Slaughtering Pigs in Romania (and Mexico)
Published December 26, 2007 by Rachel Laudan
By now it’s past but Romania and the European Union were at loggerheads over the Christmas pig. EU rules call for any pig slaughtered on the farm to be stunned before its throat is cut. All well and good.
Then Romania joined the EU and with it a population of 1.5 million pigs to be slaughtered on December 20th, the feast of St. Ignatius. Romania has nearly a third of all the farm holdings in the EU most of them tiny subsistence farms.
There just weren’t enough stunning devices. Nor was it at all clear that giving powerful electric shocks in a yard covered with wet snow was a particularly clever idea. So this year the pigs were killed the traditional way. That’s according to the Economist on November 17th.
So I asked Chuy how pigs were killed in her village about ten miles from Guanajuato. Throat slitting was the answer. In her village at least there is a man who is specially good at it. There pigs are usually killed for a wedding or fifteenth birthday or other celebration and then eaten up quickly, usually as carnitas.
Tricky problem this one of moving from traditional to modern methods. It’s not clear to me that backyard throat slitting even without stunning is less humane than sending the pigs packed in trucks to big slaughterhouses, something we see on the road to Mexico City and on roads across Britain. Those pigs don’t look very good.
Edited to add.
Here’s someone who loves Romania describing her memories of the Christmas pig and her thoughts on backyard slaughter. It comes with a photo too.
Filed under Food Politics, What's Going on in Modern Food
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Commercial slaughterhouse v backyard killing is a difficult issue and I don’t believe that there is single or simple answer.
It is now no longer possible legally to use flesh blood in Italy. For some products this doesn’t matter so much, but others are now gone.
One pig killing festive treat from parts of Tuscany was “migliaccio” which is sort of a sweet blood pancake flavoured with sugar, spices and candied orange peel (or in some cases made with special biscuits from Siena). Post-blood ban versions are now made with Chocolate replacing the blood (a familiar pattern).
I agree. I have no particular line I want to push about this. It is clear that in many places around the world there is a strong belief that one is entitled to kill one’s own animals for one’s own consumption.
Is the ban on blood in Italy a rule of the European Union? Is it just a ban on blood from home-slaughtered animals?
In Hawaii it was illegal to sell blood in the markets but it was in such high demand that vendors kept plastic bottles of blood out of sight for customers in the know.
There are very strict hygiene EU regulations involved and also the factors that you mention above, so it is more a “death by a thousand cuts”, rather then an outright ban, as far as I can determine. I doubt that it will alter how people with backyard pigs process them, but this is no longer common.
Adam, in the next week or so I want to collect together your comments on blood and chocolate and explore that issue a bit further.
I will look forward to it as I think that it is an interesting a complicated topic.