Food for Life by Tim Spector

Author:Tim Spector
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781473552265
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2022-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

Pork

The animal that is unfortunate enough to be the world’s favourite for eating is the domestic pig, despite it being banned on religious grounds by first Jews and then Muslims. The most consistently popular British lunch of the last decade was the ham sandwich, and nearly every country has its own versions of cooked or cured pork meat. Pig meat has changed radically in the last century as the traditional English pig was crossed with the Chinese pig to produce more piglets and more meat. But in just the last thirty years, because of anti-fat fears, consumer demands and highly selective breeding, we have globally focused on just one of thousands of types of pig – the Large White variety. This pig is about 30 per cent leaner and therefore drier, paler and with less flavour, but is docile and produces many litters. Most are raised in industrial barns and fattened on grain with little to no access to exercise or sunlight. In Europe, Denmark is one of the largest producers and supplies most of the UK’s ham and bacon from massive factory farms where pigs are kept in sterile but small pens, living a miserable, dull captive existence before taking the conveyor belt to the abattoir.

The most efficient factories will make their sows produce over twenty-five piglets per year, never leaving their metal crates. The piglets are weaned from their mother at three to four weeks, so the sow can rapidly get pregnant again. Pig farming in the UK is on a much smaller scale with a high percentage of organic farms, where pigs spend time outdoors, and the piglets are weaned later and are healthier. But the meat is more expensive and harder to sell to a cost-conscious public who ignore the conditions of the mega-scale production lines. In the US, around 80 per cent of pork comes from these large multi-crate facilities with over 5,000 inmates that also have a huge environmental impact on surrounding areas due to the waste cesspools used for pig excrement.

In the past every Chinese family had a pig in their backyard; now modern China is the world’s largest producer with over 700 million pigs, even though we lost about half of those and about a quarter of the world’s pigs in 2019/20 to a painful nasty death from African swine flu, caused in part because of their genetic similarity and lack of immunity. Asian countries now use hi-tech methods to improve the yields of the millions of sows in massive facilities. Farming and feed corporations in China have linked up with tech giant Alibaba to use CCTV cameras linked to supercomputers to collect data on every aspect of feeding and health of over 10 million animals, using heat sensors, Fitbit exercise tracking and voice recognition systems to hear the sound of squealing piglets being squashed by their mothers. The data is being fed into artificial intelligence (AI) programs to predict the best methods to improve fertility and health of the sows and the piglets.

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