Tales From ‘Big Pig’

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.