Serious Eats
Michael Ruhlman on Butchering a Whole Pig
Michael Ruhlman procured a humanely raised, humanely slaughtered Berkshire pig from a nearby farm and spent the weekend breaking it down and making sausage. It's enough to share among three families, affordable ($1.65/pound), and a lot of work.
But the actual work of breaking it all down, storing it properly, labeling it, using everything—roasting the bones for stock, curing the bellies and one of the two hams, all the shoulder and trim for sausage and pate, let me tell you, it’s exhausting work and no good on the back. My young cousin Ryan, 6’5” and an athletic 225 pounds easy, put his back out and was forced to suffer through another Browns loss horizontally and sans sausage the day after wrestling with the hog.
Ruhlman goes on to ask,
Who does not have access to hand-raised pigs, or rather, how many people live more than three hours from a farm that raises hogs? I'm betting my mom in West Palm would have a hard time locating a hog she could buy anywhere in her state. But what about Marlies in OK, Carri in AK, Elise in CA? How reasonable is it to ask more people to eat this way?
Ruhlman updated his post yesterday to respond to the many comments he's received and the answer is, it's probably not that reasonable. "Space, time and knowledge" are the major obstacles for most regular folk. Even so, knowledge at least appears to be a smaller and smaller barrier as pig butchering classes and demos have become more common. Here in New York, The Brooklyn Kitchen regularly hosts pig butchering classes. And Slow Food has sponsored pig butchering demos in New York as well as Boston (and probably elsewhere). What about you, serious eaters? Are you ready to go whole hog?
Related:
In Videos: The Whole Hog Project
How to Butcher a Whole Pig's Head