completely out of the blue, and with no signs of being pregnant, one of our lady hogs due for slaughter next week just gave birth to four piglets! they are healthy looking, although i’m concerned that the mother’s teats aren’t as swollen as the last few mothers i’ve witnessed. the piglets, however, look nothing like oprah’s milk-less and dying piglets i saw this past summer, so i will assume for now that all is well.
piglets that are not castrated will result in a lower quality finished product. they will waste a lot of their energy on testosterone driven sexnanigans, as opposed to devoting it towards becoming delicious tasting, like their castrated brethren. castration eliminates the dreaded “boar taint”, which is the off putting scent associated with full balled boars. in most cases i find this “taint” to be non existent in our heritage breed, mixed diet, pasture raised hogs, but on occasion it has been observed.
and lastly, castration stops them from raping their sisters. so, all around, i’d say it’s a good call.
today the piglets approached me with a cease and desist letter for im high on cooking. turns out they’re in talks with nbc for their own spinoff blog, and they’re lawyering up. the letter describes me as a talentless hack, accuses me of intellectual property theft, and claims that on a percentage basis “cute posts about the piglets accounts for the largest segment of my website by over forty percent more than its nearest contender—dumb jokes.”
another graduating class of piglets make their first little hoof prints on the rough streets of general population. as they leave the small piglet pen they have inhabited for the last month, they are leaving behind their entire world. it’s all they know.
knew.
as they walk into the forrest they walk towards the rest of the herd: baby mama and her newborns, two of babymama’s pregnant sisters, the drifters, the landracers, the mulefoots, and of course—baby scooter. each of these distinct family units melts together in the pot we call pork chop hill.
and for the new class? in addition to another group of landrace, from the same mamas our current landrace came from, we let go of our sentimental grip on oprah’s three remaining piglets: brutus, pink pearl, and ol’ black nose. after bottle feeding and hand raising these three piggies, it was bittersweet motel watching them join the herd.
they just grow up so fast.
cnn just released a full story to accompany the tv clip they released earlier this week, and the article is featured on eatocracy.cnn right now.
it includes a pretty thorough description of my apprenticeship, and the circumstances of our move from ny to ga, as well as all the details of the ins-n-outs involved between getting animals from the farm to the bun.
story, photos, and video here, on cnn
i'm high on cooking ™ 2010
