Pork kills, or does it?

March 27, 2010 No Comments

Growing up as a nice Jewish boy in Southern California, I had been told from the get-go that pork was one food that was off limits. I would constantly ask why, only to be told that it’s because of the shape of the animal’s hoof, a perfectly logical explanation if you’re willing to swallow loads of crap without giving it a second thought. I, fortunately enough, was not willing to swallow loads of verbal fecal matter and the unexamined wisdom of so many deprived rabbis. Instead, I was to swallow loads of bacon and other pork-related paraphernalia, but only on the rare occasion until I reached my early twenties and began working with food and began training to be a chef.

My first dance with this scintillating pink meat was at the age of five during a pizza party that was thrown for my soccer team – the aptly named Terminators. Not paying heed to my Jewish heritage, the soccer moms bought pepperoni pizza and nothing else. This created quite a conundrum in my young, non-analytical brain. On the one hand, my mom told me that this delectable looking piece of cheese encrusted dough topped with a spicy, circular meat product crisped to perfection was forbidden to our people. Being a good Jewish boy at the time, I held this non-sensical tidbit of dogmatic knowledge to be of great importance and reason since my mom told me. Conversely, I was hungry and didn’t think at the time that I could simply remove the bedeviled medallions that were steaming before me, calling my name “Gilad, eat me.”

Being one to trust my gut, I went for it, and truth be told – it was amazing. To this day I can remember the hint of spice and the beautifully crunchy texture of the pepperoni as the comforting fat oozed from all of the thin meats orifices as I bit through one of the most forbidden foods of the Jewish religion.

Although it was love at first swine, I didn’t eat pork for years. As a teenager I always ate pepperoni pizza, but took off the pepperoni, since the amazing flavor managed to linger in fatty droplets that clung to my less enticing piece of plain cheese.

I’m not sure what happened, but as I grew older and began to cook professionally for a living, I couldn’t avoid pork. Half the time I cooked something, I was told that I had to render the fat off of a product whose infamy is greater even than the Italian Mafia – bacon. Going through life until your twenties without bacon is fine, because you just don’t know any better, but once I ate my first piece of well cooked, high quality bacon – the word “kosher” soared to new and exciting meanings for me.

I have convinced myself that a happy pig is far more kosher than any industrially raised piece of chicken or cow and I have held this truth to be self evident every time I raise a crispy piece of fatty pork meat to my lips (which is often).

Although I still consider myself Jewish I have definitely moved over to the side of the fence with the group of circumcised pork-eaters, of which I am surprised to say are many. Chris Rock once famously said that two thousand years ago, a pork chop could kill you — but nowadays, a pork chop is your friend. I could not agree more. But as my culinary journey deepens along with my views on food and eating, I feel it’s a shame as an omnivorous race to exclude anything from your diet that is as delicious and useful as a piece of bacon. Just ask the folks over at Hebrew National, now owned by Con-Agra, just how happy their cows are when they are slaughtered and I can assure you they were not as happy as the fat happy pigs I now eat in my salami.

In all seriousness, although I’m making jokes about my new-found love for pork, it goes beyond just flavor. At Kitchen on Fire, we’re firm believers in eating everything, but not every day. As omnivores it’s in our nature to eat a great variety of foods found in nature. Pork is a wonderfully flavorful meat that is also quite lean, almost like a chicken that crossbred with a steer. This is why it’s sometimes referred to as “the other white meat”.

Finally, to finish our question about whether it kills or not, it’s true that pork products have been associated with trichinosis, a parasitic disease that is most commonly acquired by eating undercooked pork. Although the disease still exists, there are now less than a dozen cases annually in America, which means I run a greater risk of death by walking down the flight of stairs at my apartment. All in all, pork is not only a tasty meat, it is also a safe meat. Until next time, keep cooking that bacon and ask yourself, is this really a dirty animal or are rabbis just hoarding all the good pork to themselves?

Thoughts and Philosophy about Food