Pig Tales

Do you smell bacon? I certainly do, and I’m beginning to think a number of publishing houses do as well. In more than five years of publishing this review, until last week I’d never received a single book about pigs. Now the last two new books to reach my desk both take up pigs as their subject.

The most recent of these is Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat by Barry Estabrook as published by W. W. Norton & Company. Widely known and highly regarded for his skill in writing about food and food production – as exceptionally well displayed in his brilliant previous book Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit – Mr. Estabrook focuses this most recent inquiry into the place of pigs in our modern world with particular emphasis on how they are now raised and processed into food, and contrasts that with ways that might be better for both the pigs as well as those who eat them.