I always understood that, in the same way the wheat sheaves I could waft my hand over in the fields would become cereal, the beef cattle, sheep and pigs would become burgers, chops and bacon.
I have attended a nose-to-tail masterclass tutored by the great chef Fergus Henderson. Inspired by him I have simmered a whole half head and, as directed, chucked over cider and a splash of Calvados for good measure. Fergus reckons there’s no more romantic a meal for two than eating the slow-cooked soft flesh of a pig’s cheek.
Like so many I’ve been particularly intrigued by the pig and enjoy its mention in literature. The finest being in PG Wodehouse, in the Blandings stories where Lord Emsworth keeps a pig, The Empress of Blandings. Much of Emsworth’s time is spent avoiding the tedium of normality as he visits his pig, studying his feed carefully, hoping it will win trophies for its magnificent size.
Of course, there is a rather large difference between The Empress and the pigs I have come across. The former was bred and fed for her size, there was never the suggestion that she be slaughtered and eaten.
But as lockdown changed our shopping and cooking habits, so I became drawn to the idea of a pig. Supermarket trips became infrequent, we take weekly deliveries of veg boxes. I have bought meat by the box-load from local farmers. And now I’ve gone one further; one step closer to reality. I’ve bought a pig of my own.
A farming friend, Tor, introduced me to a breeder, a man called Keith, who has a small mixed farm on the nearby Devon and Somerset border. In preparation I invested in some literature, including a second-hand practical guide published by the National Trust simply called Pig
Keeping, suitably bound in pink, and a River Cottage handbook, Pigs and Pork, written by Hugh Fearnleywhittingstall’s head chef Gill Meller. There would be two pigs. One would be mine, the other my friend’s. Mine would be called Warwick, named after my food writer pal Joe Warwick, whose studiously unkempt style and beady eyes strike me as somewhat porcine.
The plan was to grow the pig until aged three to five months, and then he would be dispatched and supplement those meat boxes. We’d have chops, belly, cheeks – everything from that nose to the tail. Everything except bacon, which is made from older, seven or eight-month pigs. At £35 for the actual pig, plus feed and keeping costs and the dispatch and butchery, that seems to be a good economy.
I informed Tor of the name of my pig. She had kept pigs in the past, she told me, adding ominously, “I shan’t be naming mine…”
At eight weeks old, he arrived with a sibling and quickly settled into a stable. He was nervous at first, but within days had relaxed. He was fed twice a day on a mix of wheat, barley and field beans – and I was disappointed to learn that he couldn’t enjoy the fruits of what we always called “the pig bucket”; the kitchen scraps. “It is illegal to feed your pigs anything that has been into your kitchen,” writes Gill Meller. One has to avoid any risk of contamination from raw or cooked meat.
My 18-month-old son Walter relishes his seeing the pig, although, frankly, he’s much more interested in fetching eggs from the henhouse. A few weeks in and the time approached for Warwick and his sibling to move outdoors, to a field and a waterproofed shelter. I hammered stakes into the ground and fashioned electric wires that would administer a gentle reminder that he should remain in his enclosure.
Keith arrived with his trailer to help move the pigs and I put some highfactor sun cream on their faces. Then we chatted about their breeding.
“He’s a mix of large white and Gloucester Old Spot,” he said. I asked him what sort of characteristics this can breed. “You’ll get speedy growth, less fat and a better meat-ratio carcass,” he replied.
This made me start a little. All these weeks with Warwick and I’d somehow forgotten the main point, here. I was thinking character. Keith was talking flavour.
Right now, Warwick is out there rooting around and doing a fine job of rotovating the field. I find him endlessly fascinating and feel great calm watching him poke about. I always greet him with a “Hello
Warwick! How are you?” He doesn’t take up too much time. He just needs his two meals a day, his quarters mucking out and the straw changing once a week. In the evenings I like to wander out with a glass of wine and see how he is. As I write, government regulations mean he is (Walter aside) literally the only male living thing I am able to socialise with. When I chat to him I now also scratch him just behind his ear. He stops and grunts with quiet satisfaction.
“Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals,” Winston Churchill is supposed to have said. And Warwick does have a way of looking me in the eye, not to
All these weeks with Warwick and I’d somehow forgotten the main point, here
mention bounding up when I arrive. When I snort at him, he snorts back.
I’ve dispatched pheasants and sick chickens, I’ve shot deer and butchered them. But I’ve never eaten something or someone I have given a name to. Still, he does have a date with destiny coming. Already friends are saying: “He’s too cute.” Indeed, as we strolled back to the house after seeing him last night, my wife announced: “By the way, you’re not eating him.”
“The feeling I get when my pigs leave me is pride,” says Tor. I’m not sure quite how I’ll feel when the time comes. I’m defiant. I think. But as Keith told me: “If people didn’t eat pigs, then they wouldn’t be bred in the first place…”