Real Pigs Shifting Values in the Field of Local Pork

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 EAL PIGS
R
shifting values in the
field of local pork

Brad Weiss

Duke University Press

durham and london ​2016
© 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free
paper ∞
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Westchester Publishing
Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Weiss, Brad, author.
Title: Real pigs : shifting values in the field of local pork /
Brad Weiss.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2015049624
isbn 9780822361381 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822361572 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822374237 (e-­book)
Subjects: lcsh: Pork industry and trade—­North Carolina. |
Cooking (Pork)—­North Carolina.
Classification: lcc hd9435.u63 n68 2016 | ddc
338.1/736400922756—­dc23
lc rec­ord available at http://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2015049624

Cover: Farmer’s Hybrid pigs eating. Photo by Brad Weiss.

 CONTENTS

preface ​
vii

acknowl­edgments ​xiii

—­

INTRODUCTION
1

—­

CHAPTER 1
Pigs on the Ground ​21
profile: eliza maclean
profile: john o’­s ullivan

—­

CHAPTER 2
Pigs in a Local Place ​59
profile: sarah blacklin
profile: jennifer curtis

—­

CHAPTER 3
Heritage, Hybrids, Breeds, and Brands ​107
profile: ­w ill cramer
profile: ross flynn

—­
 CHAPTER 4
Pigs in Parts ​155
profile: kevin callaghan

—­

CHAPTER 5
A Taste for Fat ​187
profile: vimala rajendran
profile: sam suchoff

—­

CHAPTER 6
Farm to Fork, Snout to Tail ​219

—­

CONCLUSION
Au­then­tic Connections ​243

—­

notes ​255
references ​265
index ​
277

vi — Content s
 PREFACE

This proj­ect began quite differently from most of my ethnographic work.

I was on vacation. It was the summer of 2007, and I was in the midst of
fine-­tuning the final draft of my last book, a work that looked at popu­
lar culture in the tourist town of Arusha, in Tanzania. My wife and I had
driven up to Sonoma County from my parents’ home in Southern Califor-
nia, and we stayed on the Rus­sian River, which I liked to think of as my
regular getaway, or as much of one as it could be for someone who lives
2,900 miles away. I was also enthusiastically anticipating becoming the
chair of my department in about a month. All of ­these circumstances con-
duced to my pondering what kind of research I might do next. I know—­
just the kind of guy you want to take on your next vacation. In any case, as
I was pretty sure I would not have the opportunity to pop over to Tanzania
in the near f­ uture, and as my work in Arusha was all but finished, I took a
look around in Sonoma. Gravenstein apples in Sebastopol caught my eye.
Yeah, I had eaten ­those as a kid. Now ­these sweet crisp apples with origins
in Denmark w ­ ere touted as part of Sebastopol’s local heritage. E
­ very ­little
town—­Forestville, Occidental, Monte Rio, Guerneville—­had a string of
artisanal food products for sale. Amid the wineries I saw an array of goat
farms, some offering pygmy goats for sale as pets and livestock, o ­ thers
raising dairy goats for California chèvres.
My interest was piqued, but I was not sure quite what I was looking at.
I recall idling about in a bookstore (I believe it was in Calistoga) that had
what seemed like an enormous display of books dedicated to local foods.
I skimmed through the most recent issue of Gastronomica on its shelves.
When I talked to my wife over dinner, I told her that I had an idea for a
research proj­ect. Taking advantage of her indulgence, I said that ­there was
something called Slow Food, and I thought it could be looked at as a social
movement in the United States. Even better, I said we could spend our
summers up in Sonoma while I did the research, since the stuff seemed to be
everywhere. How hard could that be?
I tucked the thought away for a while. We flew back to our home in
North Carolina. I took up my ungodly commute to my newfound admin-
istrative tasks at the College of William and Mary, and I thought about
­those goat farms. One Saturday morning in 2008, I went shopping at the
Carrboro Farmers’ Market, about a mile and a half from my h ­ ouse. ­Until
that point, although I had lived in the area for five years and had done
some shopping at the market, I had not been a regular ­there; I usually
went to the market only for seasonal fruit—­strawberries in May, or wa-
termelon in the summer. I certainly did not know any of the vendors by
name, or even by sight. On this Saturday, though, it suddenly dawned on
me that I r­ eally did not need to go anywhere to investigate the questions
I had become interested in out in California. Local food, as the term sug-
gests, is everywhere and, as it happens, quite prominently so in North
Carolina’s Triangle (the area that lies between the three cities of Raleigh,
Durham, and Chapel Hill), where I lived.
I was enlivened by the prospect of d ­ oing this work almost literally in my
own backyard, albeit a l­ ittle wistful that I might not have to go to Sonoma
to do it. In looking around the Carrboro Farmers’ Market on that fateful
Saturday, I also realized something rather obvious: it would not be pos­si­
ble for any one person to study the Slow Food movement, at least not in
the ethnographic fashion that is typical of the kind of anthropological re-
search I have usually done. In part as a happy accident of the cultural geog-
raphy of central North Carolina, I saw a number of vendors offering pork
products for sale, and I realized that I might be able to look more closely
at pigs and pork as a lens through which to examine the wider questions
posed by con­temporary efforts to transform American food systems. The
fact that pigs are iconic of North Carolina’s preferred cuisine made the
case for choosing m ­ atters porcine even stronger. Moreover, the pig as a cu-
linary form and a lively creature is, as I knew even before I thought of this
as research, highly thought of by devotees of Slow Food and high cuisine.
“The pig has power­ful mojo in the world of cooking,” as Sara Dickerman

viii — Prefa ce
noted in her essay on the gastronomic lyricism that pigs and pork inspire
(2006). Of course any ethnographer worth his Maldon sea salt knows that
­human-­porcine relations are the stuff of legendary anthropological theo-
rizing, from the abominations of Leviticus (Douglas 2012; Soler 1997) to
En­glish forms of linguistic abuse (Leach 1964), and from Bakhtinian revels
(Stallybrass and White 1986) to Melanesian ritual (Rappaport 1968). All
this, coupled with their ironic gustatory appeal to an other­wise nice Jew-
ish boy, made an ethnography focused on the array of values generated
by the (re)production, transformation, distribution, and consumption of
pigs and their pork seem like just the ­thing for me to do.
Before I ­really began my research efforts in earnest, I was struck again
with the particularity of the language that I heard and read being used to
describe foods, like pigs and pork, by advocates for ­these innovations in
the food system. What made a food local? Could it be just a ­matter of regu-
lation and certification of the kind carried out by a number of markets—­
including the Carrboro Farmers’ Market—­that assured their customers
that all of the products purveyed at the market ­were “local” ­because they
came from less than fifty (or thirty, or a hundred, or however many) miles
from the market? Is something local simply by virtue of its proximity in
geometric space? Similarly, how did some food become recognized as part
of a regional “heritage”? And what made some kinds of foods part of a
“foodway,” while o ­ thers w
­ ere recognized as “heritage” and still o
­ thers ­were
noted as “heirloom” va­ri­e­ties? How did some kinds of foods become one
­thing and not another? The slipperiness and unreliability of t­ hese terms
is, of course, notorious, as this book demonstrates. It is not always clear
­whether they are intended to convey information to consumers; certify
the presence of some distinctive property in the designated foods; brand
the farmer, producer, or purveyor of the product being sold; or purpose-
fully delude potential customers with a marketing ploy. Did this complex
lexicon actually index any reliable content?
Moreover, I was especially intrigued by what semioticians would call
the iconic function of ­these terms (Fehérváry 2013; Manning 2012; Munn
1986)—­that is, the par­tic­ul­ ar kinds of qualities that are evoked by the use
of specific terms. “Heritage,” for example, is a particularly complex term
to use, perhaps especially with re­spect to food. In a few instances it might
be the product of a certification pro­cess that labels foods meeting specific
criteria that have been agreed on, ­either by experts in a par­tic­ul­ ar field (for
example, by animal scientists trying to protect the biological profile of a
par­tic­u­lar “heritage” breed) or by producers who want to regulate their

P re fa ce — ix
markets so as to create premium value for their “heritage” good. Just as
often it is simply a term that is used willy-­nilly to suggest quality to po-
tential consumers.
But why—­and how—­does “heritage” suggest quality? It implies a certain
temporal depth to a product, one that suggests a legacy of usage or produc-
tion over many generations (but how many? and where?). Even advocates
for Slow Food in the United States recognize that “heritage” means some-
thing very dif­f er­ent in Eu­rope, where Slow Food began, than it does in the
United States (Petrini 2006). While Eu­ro­pean producers often seek pro-
tection for products and practices that are held to have a long, recognized
legacy in a par­tic­u­lar region, most American farmers and artisans are less
committed to this notion of “heritage” (Paxson 2012). Nonetheless, “heri-
tage” flourishes as a term in the production or sale of par­tic­u­lar foods in
the United States. What can it mean, for example, that an apple like the
Gravenstein, which is known to come from South Jutland in Denmark,
could be declared a heritage variety in Sonoma County and be included
in the U.S. Slow Food’s “Ark of Taste” (Local Harvest n.d.)? Or that pigs
celebrated as descendants of Spanish black foot pigs could be registered
as an American heritage breed in North and South Carolina (and, indeed,
across the country)?
In the course of this book I directly examine such questions and show
how complicated it is to make such deceptively complicated descriptions.1
But I also note that it is pos­si­ble to speak of “heritage,” even in the absence
of any real generational depth—­and even when producers and consumers
do not assume any such depth—­because the word can also connote more
general qualities of depth. Indeed, a central quality of the foods that are
described as “heritage” is the way they are felt to embody deeper meanings
or characteristics. Such depth may be attributes of their pro­cess of produc-
tion or flavor. In this way, depth of meaning can be contrasted to other
qualities—­like being cheap, insipid, bland, or commercial—­and thereby
can represent foods described in this way as being opposed to, or distinct
from, the generic products of an industrial food system. In this book I
illustrate the ways that this oppositional possibility instantiates a criti-
cal contrast between the compromised values of our current food system
and what is often thought of (simply, if quite confusingly!) as “real” food.2
Heritage connotes generational, historical, grounded depth (and it is only
one among many signifiers held to instantiate ­these qualities in the food
world), which I argue is reliably embodied in something other­wise notori-
ously hard to know: the real ­thing.

x — Prefa ce
 This elusive but compelling truth, the real ­thing, is a power­ful motiva-
tion for the complex and challenging efforts I have seen made by farmers,
chefs, con­sul­tants, and ordinary eaters who are aiming to transform the
industrial food system or some specific dimension of it. This is not only a
question of finding the real stuff, not just a m ­ atter of seeking and spend-
ing and getting, but also of knowing what it is. Perhaps above all it is a
commitment to the notion that the real is a veritable entity, something
that can be brought into being, made concrete, and accessible in everyday
life. While figuring out what p ­ eople can possibly mean by “the real”—or
even by “real food”—is undoubtedly a messy task and full of ambiguity,
­these commitments to the real, as well as the capacity to discern it and the
wherewithal to acquire it, are not only abstract, metaphysical m ­ atters. The
guiding prob­lem I discuss in this book is, in fact, trying to understand and
demonstrate how real pigs come to embody t­ hese material and symbolic
characteristics. Finding and making such pigs, lively animals that incar-
nate quality, is a proj­ect with sociocultural as well as po­liti­cal economic
dimensions. The book before you is my attempt to flesh out the endeavors
of ­those working to bring us real pigs.

P re fa ce — xi
This page intentionally left blank
 AC­K NOW­L EDG­M ENTS

This book was made pos­si­ble by the generous support of many friends
and colleagues. Much of the writing was done over the course of research
leaves provided by the College of William and Mary, and I thank the col-
lege for its support. I have also benefited from invitations to pres­ent parts
of this work at the Universities of Chicago, Michigan, and Western Michi-
gan; the Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology; the Radcliffe Exploratory
Seminar; the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University
of London; and the Weltkulturen Museum, in Frankfurt am Main. I am
grateful for t­ hese invitations and for the generous comments I received
from ­these diverse audiences.
A number of scholars have offered their critical support. I presented
vari­ous essays that would become parts of this book at the 2008 and 2009
Symposia on Con­temporary Perspectives in Anthropology. I would like to
thank, in par­tic­ul­ar, Misty Bastian, Tim Burke, Grey Gundaker, Dorothy
Hodgson, Janet MacIntosh, Adeline Masquelier, and Rachel Reynolds for
their insights at ­those events. At vari­ous conferences I have benefited
from the com­pany and comments of Judith Farquhar, Robert Foster, Cris-
tina Grasseni, Donna Haraway, Deborah Heath, Karen Ho, Hannah Lan-
decker, Laura Lewis, Paul Manning, Anne Meneley, Diane Nelson, Harris
Solomon, Amy Trubek, and Harry West. Kriszti Fehérváry, in addition to
always being an enthusiastic supporter of my work as well as a font of sto-
ries about the Hungarian devotion to pork products, did me the tremendous
ser­vice of using the manuscript for this work in her gradu­ate seminar in
Ann Arbor. The comments I received from her and her wonderful students
made an enormous difference in the final work. I had a spectacular time
organ­izing a conference with Marisol de la Cadena in 2010, and the best
part of it was beginning a conversation with her about animal life, the
po­liti­cal possibilities of ontological m
­ atters, and a sincere questioning of
the value of anthropology. I have enjoyed disagreeing with her at least as
much as I enjoyed agreeing with her, and I look forward to seeing what
she makes of Colombian cows. Gillian Feeley-­Harnik and John Hartigan
offered invaluable comments on chapter 4. Gillian, in par­tic­ul­ ar, provided
such a detailed, thoughtful, and inspiring critique that it provided one of
the central themes of the book as a w ­ hole. I cannot thank her enough
for her beyond-­generous collegiality. Paige West offered a generous and
clear critique of the book that was essential to my final drafting of the
work. Ken Wissoker and Elizabeth Ault at Duke University Press have also
been ­great supporters of this book, and their accessibility and enthusiasm
have made working with the press a plea­sure. Tim Stallmann created the
maps. Heather Paxson has been a constant and remarkable interlocutor
throughout my research and writing. It was her work on artisanal cheese
that first alerted me to the work being done on alternative food systems
in the United States, which helped make it pos­si­ble for me to imagine this
research and give it some direction. Her invitations to speak at a Sawyer
Seminar and ­later at Radcliffe ­were genuinely appreciated, and her insights
and questions about my research and chapters have been tremendously
helpful in crafting my arguments. I have also been exceptionally lucky to
be carry­ing out this work on “my” pigs at the same time that Alex Blanch-
ette was engaged in his phenomenal work on “his” pigs. Alex’s remarkable
grasp of the interface between ­labor, care, and animal life (of all sorts) in
the con­temporary American po­liti­cal economy of hog production has been
a source of real inspiration. I was delighted to serve on his dissertation
committee, but the truth is that I learned a hell of a lot more about my
own work from him than he benefited from my suggestions. Both Heather
and Alex read far more of this manuscript than any colleague can be ex-
pected to, and I am sincerely thankful for their unflagging support. Above
all, I want to thank Margaret Wiener and Chris Nelson, members of my
writing group, for their detailed comments on almost e­ very page in this
book. I learned a ­great deal from their wonderful work, as well. It ­will be
impossible for me ever to think about this book without thinking of Chris

xiv — Ac­k now­l ed g­m en t s

and Margaret (and Atsuko, Siobhan, Fifi, and Sophie) as the friends who
shared not just writing but also living in Carrboro and Chapel Hill, where
so much of this research was carried out. Wherever we are, they w ­ ill for-
ever be a part of my life, not only my work, and that is something to be
very, very grateful for.
On a purely personal note, I must thank Kj and John F. for helping to
keep me sane by encouraging me to do something ridicu­lous. I am forever
in their debt. Or perhaps I just owe them a Triscuit.
Fieldwork is always a privilege, as strangers become the best of friends
and share aspects of experience that cultivate profound forms of intimacy
and empathy. Carrying out this research almost literally in my own back-
yard, in central North Carolina where I so loved living for twelve years,
only amplified this privilege. The nine individuals featured in the profiles
I pres­ent h
­ ere w
­ ere very generous with their time and offered me support
that exceeds anything I could give them in return. ­There are too many
farmers, vendors, and market customers for me to thank them by name,
but I have learned something from ­every one of them. I r­ eally appreciate
Mike Jones’s support for my work and his constant willingness to talk
to me about anything and every­thing—­and pigs, too. Charles Sydnor—­
known to every­one as Doc—is a master rancher at Braeburn Farms, and I
have not only learned a ­great deal from him about grass and c­ attle, but I
have been sincerely humbled by his re­spect and enthusiasm for my work.
I learned a ­great deal while having a very good time working alongside
Marshay Privott. I can hardly thank him enough for the few months that
we ­were able to do chores together. A number of unimaginably talented
chefs offered their support for my work, and many of them took the time
to talk with me extensively about their work and their interest in pas-
tured pork. In par­tic­u­lar, Adam Rosen, Aaron Vandermark, and Jeff Bar-
ney made very helpful contributions to my work. Andrea Reusing not
only talked with me, but she also gave me the opportunity to work in her
award-­winning kitchen at Lantern alongside her phenomenal staff. Fer-
nando Lara put up with me during the summer of 2009 while carry­ing out
his herculean tasks in prepping a thousand delicious and exhausting con-
coctions ­every day in a way-­too-­small kitchen. I learned a ­great deal from
him and from Miguel Torres and Monica Segovia-­Welch, as well. I thank
all of t­hese hard-­working cooks. Andrea Weigel, who writes about food
for the Raleigh News and Observer, also offered some valuable insights, for
which I am grateful. Steve Moize and Jeannette Beranger of the Livestock

A c­k now­l e d g­m e n t s — xv

Breed Conservancy had a number of conversations with me about their
work and this added a ­great deal to my understanding of this proj­ect.
I do not know what to say about the Carrboro Farmers’ Market except
that it has been my home for part of ­every week for the past seven years.
Working side by side with the farmers, bakers, cheese makers, and cultiva-
tors of all good t­ hings has almost always been pure joy. First Sarah Blacklin
(whom I profile h ­ ere) and then Erin Jobe, the man­ag­ers of the market,
welcomed my work, shared extremely helpful information with me, and
engaged in thoughtful and fulfilling discussions about farming, food, and
community. I am grateful to them both. I first got to know John O’­Sullivan
(also profiled in this book) at the market, and I want to offer him my ­great
thanks ­here. John is a bottomless source of insight and understanding
about local food, agrarian history, and community politics in North Caro-
lina. Whenever he expressed his approval for the work I was ­doing, it was
tremendously reassuring for me to know I might be on the right track.
John has done the entire state of North Carolina an impor­tant ser­vice in
his ­career, and I am the beneficiary of that as his former fellow citizen and
as his colleague and friend.
Eliza MacLean is the best. Nothing you ­will read in this book could have
even been ­imagined ­were it not for Eliza. She is the busiest person you
could ever meet, but she took the time to teach me pretty much every­
thing I know about anything I have written about h ­ ere. From my first days
mucking about on Cane Creek Farm to my final days in Carrboro manning
the high-­tech mobile trailer of the Left Bank Butchery, Eliza has been my
guru, guide, and dear friend. She has also always let me know how thank-
ful she is for my help to her, which is embarrassing considering how much
I have benefited from our nonstop jabbering relationship. On top of all this,
Eliza made it pos­si­ble for my getting to know all the brilliant and beauti-
ful members of her ­family—­Quinn; Enid; and my sweetheart, Elizabeth
Basnight—­who have greatly enriched this book, my kitchen, and my life. I
cannot wait to get back to Saxapahaw, as often as pos­si­ble, to see how Cane
Creek Farm grows over the years and to spend time with just about my
favorite ­people on the planet.
Just about my favorite—­but I ­will reserve that esteemed status for
Ezra Weiss and Julie Corsaro. If it ­weren’t for Ezra, the three of us would
never have lived for so long in North Carolina, and this work would never
have happened. So I am thrilled that he was happy to stay in Carrboro way
back when. But I am especially proud of the way he has grown into a fine
and compassionate young man. His enthusiasm for animals and farming

xvi — Ac­k now­l ed g­m en t s

kept me enthusiastic, and I am delighted that he is g­ oing to keep his toe
in farming—­and in North Carolina—­for a ­little while longer. Of course, I
love him dearly. And he took many of the ­great photos in the book. Julie
is my alpha and omega, and her tolerance for my filthy boots, my ungodly
early Saturday mornings, and a ridicu­lous amount of pork leave me hum-
bled. Her ­simple tolerance for me is rather inexplicable, but I could not
live without it.

An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as “Making Pigs Local: Discerning

the Sensory Character of Place” (Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 3: 440–63),
and a version of chapter 7 was published as “Configuring the Au­then­tic
Value of Real Food: Farm-­to-­Fork, Snout-­to-­Tail, and Local Food Move-
ments” (American Ethnologist 39, no. 3: 615–27).

A c­k now­l e d g­m e n t s — xvii

This page intentionally left blank
 INTRODUCTION

One of the first pigs I encountered in my ethnographic research was an

enormous boar with a thick mottled coat. With coloring that vaguely
resembled that of a calico cat, he was the sire of a ­great many hogs that
would be “grown out” (or raised) and taken to market by Eliza MacLean of
Cane Creek Farm, then located in Snow Camp, Alamance County, North
Carolina. He went by the name of Bill Clinton (but known on the farm as
just Clinton).
Clinton is no longer with us, though his legacy lives on in one of his
equally prodigious offspring, Ju­nior. Pigs like Clinton and Ju­nior have
become iconic ­today of efforts to re-­create industrial food systems, to
revitalize—or perhaps reinvent—­commitments to slow and local foods.
This commitment speaks not only to the conditions of ­these animals’ pro-
duction and the regional practices associated with their husbandry, but
also to their eventual consumption as pork. Chefs and food enthusiasts
of all kinds across the United States are engaged in a bit of a pig romance
(see, for example, Dickerman 2006), since the many and varied ways in
which pork can be prepared or used to enrich a host of other dishes—­
from lardy confit of root vegetables to maple bacon doughnuts—is now
a well-­established dimension of con­temporary American cuisine. When I
asked a well-­regarded chef and a regular customer of Cane Creek what at-
tracted him to pigs like ­those sired by Clinton, he was less concerned with
their ancestry than with their flavor. He told me he was “looking for a pig
Fig I.1 ​Clinton, a large Farmer’s Hybrid boar (foreground).

with some fat on it.”1 Of course, fat is not just a question of the flavor of
the pork, it is also a vital physiological component of the pig’s life—so
production and consumption join together in their common concern for
excellent fat.
If we take a moment to consider Clinton, we can see that he possessed a
number of qualities that ­were critical to his own life and to the community
of farmers, chefs, and consumers that w ­ ere interested in him. How did
Clinton get to be a pig with fat? At his heaviest, indeed, he weighed close
to a thousand pounds. But are pigs not always fat? And if not, why not? If
a chef is looking for a fat pig, perhaps that suggests that only certain types
of pigs—­pigs of a certain stock or lineage—­can be counted on to yield suf-
ficiently fat pork. Or perhaps it simply means that any pig can become a
suitably fat pig if it is raised in the proper fashion. What might it mean for
pigs to come in recognizable types—in Clinton’s case, the Farmer’s Hybrid
variety? How does this question of pig classification relate to the desirability
of the pork the animals yield? Prob­lems like ­these are often understood in
terms of yet other qualities, like being “natu­ral” or “heritage.” Moreover,
­these esteemed qualities of heritage and breed are very much a part of the
material dimensions of Clinton’s life, as well as of the conditions in which
he was produced and reproduced. The fact, for example, that Clinton had
a thickly bristled coat made it pos­si­ble for him and his descendants to be
raised outdoors. Even in inclement weather, in places like northern Iowa
and Sweden, hairy pigs such as ­these can endure ­bitter cold with only straw

2 — I nt roduc t ion
for bedding. Just as impor­tant, hairy pigs can survive the often scorch-
ing summers of places like North Carolina. It turns out that pigs w ­ ill get
terribly sunburned without this hairy protection, though they also need
adequate wallows in their pasture to keep cool since pigs cannot sweat.
Furthermore, pigs raised outdoors get a good amount of exercise, which
often means they “grow out” a l­ittle more slowly than other pigs, which
also require substantially dif­fer­ent conditions of production.
A fat pig like Clinton, then, possesses a host of related qualities. And
all of t­hese characteristics speak to the relationship between place and
time, as well as that between history and community. Such qualities are
markedly valued by the categories of slow and local food, which explic­itly
connect value and region to heritage and taste as well. What is gener-
ally less noted, however, is how relevant such qualities are to the ways in
which communities are put together and often drawn apart. The relation-
ships that shape communities—in the con­temporary United States overall
and perhaps especially in North Carolina, which has under­gone a tremen-
dously rapid transformation in recent decades—­are often brought to the
fore when m ­ atters of locality, history, and even aesthetic judgments about
­things like taste are the focus of social movements like t­ hose centered on
pasture-­raised pork and local food. I argue that ­these proj­ects and practices
raise critical questions of class—in par­tic­ul­ ar, questions that anthropolo-
gists have been asking about food (specifically, its meanings, value, and
availability) for a very long time.
The con­temporary practices centered on pasture-­raised pigs in the Pied-
mont of North Carolina are the focus of my account in this book. The pigs
in the Piedmont raise prob­lems relating to the transformation of place
and the ways we inhabit it. They exemplify ­people’s interests in praising
the virtues of heritage, as well as capitalizing on its cachet. Promoting forms
of value like heritage also depends on developing and circulating ways of
knowing this value, so I pay attention to the vari­ous modes of discern-
ment embodied by artisanal producers as well as selective consumers that
contribute to the qualities that make for good pigs and good pork. Above
all, farmers in the Piedmont as well as customers shopping for pork from
healthy and happy pasture-­raised pigs are in search of “the real ­thing,” a
phenomenon and an experience with unique characteristics that are in
some ways irreducible and that make them worth seeking out. In this way,
a concern for authenticity is a prominent feature of this work. I explore
authenticity—­the commitment to producing, preserving, distributing, and
consuming “real” pigs—­throughout this book. Authenticity is plainly an

I n t roduc t ion — 3
ethnographically observable motivation,2 but it is also a complex sym-
bolic form that I argue needs to be better theorized, rather than dissolved
as epiphenomenal in a constructivist framework of in­ven­ted traditions
and fetishized commodities. This book winds through multiple sites and
practices—­a host of elaborate locales—­across the North Carolina Pied-
mont to detail ­these themes of place, discernment, heritage, and artisan-
ship, all of them held to be au­then­tic. My aim is to describe and analyze
the ways that many ­people’s commitments to the reinvention of food are
realized and contested through what they consider to be (as my title re-
veals) Real Pigs—­that is, lively pigs that yield delicious pork, all possessed
of an au­then­tic character. In the remainder of the introduction, I spell
out the theoretical orientations and methodological practices that have
guided my research on ­these m ­ atters.

An Anthropology of Food
Anthropology has had no shortage of works dedicated to the study of
food. As Judith Farquhar notes, “for anthropology from its inception,
food has been good to think with” (2006, 146). The past fifteen years or so
have seen a true explosion in the lit­er­a­ture that relates food to sociocul-
tural questions (for numerous examples, see Holtzman 2006; Mintz and
Dubois 2002; Sutton 2010). My approach to the study of food is part of
an effort to bring po­liti­cal economic and phenomenological concerns into
a common framework. A number of works have looked at the way that
food has played a central role in the reordering of social relations and, in
par­tic­u­lar, in the production and consolidation of relations of social hier-
archy. Preeminent among t­ hese is Sidney Mintz’s pathbreaking Sweetness
and Power (1985). In his historically grounded text, Mintz describes the
ways that sugar production generated very specific conditions of enslaved
­labor in the Ca­rib­be­an; shows how this mode of production provided a
template for industrialized ­labor in the British metropole; and shows how
the sugar produced by the industrialized plantation transformed the Brit-
ish diet in ways that both facilitated the creation of a resource-­limited and
time-­disciplined working class and made that class dependent on a cheap,
abundant, stimulating, and drug-­like food.
Mintz’s work—like the many works drawing directly or indirectly
on it (Gewertz and Errington 2010; Nestle 2013; Patel 2007; Schlosser
2001)—­provides a model for thinking about how the production, circula-
tion, and consumption of foods can come to embody transforming regimes

4 — I nt roduc t ion
of hierarchy and l­ abor, inculcating innovative and compelling tastes while
also consolidating the power of t­ hose who stand to profit from t­ hese re-
gimes. While this analy­sis is more directly relevant to the industrial con-
finement pork I discuss in chapter 1, it does form an impor­tant backdrop
to the pastured-­pork practices I address h ­ ere. At the same time, I am reluc-
tant to portray American consumers of industrial foods as the benighted
dupes that Mintz’s work and the lit­er­a­ture following it often make them
out to be. Even some of the most erudite and committed farmers I work
with eat foods from a variety of sources and cannot scrupulously restrict
themselves to only local food. One farmer likes to joke about taking long
trips across the state to pro­cessors or customers and tells me how she
stops at Bojangles for a sausage biscuit—or, as she puts it, “some of their
confinement pork.” Moreover, the reflexive implications of ideological
­critiques like t­ hose inspired by Mintz’s work not only suggest a misrepre­
sen­ta­tion of consumers’ motives and values, but they also preserve a place
of exception for the critics, who are somehow sophisticated, enlightened,
or self-­disciplined enough to withstand the inescapable grip of industrial
foods on our diets. As Julie Guthman asks in her trenchant critique of t­ hese
perspectives, “if junk food is everywhere and ­people are naturally drawn to
it, ­those who resist it must have heightened powers. When Pollan waxes
poetic about his own rarefied, distinctive eating practices, the messianic,
self-­satisfied tone is not accidental. In describing his ability to overcome
King Corn, to conceive, procure, prepare, and serve his version of the per-
fect meal, Pollan affirms himself as a supersubject while relegating o ­ thers
to objects of education, intervention, or just plain scorn” (2007, 78).
From a broader perspective, what is missing from ­these now myriad
popu­lar press critiques of so-­called industrial foods is a recognition of both
the way that all foods—­industrial, “real,” and other­wise—­are enmeshed
in a field of po­liti­cal economic forces3 and the fact that all food-­related ac-
tivities are modes of cultural practice. The choice to pursue alternatives to
industrial foods, or to look for niche-­market meats, is not merely a mode
of liberation from corporate structures of authority informed by rational
insight. Quite aside from the facts that it is impossible to eat in only this
way in the con­temporary United States and that all consumers eat foods
from a variety of sources, the interest in alternatives is itself a meaningful
activity, motivated by a range of values that are themselves encoded in
symbolically charged qualities materialized in food. Pasture-­raised pork
chops are not exempt from ­these pro­cesses of class strug­gle, nor are they
simply the enlightened choices of conscientious consumers.

I n t roduc t ion — 5
 Mintz’s work offers a useful—­indeed, pathbreaking—­paradigm that
shows how to offer a historical perspective on a commodity supply chain.
But his approach to the relationship between power structures and sub-
jects’ consciousness of consumption4 reduces meaning to the reflex of a
power-­laden, but somehow symbolically transparent, pro­cess of produc-
tion that is wholly separated from, yet still powerfully constrains, con-
sumers who strug­gle to construct the inside meanings they attribute to
commodity forms. A more promising, if still problematic, approach to
the ways that food-­related practices can articulate an order of po­liti­cal
economic—­and specifically class—­relationships in a world of lived ex-
periences (and not, as Mintz says, the mapping of working-­class cultural
meanings on economic goods) is offered by Pierre Bourdieu. His discussion
of “The Habitus and the Space of Life-­Styles” (1984, 169–225) illuminates
the way in which class dispositions are embodied5 and do not simply re-
flect dominant structures of po­liti­cal economy, but rather constitute the
often unconscious—or taken-­for-­granted—­values of a hierarchical order
by means of the practical activity of subjects. His discussion of the “taste
of necessity” that is the centerpiece of his entire chapter demonstrates
that necessity is not sufficient to account for a cheap, heavy, rich, fatty
working-­class cuisine (and especially the diet of working-­class men), nor is
this a taste (­after the fashion of bourgeois lifestyle choices) that is merely
a demonstration of the unsophisticated palate of proletarian rubes. Taste
is neither a utilitarian calculation (according to which poor p ­ eople econo-
mize and eat poor food) nor an absolute mea­sure of sophistication (in this
view, the more cosmopolitan one’s experience, the more cultured one’s
preferences). Instead, it is a set of dispositions that does not simply con-
form to but actively constitutes (and so may transform, or reproduce—­
lest we forget that social ­orders do have a remarkable capacity to repro-
duce themselves) a habitus.
Bourdieu’s discussion of fish in the working-­class diet is a l­ittle gem of
analy­sis of how this works, offering insights into the symbolic mediation
of class and gender relations in the material characteristics of the food
itself and—­especially—in the embodied character of tastes, preferences,
and the ­actual eating of a meal:

In the working classes, fish tends to be regarded as an unsuitable food

for men, not only b ­ ecause it is a light food, insufficiently “filling,”
which would only be cooked for health reasons . . . ​but also ­because,
like fruit (except bananas) it is one of the “fiddly” t­ hings which a man’s

6 — I nt roduc t ion