Since I started my journey down the rabbit hole of all things BBQ I have found myself starting to question the provenance of my meat. I fell we need to do more as a consumer, what we see wrapped and neatly presented on the supermarket shelfs for our convenience has had a journey and I want to know the story.

My enquires led me to a closed face book group page “Pig your own – raising the best pork for your fork”.  I will explain later why this a closed group.  Hold your horses... or piggies, if you will.

The brain child of childhood friends Steph and Faye, both animal lovers and who like myself wanted to know where their meat comes from. So, they mused, what better way than to raise them ourselves.

Genius.

The Premise is this... the pigs are raised by Steph and Faye. You then have the opportunity to purchase a share of a piglet, a quarter or a half a piglet and once he/she has reached the right ages and weight in this case 65KG.

They even ask if you would prefer a male or female pig because as the sex affects the meat, the males tend to be leaner and the females have better booties.  Obviously.

The pigs are slaughtered and butchered locally and depending on how much you purchased the corresponding cuts will be sent to you in the post ready for eating. So if you want “home kill" meat but don’t want your rose bushes trampled then this may be your perfect solution.

You get the opportunity to watch your animal grow on the Facebook group.  I bet some of you are gasping in horror at the concept, but let me be clear... although these animals are loved, they are not pets, they are raised for consumption.

A banana a day keeps the Pig Doctor away

 

After chatting with Faye and Steph I get the sense that this project has been born from love and the desire to educate people about their meat.

Now as I mentioned before this is a closed Facebook group because when it was first created as an open page it received a lot of abuse from an American vegan group.  I have vegans in the family and we co-exist, I eat bacon in front of them and they eat salad in front of me, I respect their choices. We cater for them when we have bbqs and my brother in law has no issues with cooking steaks for the meat eaters when we get together.  So its sad to hear that this great idea was momentarily side-lined by the 1%.
These pigs from “Pig your own” couldn’t ask for a better life, Faye and Steph have constructed purpose built shelters and they spend the day roaming about on two massive orchards in Dartmoor.

The Pigs are fed on pig food, but they can snaffle whatever they find during the day and sometime even the odd banana as a special treat, a happy life is led until the end. So as I wait with baited breath for my package of piggy delights to arrive I implore you take a look at this group, this is an excellent idea and I hope that it inspires others to do something similar.

So head on over to "pig your own - raising the best pork for your fork" on Facebook. Be quick as most of the little oinkers have already been  snapped up.

Photos supplied by Faye Victoria.