Pork Fat Rules

We’re going to be eating pork for the next couple of days. Unfortunately I just filled my freezer with meat from Running W on Friday (including lamb chops!), or we could probably have pork for the next couple of weeks.

The Amaya family (Marta Uno) had a pig that they were planning to save and butcher when Dimas, Marta’s husband, returns from working in the US. This morning, the entire clan came over to see if we’d seen their pig, who had broken out of her cage sometime overnight. We hadn’t seen the pig, and promised to keep our eyes and ears open. Around lunchtime, Hector and Wilton came over, all wound up, asking to borrow the wheelbarrow because they’d found the pig, but it couldn’t walk. They told us it had something sticking out of its side, and it was all very dramatic. Mid-afternoon, we heard a God-awful screaming from next door, so we figured the pig had made its last trip home in the wheelbarrow. Around 5:30, Delmy showed up at our door, asking us how much pork we would like to buy. She told us that the pig had broken her leg, so her mother decided to butcher it rather than take care of a convalescent pig for however long it takes for a pig’s leg to heal. We’re still not sure what was going on with Hector and Wilton’s story about the pig having something sticking out of its side, unless it was just the pig’s leg at an odd angle however they found it – or it was just a Hector and Wilton dramatization. In any case, we now have about five pounds of pig in the fridge to be cooked tomorrow, and I squeezed another five pounds in the freezer, although we’re going to have to eat something out of that freezer before too long because it’s hazardous to open the freezer door.

We’re interested to see how this pig tastes, because it’s been eating mostly scraps rather than pig food from the feed mill. In a way, we’re looking forward to it and hope we like it, because we think the whole pig feeding system at the mill is a little, um, cold. When someone first gets a pig that they’re planning to butcher, they get Pig Starter feed. Then, it switches to Pig Grower as they try to get it as big as possible. A few weeks before butchering, it’s changed to Pig Finisher – how cold is that? I guess it’s a good thing pigs can’t read the labels on their feed bags, or they’d be heading for the hills when the Pig Finisher appeared.