05/08/2015

Tales From ‘Big Pig’

17:10 minutes

Barry Estabrook’s latest book began with a pork chop—a cut so “transcendent, red in color, and well marbled with strands of delicious fat” that it made him wonder how modern pigs end up on our tables. The result is Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat, a journey through the good, the bad, and the ugly of hog farming, from industrial factory farms—part of the “Big Pig” industry, where a sow is “nothing more than a piglet machine”—to small operations that raise the pigs behind those transcendent chops. Read an excerpt here.

Segment Guests

Barry Estabrook

Barry Estabrook is the James Beard Award-winning author of Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat (Norton, 2015) and Tomatoland (2011) based in Vergennes, Vermont.

Meet the Producer

About Christopher Intagliata

Christopher Intagliata was Science Friday’s senior producer. He once served as a prop in an optical illusion and speaks passable Ira Flatowese.

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