This Little Piggy Went to the Reader ...

By Laura Oppenheimer in Food on May 21, 2007 2:00PM

In last week's Chicago Reader, Mike Sula journeyed up to southern Wisconsin to visit Hillspring Farm, where the rare and endangered mulefoot pig is being bred. Stop reading now if you have vegetarian tendencies, because these pigs aren't being bred for a petting zoo. “If you treat them just like precious zoo animals that’s how they get extinct,” said Linda Derrickson, who runs the farm with her husband, Mark Kessenich. At print time, Crystal, one of their sows, was just about to give birth to her first litter.

Today we read on the Food Chain that not only has Crystal farrowed her first four piglets, but that the Reader has adopted one! They haven't decided which of the four pigs they will adopt, but from what we've read, it doesn't matter much. Writes Sula:

The little things are impossibly cute: black, shiny, silky, about the size of guinea pigs, and though they're sticking close to mama, or burying themselves deep in hay to keep warm these first few days, they're already distinguishing themselves — the boar has tiny white feet, a deviation from solid black allowable under the breed standard.

It will take 10 months to a year for the pig to grow big enough to slaughter. During that time, the Food Chain will give updates on the pig's progress and "examine every aspect of what it takes to raise your own food — the ups, the downs, the tears, the laughter, the squeals, the meals." At the end, the mulefoot will be slaughtered, and a lucky reader or two will be invited to partake in the feast. Not convinced yet that this will be totally awesome? According to Sula, mulefoot meat "has a clean, unadulterated flavor as opposed to that of supermarket pork, whose mealy, mushy texture and oily unsavoriness you don’t notice if it’s all you’ve ever had. Mulefoots have rosy, rich, tender meat, and the quantity and quality of their fat make them good for ham and bacon, something that’s been bred out of the factory-farmed 'other white meat.'"

Image via the Food Chain.