Portland Meat Collective

Recently, Chris Onstad, a lovely writer for the Portland Mercury, took my Pig Head Butchery & Charcuterie class and wrote a very good piece about it. I especially thought it interesting that Chris used the article to explore notions of decadence. And I found myself pondering why it is that a recipe like Porchetta di Testa that has undeniable peasant roots has come to be seen as something decadent. If the very definition of decadence is, as Chris says, something that makes your mouth water and your hair stand on end, I’m quite interested in the “hair standing on its end part” especially within the context of eating animals–or rather, every part of an animal. When did using parts of the animal like the head or the feet make our hair stand on end? This most certainly wasn’t always so. What psychological shift occurred to make these parts of the animal creep us out?

I reached the end of the article, and then, there was this: a lone reader comment. More »