China’s pigs are vanishing as consumers go the whole hog for leaner pork
- Across the country breeds are rapidly disappearing and signature dishes are going with them
- Year of the Pig unlikely to provide much comfort as animals are exposed to increased risk of disease
The Year of the Pig may be at hand, but in China the animals themselves – central to Chinese cuisine for thousands of years – are disappearing.
Across the country hog breeds are vanishing rapidly, taking with them some of China’s signature dishes and, more worryingly, exposing the remaining swine to increased risk of disease, agricultural specialists said.
As the world’s biggest producer and consumer of pork, China has been domesticating pigs for 8,000 years.
But indigenous Chinese pig species dropped from 90 per cent of the market in 1994 to less than 2 per cent in 2007, the last year the Ministry of Agriculture made such figures available to the public.
Breeds like Jinhua and Chenghua, which used to be associated with specific regional dishes, have been depleted because of changing market demands and diets that have allowed Western breeds to increasingly take over the Chinese market.
“The Jinhua pig has always been used in Cantonese cuisine,” said Paul Lau, chef de cuisine at the Michelin-starred Tin Lung Heen restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Hong Kong. “It is used to make the broth, which is the soul of Cantonese cuisine.”
