A Suprise Pig Roast

Josefina invited us (Dana, Andy and I) to her house on Sunday, our last weekend on the farm. We were definitely her favorites, maybe because we actually work and we can understand her Spanish (even Andy). The most exciting part of the day was supposed to be the Class V hike to her house through the neighboring fields and one deep, steep ravine. I remember saying aloud, "I want to have a relaxing afternoon with Josefina. I hope I have nothing to write about." We arrive at Josefina´s house and no one is there. We situate ourselves on her front porch to wait. Within fifteen minutes, Josefina´s dad walks by and tells us that Josefina is up the road. As the sixty-eight year-old man escorts us at least a mile up the road, we struggle to keep up. Josefina is at her brother´s house. We walk in the backyard and instantly I knew I would be writing....

In celebration of Carnival and the holidays, Josefina´s whole family is there (3 sisters, 4 brothers, their wives/husbands, some friends, 8 children under five years of age, and 2 dogs).

Laying on its side in the backyard is a whole dead pig and someone is taking a blow torch to it. After the pig is sufficiently blow-torched, a water hose and knives are taken to the skin to remove dirt and the hair from the pig. The men then hoist the pig up so that is hanging from a rope cut through its jaw from the house. As a few men begin to cut and clean the pig out, another man begins removing the skin in squares about 1/4 inch thick.

The squares of the skin are then passed around and some people begin eating them raw. For the rest of us we put salt on it and throw it over an open fire for a minute (literally, one minute). Let me describe the meat skin. The outside is a tough thin layer because....it is skin. The bulk is the outside layer which is all white fat. So as you bite into it, your teeth first sink into the white fatty layer and then you must literally rip the tough skin. As you begin to chew it is an odd mixture of the really tough skin and the really chewy fatty part. I will let you think about this a moment....


Now as you are thinking about chewing it and the textrue in your mouth, let me tell you what is in every little piece of the fatty part...black hair. Wait...one more time...let me say it again: thick little pieces of black hair, everywhere, because while the knife cut the hair off of the skin, the hair follicles and hair remain under the skin.

Now my meat ethics--having not eaten meat (fish excluded) for better part of a decade--I have finally realized and come to terms with my meat ideals. While I will probably never eat chicken again, all other meat I do not eat now based largely on the way it is raised and processed in the US. Therefore, when I return to my family´s farm I am happy to eat grass-fed cows raised on our land. This also means that I will not eat a hamburger from a restaurant in the US, but in a strange irony, I am free to try meat raised by a family here in South America and butchered and cooked in the backyard. Before you picture me gorging myself on Ecuadorian pig skin in a backyard, while I feel I can eat the meat in good conscience, it usually means I will only try a few bites. Regardless of where it came from, I will never be a big meat eater. Josefina knows this and hands me the smallest piece of skin, Andy on the other hand being the token meat-eater in the group received a healthy portion (Dana hasn´t eaten meat since she was eleven, and I am sure that regardless of how good the pig looked hanging from he house with children and dogs running around it, she wasn´t THAT tempted).

This is how my eating experience went: tore off the smallest piece I could from the skin, let it sit in my mouth for a second and get the taste, turn around when no one is looking and spit it out on the ground. I ended up having to do this three times before it looked like I had taken one bite. Between those bites, I stood facing the crowd, pretending to chew. I handed my meat to Josefina as soon as it looked like I had one full bite.

I look over at Andy and while his face portrays how he really feels about the pig, he is eating his down like one of the family. After being with Andy for four and a half years now, I know exactly what was going through his mind. He was pretending he was with Anthony Bourdain on Travel Channel´s "No Reservations." With this scenario playing in his head and the video cameras I am sure he was imagining being in front of him, he finished every bite. Impressive.

Every part of the pig is used: skin, hooves, eyes, innards. The women set about cleaning the stomach and intestines as soon as they came out of the pig. They would be going into a soup; a huge black caldron over the open fire in the backyard awaited. To clean the intestines of a pig:
1. You must accept your position as an official "bad-ass".
2. Clean off the outside first, the little bits of white fat.
3. Cut into sections and spread the "fertilizer" that comes out of over your plants in the yard.
4. Rinse the intestines out with water and once more spread the "fertilizer" on your plants.
5. Take a stick from your back yard and push it through the intestine several times to get it REALLY clean.
6. Then on a rock slab, take all the clean intestines and work in lots of lime juice for 15-20 minutes. It should look like you are washing clothes, fiercely working the intestines. (I like this step the best because I think the acid from the citrus is killing any bacteria)
7. Put in the soup.

(The way everyone washed their hands was to scoop out water from the gray bin in the very left of the picture, scrub vigorously and go about their business (no soap)).

At this point we had been there for two and a half hours and had watched a pig being cleaned and prepped for cooking, we had eaten pig skin, we had watched the intestines and stomach be prepared for soup, we had watched as one mom and the children gathered around one of the girls and had picked lice out of her hair as they ate. It had been a full day in our eyes. We excused ourselves right after the mandatory one cup of wine had been passed around the group (we were at the end of the line, but really didn´t care at this point). Josefina was upset that we wouldn´t get to try cooked pig--so she found Andy a grocery bag and picked out some pieces of meat from the plastic bin in the yard that she was cutting the meat into for Andy to cook later. We hugged Josefina goodbye and left. I apparently left with some pig parts on my shirt from the hug as Josefina was in the middle of cutting up the pig. Immediately after we left, and got out the celebratory hand sanitize and doused all of us in it.

On a side note, Andy cooked the meat that night. While I did not partake it smelled great and did not have a hint of pig smell. It doesn´t get much fresher, it was alive that morning.