Rachael Ray

Have you ever met a hipster? Neither have I. All hipsters, by definition, despise hipsterism, and each other, and themselves. Foodies are not much different. I’ve never known someone who is really into food and restaurants to unironically call themselves a foodie. (The same is true of Trekkies, Cork Dorks, and any other subculture you can name. They’re insular and angry, always writing off aggrieved messages into cyberspace and getting into heated defenses of things other people barely know exist.

So the fact that we foodies were wrong about pork should come as no suprise. But wrong we were. I learned this the hard way recently, when I was organized a big pork dinner out of New York. I had two great chefs, some of the very best pork available anywhere in the country, handmade pastas, a fabulously luxurious room – and you know what? I could barely get anybody to go. In my dismay, I called up a friend of mine who owns a lot of very successful restaurants, and whose view of the business is famously unsentimental. “What the hell were you thinking?” he asked me. “This is New York City. How many of your customers are Jewish? They’re not going to go to an all-pork dinner! Plus it’s going to be all guys. No woman will come to that.”

I have to admit that I was flabbergasted. Didn’t every cook have a pig tattoo? Were not pork bellies, pork buns, whole pigs, the very symbol of the way we eat today? To we foodies in our sphere, everywhere we look, the pig is a totem and a talisman. Bacon seems to have become a sixth food group, and boards of house-made charcuterie have become all but inescapable. But that’s for foodies; the chef I did our dinner with confessed to me that, despite his own boundless love of pork, it was the 11th best selling item on a menu that included 16 meat and fish dishes. My tycoon friend said the same thing, dismissing my folly, with a conclusive, “pork doesn’t sell.”

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The statistics bear it out. The National Pork Board announced earlier this year that they were dropping their longtime “the other white meat” slogan in favor of a more generalized “be inspired” motto. They had to do something: their own statistics told them that 28% of the population eats 70% of the pork. And I would guess it’s not the 28% of the population that spends the most money on meat. Pork is a distant third in the meat hit parade, but you would never guess it from the food media, for whom the pig is the official spirit animal.

Why do critics and chefs and, more importantly the, yes, foodies who follow them have such a basic disconnect from the rest of America on this? I’d like to think that it has something to do with the gruesome conditions in which so many pigs live, but we all know that’s not true. A bigger reason has to do with who eats in the kind of restaurants that have gone pork-crazy over the last decade. The young chefs you hear the most about tend to have a younger clientele that really doesn’t care that much about their heath. For a restaurant to succeed, it’s not enough for people to come in for dinner on a friday night; they have to come in on tuesdays, early as well as late, and how many people can eat pork belly or spare ribs regularly, on weeknights, and not get fat? I don’t know anybody over forty who could do it. Even I don’t want to do it.

Pork partisans will tell you that the flat sales of pork are the fault of American pork producers, who have, through decades of breeding for leanness and rushing animals to slaughter, produced a meat that is indeed just another white meat – a second-rate version of chicken. This seems a stretch for me. Supermarket pork chops, ribs, roasts, and the like may not have the fabulous marbling of a mangelitsa hog, or the ethereal flavor of iberico de bellota pigs gorged on chestnuts, but it’s still good. Maybe too good. I suspect that, unthinkable as it to me and my fellow foodies, a lot of Americans – most even – simply aren’t as turned on by the taste of the animal or its unctuous, lovely fat, as we are. Nothing would be harder for us to believe. Which, socially speaking, is part of the problem. If at this point pork hasn’t crossed over to the mainstream, maybe foodies, like their fellow nerds, will just have to live in the margins, hunkering in a few urban centers and gorging ourselves on lardo and mortadella. I suppose there are worse fates.