Pork Week

At Salon, they've lined up an entire week of essays on pork. Pork week. Wow.

On Day Two, Rebecca Traister reflects on why she cures her own bacon.

Well, to be fair, it's really my boyfriend, into whose apartment I have recently moved, who cures his own meats. His interest in this enterprise developed in the late fall, soon after I met him. Before me, there had also been an extensive flirtation with duck confit, a dalliance that explains the surprising number of duck carcasses in our freezer.

I like her boyfriend.

I fell for a guy who, when he says he's going to make soup, takes out one of the 12 kinds of homemade stock he has frozen, and when he says he's going to make burgers, starts considering what kind of bun he'll bake for them.

I love the idea that there's an site where you can find a perfect match with a farmer who will have a particular breed of pig on a particular day. “When you hold an animal's insides in your hands, big and fresh and smelling of nothing but flesh and fat, you feel a certain responsibility to put them to good use.”