I've been doing some serious reading lately, E.M. And "Nourishing Traditions" is one of the books I've been reading!! I noticed that there were no recipes for pork...either chops, roasts or ribs, etc. Then I read in the book that "In the lab, pork was one of the best mediums for feeding the growth of cancer cells." This means pork MEAT not pork FAT. But I also read that two groups of people that eat lots of pork meat and lard are very long-lived.

So my question is...should Harry and I give up raising a pig every year 'cause it might be causing our cells to mutate into cancer?? Or is the jury still out one this one? Thanks for the help!

-- Anonymous, March 07, 2003

Answers

There are several different groups of anti-pork eating folks, most of them religiously based. I'm quite certain Sally Fallon is a believer in one of them, hers being Biblically based under the guise of 'science'. She does a similar thing with homosexuality, and I have had many discussions with her on that issue, and she actually softened her reference to it in the latest edition. She has very strong opinions, which of course is just fine as long as she agrees with me! :) She think gay people are an inutero 'mistake', caused by degradations of the food the parents eat, to put it simply.

Obviously I see this as hideous garbage, and I also totally disagree with her about pork. An experiment in a lab does little to convince me of the unhealthfullness of a pure, clean food. Pork is the one meat that we all know has to be completely cooked before being eaten, should not be eaten raw like other fresh meats can be. But the cultures of port eaters, of which there are many, to my knowledge have no more cancers than those who refrain. So we eat it in my home about once a week, and always have, and use lots of lard in cooking.

-- Anonymous, March 09, 2003

Thanks, E.M. for answering my question. We sure wouldn't want to give up our pork!! Seems like every time we turn around these days there's a new "idea" about what we all should and shouldn't be eating. Very exasperating!! And we always eat our pork (and poultry) well done. But can't say the same for our beef. I swear that sometimes when I stick my fork into my steak I can hear it mooing :-)!!

And...about lard. Is the stuff in the supermarkets okay or have they ruined that somehow during processing??

-- Anonymous, March 09, 2003