Pig Feet & Crickets

In 2008, in the midst of a cripplingrecession, British supermarkets started to stock a cut of meat virtuallydisappeared since the 1950s: trotters.

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Trotters, otherwise known as pig feet,hadn’t been a common dish for over40 years. High in collagen, pre-recession, trotters werealmost exclusively used as a thickening agent in gravy. Yet, with the onslaughtof a major financial crisis, resourcefulness and a need for cheap meat broughtthe pigfoot back to the mainstream. While grocerystores added trotters to their inventory, restaurateurs experimented with theproduct on their menu – producing innovative new recipes.

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What began with a financial needtransformed into a seemingly lasting cultural change. Accordingto The Daily Mail, the British supermarketWaitrose has seen sales of trotters rise 36 per cent from 2016 to 2017. Andtrotters aren’t the only cut in the midst of a renascence, Waitrose has alsoseen an increase in sales of pork chops, shanks, and beef brisket.

The return of the trotter speaks to afundamental truth about food: what we find tasty is subject to economics,culture, politics, and availability.

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Worldwide, different cultures have evolvedto define various meat eating habits and norms. Not all cultures have come tothe same conclusion as to what is edible. In France, snails (escargot) andgoose liver (foie gras) are considered delicacies. In Africa, all types ofanimal bones are eaten without a second thought. And yet, in the North America,most consumers baulk at the idea of eating snails or bones. Clearly, thisindicates that the parts of meat that are and aren’t edible is learned notinnate.

The return of the trotter speaks to a fundamental truth about food: what we find tasty is subject to economics, culture, politics, and availability.

Yet, it is the constructed, arbitrary andlearned nature of our taste buds that will prove pivotal in upcoming decades ashumanity struggles with the diet we have created and attempts to replace itwith a diet we can sustain.

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“Theway we consume meat is becoming a problem,” said Brock Bastain in a 2011 article published in The Conversation. “Meatproduction is resource intensive and has a significant impact on theenvironment, compared to less resource expensive food products.”

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Inother words, the human capacity to decide what is tasty, our ability toselective choose what is edible, has lead to consumption habits that pose agrave threat to our environment.

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Accordingto the interactive tool from the Water Footprint Network 717.5 gallons of water are required toproduce just one pound of pork. In 2016, Americans ate on average around 50 pounds of pork per year. At just over 323 million Americans (in 2016), that’s over 11.6 trilliongallons of water for pork production per year. That number doesn’t even takeinto account beef, chicken or any other types of meat consumed. That astoundingquantity of water is not sustainable, especially as the population continues togrow.

Yet, it is the constructed, arbitrary and learned nature of our taste buds that will prove pivotal in upcoming decades as humanity struggles with the diet we have created and attempts to replace it with a diet we can sustain.

Withthis population growth, the problem of human created waste is impossible toignore. Whether or not we want to, eventually, humans will need to find a moreethical path in our food consumption. This may mean that we will need totranscend our arbitrary definition of what is considered edible.

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In an effort to research unusual cuts ofmeat, I decided to visit my local butcher at The JuniperPig, a new business in the Denver area thatsupports the local food movement. I came away with a cut of beef called thepicanha. This cut is hard to come by in the United States but is common inSouth American countries like Argentina and Brazil. Sometimes known as the topsirloin cap, the picanha is the top part of a cow’s rump. With minimal research,I simply seasoned the meat with rock salt then grilled it for a delicious yetunconventional dinner.

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Yet, exploring adventurous cuts of meat atyour local butchers won’t make a substantial difference. To truly curb theeffects of mass meat production, more drastic, innovative, and, for thetime-being, distasteful measures need to be taken.

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In the United States, eating bugs such ascrickets is growing in popularity. Although cricket bars remain a novelty, businesseslike Edible Insects are springing uparound the country touting insects as highly nutritious due to high levels of protein,iron, calcium, and vitamin B12. Sriracha crickets, cricket flour, edible wormsand insect candy are just some of the items sold on the Edible Insects website.As unsavory as it seems, in a world engulfed by food insecurity, bugs mighteventually become a staple in our diets.

Businesses like Edible Insects are springing up around the country touting insects as highly nutritious. Sriracha crickets, cricket flour, edible worms and insect candy on the menu.

Yet, considering the human track recordfor consumption cognitive dissidence, eating bugs isn’t too much to ask.Westerners have often been able to separate the idea of what is edible fromwhat they are eating. An example of this lies in gelatin. Gelatin is made fromanimal by-products but most people probably don’t recognize their nostalgic, colourfuland flavourful Jello as containing animal bones.

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Furthermore, consider the quintessentialcase for human cognitive dissidence: meat. In order to reconcile our love ofanimals and our love of meat, we have learned to ignore the link betweenanimals and meat. Furthermore, we have also become adept at ignoring ameat-based paradox: we don’t eat animal bones but we eat gelatin without issue.Similarly, we don’t eat animal by-products but we have no problem eating hotdogs (which are made of animal by-products).

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We’ve become so disconnected as to thesource of our food that in a recent British Nutrition Foundation surveychildren thought that pasta came from animals and cheese came from plants.Fourteen per cent of the children in the national survey between the ages offive and seven indicated that bacon was a product of either a cow, sheep orchicken.

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Some people, such as some vegans, arguethat eating meat at all is not natural. In her book, Pig/ Pork: Archeology, Zoology and Edibility,Pia Spry-Marques brings up the idea of carnism.

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“Eating meat isn’t something we do becauseit’s inherent in our nature,” said Spry-Marques. “But rather because we’ve beenconditioned to do it by an invisible belief system that ‘encourages’ us to eatanimals.”

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Yet, this mindset is challenged. In a 2016Time magazine article, Jeffrey Kluger argues that when humans beganeating meat 2.6 million years ago, they increased their calorie intake withmeat while decreasing the energy needed to eat those calories.

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“Prey that has been killed and then prepared either by slicing, poundingor flaking provides a much more calorie-rich meal with much less chewing thanroot foods do,” said Kluger “Boosting nutrient levels overall,”

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Thereduction of energy used in eating gave way to brain growth. Therefore,providing the argument that eating meat allowed humans to get smarter.

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However, the argument for weather eatingmeat is natural or unnatural is completely useless. Given the constructednature of our taste preferences, and our power to control and manipulate thesepreferences, the ‘natural-ness’ of a product shouldn’t matter. We shouldinstead focus our preferences towards products that are healthy for our bodiesand our environment.

Given the constructed nature of our taste preferences, and our power to control and manipulate these preferences, the ‘natural-ness’ of a product shouldn’t matter. 

Nomatter why humans eat meat, the Western diet is currently raising,slaughtering, and eating meat in an unsustainable fashion. Weather we like itor not, we are not going to be able to waste resources at our current rate. Wewill need to make a change by either cutting down on our meat consumption,embracing crickets as food, welcoming pig feet into our diet or, more likely, acombination of all of these options. Fortunately, a rudimentary review ofcultural diets and the history of food makes it abundantly clear that this is achallenge perfectly suiting humanity.