pork

Pork

I'm not a great fan of pork. I think, really, that very few people are. Consider, you walk into a restaurant. You sit down, of course; it's almost mandatory. You peruse the menu; you may see breast of chicken, steak of beef, leg of lamb, shoulder of vegetarian and what have you, but you are less likely to see anything of pork. If you do, it's probably not pork; it'll be bacon. Pork must be the only meat which more people eat cured, and thus denatured, than fresh. It's about the only meat, come to that, which is commonly cured. Where you do get fresh pork, it's often in a stew, or a casserole, or heavily spiced, or with its flavour masked in some way.

So why is this? Well, as you know, the pig's close relationship to the human is much touted. They share more genetics with us than anything else that is commonly eaten. They even get sunburnt! Imagine! Well, they don't nowadays, of course; they live in boxes. But the point is, they're similarish. Those in the know (presumably mostly weird Germans) tell us that human tastes quite like pig, and indeed human meat is sometimes called 'Long pig'. Now, we tend to have inhibitions against doing things which harm us or, to a lesser extent, society; hence, for instance, the distaste that the average person has for setting themselves on fire or attending a church service. So why not an inhibition against cannibalism? It's one of the most universal taboos, and there's little enough evidence that it was ever particularly widespread. Maybe we just don't like eating ourselves, or anything that tastes like us.

There's a tip to any would-be cannibals, then; if you really must indulge, you'd be best to salt your victim and serve him with eggs, and possibly fried bread. Best not ask about the frying medium, really.

Another widespread use for pigs is gelatin (more on this later). Marks and Spencers has a variety of pig-head shaped sweets whose ingredient lists note that they are made with pork gelatin. This is presumably to scare off any practitioners of a kosher diet not already discouraged by the general motif.

And the Americans, bless their hearts, have another use for pork! There, they have 'Federal pork-barrel spending'; this is a rather colourful Americanism for what we here in Ireland refer to as 'the National Aquatic Center'. There was an interesting piece of news on BBC the other day about American worries about agricultural terrorism. Presumably it is feared that an extremist will crash a cow into the USDA headquarters. In any case, local cow farmer referred to plans to build a $500million cow-related terrorism center (or terrorism-prevention center, one would hope) in Kansas as 'pork-barrel spending'.

And finally, 'porking' is a euphemism for sex. I have no idea why, and I don't really think I want to know.