Today’s Seven Dials in London (on what looks like a suspiciously quiet day)…

…contrasts rather vividly with this etching of the same area, dating from the Victorian era.

As villages grew into towns and those towns merged together — almost silently and apparently seamlessly leaving only a few names that reflected their earlier rural location– to become the rapidly expanding cities, pigs quite happily followed man into these urban sprawls; it was after all the best place for the former to find food from the latter.

There is always a place for the pig. Well, except in those few areas where religious maniacs have strictures against their consumption. More fool them.

From the 1300s on, London was full of piggeries and they were just getting bigger & bigger & bigger. The owners would routinely let their pigs out into the streets to scavenge and fatten up and, although these city pigs were good for dealing with decomposing human waste, they produced their own as a necessary by-product of this consumption; soon becoming a (yet another) new health hazard.

A few more fun facts: there were (possibly apocryphal) stories of whole families of pigs seen living in the sewers of Hampstead. In 1850 Shepherd’s Bush was dubbed ‘the pigsty of the metropolis’ because nearly every house (sensibly) kept at least one of them as part of the family. And around this same time (in the newly minted role of) health inspectors, over 3,000 pigs were found in the Potteries (now Notting Hill), distributed between some 250 properties.

Seven Dials isn’t anywhere near as smelly as this nowadays….

@hlovins Hunter Lovins explains how we should start grazing to save the planet…

…no, not us. Not humans. That’d be silly. No, she’s truly excellent on why it’s cattle we should be grazing more of, in her piece entitled “why George Monbiot is wrong: grazing livestock can save the world”

Or listen to Rick Haney, a U.S. Department of Agriculture soil scientist in this piece called “Dirt First”, flagged up by Dan Barber.

@defendingbeef The Science of Soil Health: Compaction

http://youtu.be/GTUVRieYoZ8?5BFt

and by Nicolette Hahn Niman:

Well managed cattle improve soil health by increasing organic matter-soil carbon. This in turn improves the soil’s capacity to hold more H₂O

© Nicolette Hahn Niman

Great description of how to raise pigs; in this case some very beautiful Hindsholm hogs from Denmark but this process should apply everywhere around the globe. Slow is good. Fast is bad.

And how to solve the bread over-supply? This piece from Eater is interesting.

Here’s Grant Achatz

“He stood up and greeted her loudly in rapid-fire Italian, waving his arms and kissing her on both cheeks. She bear-hugged him back. The woman appeared to be eighty years old, even though she was probably sixty. She wore a blue dress with small white flowers scattered across it and a white apron loosely tied around her rotund midsection.
A man who I assumed was her husband walked over, plunked down wineglasses and a plate of crostini with chicken liver, bean, and tomato toppings. He filled our glasses with a hefty pour of red wine.
“She usually just cooks, well, whatever!” Tom said. “Today she’s made chicken under a brick, some gnocchi, wilted greens, and fagioli al fiasco. You guys know what that is? Basically a very typical Tuscan way of cooking white beans. She’ll place them in a glass flask over a dying fire until they’re creamy. They’re pretty awesome.”
“Yes they are,” I thought. “Yes they are.”
I peeked around the corner and saw the woman bent over a makeshift grill with glowing embers beneath, pushing a plain old brick on top of our chickens. Four glass flasks filled with beans were positioned around the edges.
We ate and drank for two hours. I didn’t want to leave. Everything was more perfect, more delicious, and more inviting than any of the three-star restaurants we’d been to. Even the service was better.
At the end of the meal the woman brought out a plate of almond cookies and we dunked them in Vin Santo. “Grazie,” everyone said.
I left the restaurant in a daze, and not because of the wine.
I realized immediately that I had just had the best meal of my life.

And finally, if this picture isn’t the very definition of “happiness” then I don’t know what is…

And fancy a killer piece of pork belly? Courtesy @tuomenyc.

The end result:

Separating the skin from the meat

And a couple more close ups of the result of this mixture of techniques (think Peking Duck, spare ribs and pulled pork)

In that case, here’s your guide. “Every bite is the perfect part of the pig” via Chef-owner Thomas Chen.

Lester caught it perfectly, when writing about Richard Hell:

“We’re all stuck on this often miserable Earth where life is essentially tragic, but there are glints of beauty and bedrock joy that come shining through from time to precious time to remind anybody who cares to see that there is something higher and larger than ourselves. And I am not talking about your putrefying gods, I am talking about a sense of wonder about life itself and the feeling that there is some redemptive factor you must at least search for until you drop dead of natural causes. And all the Richard Hells are chickenshits who trash the precious gift too blithely, and they deserve to be given no credence, but shocked awake in some violent manner. Either that or be spanked and put to bed.”

So, eat, drink and be merry. And love your fellow human.