For those of you too young to remember a real pig.....
https://modernfarmer.com/2013/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-great-american-hog/
In 1956 the University of Illinois released a short instructional film called “Pork People Like.” It starred the fictional character “Frank Farmer” who was producing lean hogs for market. Or, as the film put it “hogs that will make the buyer happy” because they’re “not over fat but long and meaty.” The second star of the film was the “American Housewife.” Shown shopping at the supermarket, the film explains that this “determined young lady” is the person “everyone in the meat industry … is trying to please.” As she strolls down the meat aisle turning her nose up at fatty pork cuts, she serves as a grave warning to the intended audience of the film: farmers who still raised hogs the way only a handful do now — outdoors, in dirt pens, and pasture-based systems. Keep raising fat pigs, the film says, and you’ll find your own profits growing lean.
At the time the film was made, the roughly 88 percent of women whose primary duties resided within the home — raising children, cleaning and cooking — were voting for leaner cuts of meat at the grocery store. They were passing up marbled pork chops with an ample ribbon of lard down the back for chicken breasts and lean beef steaks. The prevailing wisdom of the day was that vegetable fats like Crisco worked better, were healthier and more economical. With physical labor on the decline and a population increasingly accustomed to affordable staples, women whose job it was to feed their families didn’t want to overfeed fat or waste money on lard that would cook away to drippings in the pan. Concerned with declining sales, the pork industry set out to help hog farmers bring pork that appealed to consumers to the market again. At first, the shift was a positive one. Frank’s meat-type hogs in the mid-1950s were fatter than our fattest pigs today, but leaner than what had come before. They provided bang for American families’ food buck without compromising flavor — no one needs two full inches of backfat, anyway.
But since Frank Farmer originally took his meat-type hogs to market for the camera, many American consumers have grown even more health conscious, and remain leery of products they perceive of being high in “bad” fat, which had become synonymous with animal fat. So, even as pigs grew thinner, consumers continued to equate pork with fatty excess and demanded it become leaner still. What started as a PR campaign for pork resulted in bland, unforgiving meat that upon cooking doesn’t render enough fat to keep a layer of lipids on the pan. We engineered pigs for consumers who wanted leaner meat, and now we have a tasteless product that many don’t want to buy.
Fifty years later, we’ve begun to rethink our ways, and a handful of pork producers are trying to breed pigs that provide the kind of pork only the tastebuds of the oldest Americans have experienced, but there’s no simple solution. Not only has the way pork tastes changed radically, the way it’s raised has as well. Going back isn’t as simple as flinging open the barn doors.
Fat isn’t just good for flavor, after all. The hogs of yore also had the fat coverage needed to weather the elements of their environment. Without it they’re ill prepared to thrive outdoors. When farmers in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s bred hogs capable of producing the type of pork American shoppers wanted, they also moved their operations indoors where temperatures could be regulated and creature comforts supplied. Barn space is an expensive commodity, so swine living areas shrunk significantly as changes were made, and previously used fields were turned over to other forms of food production. In 30 years time, the U.S. was breeding half as many pigs,
while at the same time doubling output through more productive breeding practices and meatier carcasses.
Which all sounds good until you realize that while we were busy meeting consumer demand
we weren’t busy learning from our mistakes. Fifty-seven years after Frank Farmer made his debut, the National Pork Board — the entity now responsible for pork’s public image — is at the marketing drawing board again. Their last PR campaign, “The Other White Meat,” resulted in the very problems we’re trying to fix — hogs that produce meat so lean American consumers are turned off by the quality. So now they’ve devised another plan that promises little more than a band-aid. The group partnered with the beef industry to rename cuts of pork after high end beef steaks, hoping to attract consumers back to pork after years of dried-out chops for dinner.
