Dan Barber: Why Does Your Pork Taste Better? | DAN BARBER | Big Think

Dan Barber: Why Does Your Pork Taste Better?

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Dan Barber: The importance of fat and old-world breeding methods.

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DAN BARBER:

DAN BARBER is the Chef of Blue Hill, a restaurant in Manhattan's West Village, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, located within the nonprofit farm and education center, Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture. His opinions on food and agricultural policy have appeared in the New York Times, along with many other publications. Barber has received multiple James Beard awards including Best Chef: New York City (2006) and the country's Outstanding Chef (2009). In 2009 he was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world.

To expand on his philosophy of cooking with sustainably grown, local ingredients, Dan has been working with such organizations as the Kellogg Foundation, Slow Food USA and Earth Pledge to minimize the political and intellectual rhetoric around agricultural policies and to instead maximize the appreciation of eating good food. Focusing on the issues of pleasure, taste and regional bounty-and how these imperatives are threatened-Dan helped create the philosophical and practical framework for Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture and continues to help guide it in its mission to create a consciousness about the effects of everyday food choices.

He is author of the book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Why does your port taste better?

Dan Barber: Well the farmers do sort of this, I don’t know, old world breeding, which is they have a boar and a sow, so they do natural breeding. Like 99 percent of the breeding of pigs, for one it happens with a lot of animals. But with pigs specifically it’s done with frozen semen. It’s basically artificial insemination. So they have these super boars of which there’s like something like 2,000 super boars that they take the semen from.

And that gets impregnated into these sows in the industrial level because they don’t . . . they want the good genetics, and there are certain boars that have been bred to be great producers – “producers” meaning their offspring grow quickly. They have good fat to meat ration, etc., etc. – whatever the industry is looking for. That’s the other white meat. That’s where the other white meat is coming from – from frozen semen of a very select few boars. And so the natural way of course to do it is to get a boar and a sow together, and a sow when she’s in heat, and have them . . . have them work that way. But that’s a hard thing to do.

It’s a frustrating job because you gotta get the sow when she’s in heat, and the boar revved up, and it’s gotta work. And you know there are some complications there, so that’s sort of old world farming. Does it produce better flavor? Well I would argue that it does, but it would be a tough argument because there are other people who would say, “Well why wouldn’t you get the super boars? That’s what they’re bred for.” And it’s a no-brainer when you’re an educational facility. That’s part of the reason we do it. We’re an educational facility, so we’re there to show how it’s done. But I would argue that the flavor is better because you can control your future stock when you know your boar. So you can choose your boar, you can choose your sow, and you can marry that together. And you can through patience, through time, through generations increase the quality of your meat just by getting to know your meat.

And that’s what we’re there for, and that’s the exciting part about it. When you buy off the Internet – go to SwineGenetics.com – you can get frozen semen. And you can . . . You can use that, but it . . . But you really don’t know what you’re getting, and you don’t know what you’re introducing to your farm. And so in this way you’re in a closed system. And it seems to me to be a much more interesting way, and for me flavorful way to farm for the future.

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