What Good Is a Pig? Cuts of Pork, Nose to Tail

Reader Contribution by Walter Jeffries
Published on May 14, 2012
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 Walter Jeffries and his wife Holly raise pastured pigs on Sugar Mountain Farm, their sustainable homestead in the mountains of Vermont. To improve their ability to get their pork to their customer’s fork they’re building their own on-farm USDA inspected butcher shop. Until May 15th they’re running a Kickstarting the Butcher Shop at Sugar Mountain Farm project to raise additional funds for equipment so they can open the butcher shop  in summer 2012. In response to the Kickstarter project, several backers asked about the various cuts of pork, and this is Walter’s reply, which will almost surely inform you and make you a better consumer: 

Several people have asked about the cuts of pork, and this article will give you an introduction to what good is a pig, nose-to-tail.

We’ll refer to the Pork Cut Chart above time-to-time. (You can zoom in on the image here  to read the small print.)

Reality of Economics and Social Justice
All of the pig is good, nose-to-tail, but some of the pig sells for a lot more than other parts. This is not a social injustice. This is simply an economic reality. There are only two tenderloins on a pig and 20 people want them. There is only so much bacon to a pig and virtually everybody wants that. You can’t buy a pig and ask for it to be all cut into chops and bacon — pigs just don’t work that way although I’m trying to get there through our selective breeding program.
Supply is limited, and the rest of the pig must be eaten too, in order to avoid waste. The people who are willing to pay the higher prices for the high demand cuts make the rest of the pig available at lower prices to the rest of us. Be thankful that the 1 percent likes and pays for tenderloin. Again, this is not social injustice — just economic reality.
Additionally, not all cultures make use of all of the pig, or not in the same way. We find very little market for heart and tongue — delicious as they both are. A few customers know this secret and buy them up, but it took years to develop that market. Nobody buys the balls, at least not here — a feast for our livestock guardian dogs.
There is next to no market for lungs and pig guts. One of the advantages of our forthcoming on-farm slaughter facility is the offal, literally the parts that fall off, will be used in feeding our chickens during the winter and our compost piles to recapture the chickens’ nutrients for our farm’s soil to grow crops in the future. With on-farm slaughter, nothing goes to waste.

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