Posts Tagged ‘pigs’

River Cottage: Pig in a Day

Saturday, March 14th, 2015 | Distractions

Oh Mr. Fearnley-Whittingstall. My hero, my idol, for at least the past two months. How much damage you can do with two comments.

River Cottage: Pig in a Day is a course run at River Cottage HQ to teach people how to butcher a big. They then translated it into a two hour DVD. The DVD starts with a really nice section on keeping your own pigs and what fun they can be, before showing footage of sawing through a head and butchering the entire body of a dead one.

There were however two bits that annoyed me. Firstly, Hugh said the only real health problem he gets with his pigs were coughs and colds, that he treats with homoeopathic remedies. Boo! What a confidence knock in an otherwise sensible man.

Though this does have the advantage that you can clearly just ignore colds because they will go away by themselves. Or does it? This brings up an interesting question as to whether placebo works on animals. RationalWiki suggests that you can condition animals to get the benefit.

Secondly he referred to organic salt. What the fuck is organic salt? Presumably one with additives because you need to get the carbon in there somehow…

Anyway, that aside, the show really does embrace Hugh’s “nose to tail” philosophy as he calls it. They eat pretty much everything. I say pretty much because a bit of fat gets cut off, and the eyes come out. However, that is pretty much it. The organs are cooked, the trotters and tail are used for stock, and even the brain is fried up and scoffed.

It was a mildly interesting watch, but I’m not sure how much appeal it has. You are either a) do not have your own pigs, which seems very likely, so how relevant is the content? Or B) you do have your own pigs, in which case are you really going to try and butcher the entire thing based a DVD? If so, I tip my hat to you, you clearly have some balls. Specifically pig’s balls.