Where is the Pork?

The Chinese, as once the Romans, have always preferred pork to beef. Africans, Australians, Americans and the British prefer beef. "Everyone to his own taste," as the old woman said when she kissed her cow.

There is a new book out called All about Pigs, giving every species and phase of shoat-barrow-sow-boar life until it comes to your table as pork: ham, bacon, spare-ribs, trotters, lard, chitterlings or salami. It may even turn out to be a football.

But there is nothing in there about the delivery, display and sale of pork in the markets and butcher shops.

How pigs are killed there and how refrigerated until put on open lorries you will have to discover for yourselves if you have strong stomachs. The old-time Armour, Swift or Wilson slaughter houses in the city, called the "Hog Butchers of the World", used to have a man catch a penned pig by the hind leg, clamp it into a ring or open hook attached to a great ten foot disk rotating on a wall. The hog, squealing bloody murder went up and almost down when another man with a sharp knife slit its jugular vein, thus letting out its blood. One more rotation and the pig had bled out its life, was dumped into a cart and plogged into boiling water to clean it and soften its bristles so that they could be scrapped off.

There, in the city, they say, pigs are electrocuted by introducing an electrode into each ear. That seems a simpler way. But all that is neither here nor there.

What is generally observable is the sight of a pig delivery lorry double-parked along some crowded side-street with maybe twenty white carcasses inside and the bloody insides of all of them dengling on the inside and the outside of the vehicle. One helper comes to the tailboard, pulls it down and gives a written order for a specific weight of pig. The man in the truck starts walking over the pig lying there, slipping, sliding and looking for the one that is wanted. He finds it up at the front end and then drags it over the other hulks until he polps it on the bloodied shirt of the porter.

Thereupon, the pork-bearer walks into the shop, looks for a spot to lay down his burden, finds none and lets the pig plump on the floor. "O Well." he, no doubt, thinks, "What's a little more dirt after the pork has been exposed for hours to the sun, the dust, germs and pollutants of the streets through which we came and the flies that have been feasting on the meat all along. After all our cooks are wise and boil pork thoroughly before they serve it."

The butcher may be unhappy that some of his customers have seen the pork on the floor. So, as soon as he can, he ambles over to the prostrate form, hooks it to a claw on the wall and wipes it clean with a dirty rag. There it hangs waiting to be sold. Most dust, grime, flies, peoples' breath examining it and, gradually, it is dismembered, sold, boiled and eaten within a few days of its trip from the farms - unless itis roasted as a whole carcass.

A good many suckling pigs and large ones up to sixty pounds get roasted somewhere in the city. Where ? Who knows? All that we see is the boy on bicycle or motorcycle with a roast pig slung across his handle-bars or attached to the carrier behind his seat - or maybe with one in either place.

He travels down the streets with his strange load, daring all the hazards of traffic, especially slippery streets and emergency turns that may easily shift the nice but risky balance of dead weight. If he is lucky, he delivers the roast porkers clean. They too, are hung up in butchers's places and may stay there for days - gradually cut off as if they were loaves of bread and disappearing into the customers' shopping bags.

The people in the city surely have good gastric juices that enable them to eat pork: sweet, sour an spoiled - seemingly without untoward effects!

- Fr. J.A. Daleiden
- Orson L. Jarret