Must Reading: Mark Bittman's "A Better Sort of Pig"

There's a great piece by Mark Bittman in The New York Times today about high-quality pork production in Iowa and how everything about it—volume, treatment of pigs, flavor—differs tremendously from the large-scale industrial operations that produce most of the (tasteless) meat we eat.

The major issue at play—as is the case with most everything within our modern food supply—is one of quantity versus quality:

"The meat produced by both the Becker Lane and Niman operations is expensive — it costs at least twice as much as conventionally raised pork — and they don’t produce all that much, at least by industrial standards. But if you buy the 'less is more' argument — that is, if we produce, buy and eat less meat we can afford to make that meat higher quality: fewer drugs, better-treated animals and so on. That treatment costs money, but as Becker says, 'Food isn’t just a pile of stuff to be measured by weight and volume, and there’s a reason industrially produced meat is just a little more expensive than garbage.' It’s a quantity versus quality argument."

Click here to read all of "A Better Sort of Pig."