I visited Marta’s family to ask them why they didn’t show up at the recent latrine meeting, so the conversation did not start on very positive pretenses. After we finished with business, while the son was up in a tree tossing me down mandarin oranges to eat, I asked Marta what she was cooking in the gigantic pot set up over the fire outside. She told me, pig, once she could find one of her brothers to kill it.
I decided to stick around. Although about a third of the families in my community raise a pig or two, I have never tasted pork in the Comarca. A piglet is a huge investment – $40. If the family wants the pig to grow quickly, corn must be available, or else the pig can be left to snuffle around for food in the woods and yard. Once the pig reaches 150 or 200 pounds the family can sell it live to a Latino farmer for $100 and up, and it is hauled away.
The same holds true for cows. A few better–off men in the community own a herd of cows, which turn all of the footpaths into swamps when being herded from pasture to pasture. Only three cows have been killed in the village itself for community consumption in the past year. I have come to abhor pigs not only because they are smelly and ruin gardens, but because they are a symbol of what people in my community cannot afford – meat.
So naturally I was surprised that this woman was going to kill a pig for her family (and me) to eat. She explained that the pig stopped growing after it reached 50 pounds, so it was not worth trying to sell it. As we were talking, her brother walked by with an axe. I heard a screechy squeal, and next thing I knew a dead pig was plopped down on a few logs on the ground next to me.
I was still confused why Marta was heating up a big pot of water –even this small pig would not fit. It turns out that the hot water was first used to wash the pig with a brush, and then to peel the pig. I was handed a big butchering knife and while Marta dumped cups of boiling water on the pig, I scraped off the hair with the knife. It made me appreciate how much surface area this small hairy pig had.
Once the pig was completely hairless, we rinsed it off with hot water again and then started to cut it up. First, down the center to pull out the inner organs. Then, leg by leg. I was so focused that I did not have time to be grossed out, and neither did the 10 kids crowded around us witnessing the dissection. The last and only other intimate experience I have had with a pig was on an operating table in a lab at Johns Hopkins, when we were testing our bipolar kidney clamp on an anesthetized 200 pound pig. My lesson learned from my first pig operation was to not pop the bladder. This time I had better luck.
The mountain of edible pig parts grew – because pretty much everything is edible, including the head. I stayed for lunch (boiled green bananas and pig liver) and then headed back home with my goodie bag of 1 pound of pork, which I shared with my neighbors. It tasted like heaven.
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