Perceptions of Pigs: Analysing Australia’s Pork History

Craig Norris Alright, you’re listening to media mothership on 99.3 FM and it looks like everything’s green lit now. So I’ve taken control of the station for the next 50 minutes. I’m Craig who will be. The host of. The show, as I’ve been for the last 103 episodes, joined by my co-host Taylor Hello and special guest all the way from UTAS. Taylor Lidstone All the way from upstairs. Speaker Sandy, baby. Craig Norris PhD candidate from the School of Humanities Major in history, Evelyn Lambeth. Hello. Hello fantastic. So where? So I did grab Evelyn so I could. Unleash her research onto the Hobart airwaves through Edge radio as well as we’re streaming on YouTube and Twitch so you can jump on that Twitch if you want to see us live in person by just going to media mothership and we’re going to explore her. Research that’s in its third year looking at issues around well. Pigs. I’ve. I’ve written your title somewhere. Yes, no, somewhere but. But you’re here in the flesh for me. To. For you to tell our audience what your project is. What’s the title of your thesis or your research at the moment? Evelyn Lambeth The title of my thesis as it stands. I can change it later if I want. We’ll see how we go. It’s called pork problems. Cultural attitudes towards pigs through history and the effects on modern food safety in Australia. Craig Norris So it’s as you’re within the area of history, it’s taking a very broad long historical view of. The controversially titled Pork Problems, so it’s already kind of, I guess, flagging concerns some some more than likely, myths that that I have, that you have, Taylor. That probably a lot of people in the audience. Do you eat pork a little bit? Yeah. I eat pork, everyone. Evelyn Lambeth Do eat pork? I do. Speaker Yeah. Craig Norris The first thing to say, and it’s just. My own curiosity. About the naming of English, how English names things. So we’ve got. Eggs. And then we’ve got pork. Now it’s it’s the. It’s what’s the connection between pigs and pork? Why do we? Call it pork. And not something like pig meat or. Evelyn Lambeth How appetising pig meat sound to you? Do you want to get some pig meat? Craig Norris From the store like. In fact, yeah. Is this? Historical curiosity, So what? What’s because I know that. I mean, for me, one of the surprising things about animals has been that moment where England was was at the the 1066 invasion of Normandy, and suddenly all these French words ended up. So you’ve got mutton and beef and and this kind of historical curiosity of the language used to mean the. Did that happen with pigs? And pork. Evelyn Lambeth Absolutely. There’s lots of theorists that go into this. Probably 1 of the more famous ones be Carol Adams, but she talks about it as the absent referent, so the just removing yourself from the animal makes it feel more holistic to eat. You feel further removed from the animal if you say I’m eating bacon versus I’m eating a backstrap. Off of this cute little pig. Craig Norris Yes, and that OK, so let’s open up a couple of things. But the first thing, this historical curiosity, so much like my weirdness about why we name the thing, we’re eating something else. Have you come across any surprising historical facts as you’ve been researching pigs in? Australia, that’s the. Top five surprises, Top 10 surprises Top 25 surprises. Evelyn Lambeth 10. Wow. Yeah, my. Yeah, I think about pigs all the time. Maybe I’m interested in the legacy of pigs. I I studied. I hope you can tell from my accent I’m an immigrant. I was born in Louisiana, so when I immigrated about 8 years ago. Obviously I was really interested in why Australians don’t really eat kangaroo or wallaby. In my mind that would be a really good source of protein, so of course I wrote my thesis about that. My undergraduate thesis about that. Craig Norris No. Why don’t we eat? I’m sorry. I’m really curious now. Why? Why don’t I eat them? Speaker Ah. Taylor Lidstone Have you ever eaten? Craig Norris Them. Yeah, I went to a really expensive restaurant once and they served. Kangaroo I reckon I blocked it out man. Taylor Lidstone You can get you. Can get ruberg as at just. Craig Norris Woolworth yeah. They they don’t though, I mean. Yeah. What’s going on there? Evelyn Lambeth I argued I wrote a paper about it. It’s published in Gastronomica if you want it. And there’s a podcast version of IT, Heritage Radio Network. Craig Norris Gastronomica great name for a journal. Really. Gastronomica Heritage Radio Network check it. Evelyn Lambeth Out check it out, but my argument is that. It’s an emblem animal, so it was marketed out of our conscious ability to eat. Craig Norris It by implants that like. Taylor Lidstone Ah, that’s why Americans don’t eat eagles. Craig Norris So there’s more reasons than that. There’s like, not much meat on it and. Evelyn Lambeth But of course, there’s policy and game law and lots of mechanisms that protect certain animals for consumption. I eat beef and mutton in. Taylor Lidstone Yeah. Evelyn Lambeth Australia is it because? Craig Norris It’s like we have our coat of arms emblem, so there’s literally an emblem that features. Our animals I don’t need. I don’t need anything that’s on our emblem either. Yeah, but it seems like the squandering of resources, right? It does end up in in a food chain. I imagine in terms of animal cat food, right? Dog food. That’s where it ends up in this lower food chain. Evelyn Lambeth Absolutely. And yeah, a little bit and the human consumption market and we export. It as well. Craig Norris So is there a human export market for us? Right, who eats its overseas? Evelyn Lambeth Lots of Southeast Asian countries, we ship a lot of bones there as well. Craig Norris And that would promote, right? Ohh, right. And there’d be all this language around the nutritional benefits that this is great food. So it’s interesting. Yeah. The domestic market isn’t engaged with it as. Evelyn Lambeth Tenuous California. Taylor Lidstone Well, so we ship bones is that for like making stocks and stuff like that? OK, yeah. Craig Norris Do you eat native animals? Evelyn Lambeth Yeah, I think everyone. I think the best way forward, honestly, there’s no right or wrong and it’s going to be a multifaceted way forward. But you should eat according to the land. I think everyone should be sanitarians. Taylor Lidstone Koalas. Craig Norris Ohh, that’s kangta areans do I love that phrase? While Italians Kington, you got vegetarians. Evelyn Lambeth I did not. Coin that turn, but I don’t know who. Did, but it’s a good one. Craig Norris That’s the only atarian I know. I love the idea of Kanga Terrians. Evelyn Lambeth Yeah, it’s not univariance omnivores. Craig Norris I’m divorce. Yeah. That’s mind blowing. All right, so you started. That was your. Honest thesis was. It or or a previous paper research. Evelyn Lambeth Oh yeah, that was my honours thesis. Oh, we’re still talking about the pig. Gosh. Craig Norris We’re getting around to the pig. You just blew my mind in terms of posing a question that I’ve not asked myself, and I gotta admit part, it would be psychological. Just feeling like, you know, I’m such. A creature of. Habit that I’m just eating my cow. And the pig and to see like it has to be on sale, it has to be pretty heavily discounted and thinking OK, well that’s a good value thing. It’s fascinating cause there’s Wallabies. There’s yeah. Anyway, so surprising. Historical facts. OK. Oh, here we go. So the next. So in that case, if we’re looking at changes to people’s attitudes towards me, that’s an example, I guess of of Australian attitudes towards indigenous. Animals. That, that, that are not changing. Your the title is. What is it, pork? Problems. Alright, so there’s there’s attitude issues towards Paul. What’s what’s the history of that? What what is that? That poor problem over time issue you’re unpacking? Evelyn Lambeth Yeah, so studying. Native animal. I then wanted to look at a domesticated species. And I sort of compared Wallaby and. Cow consumption. So I knew a lot about the beef industry, but less about pigs, so they seemed a natural. Choice and like I guess going back to facts that are surprising. Some of the statistics argue that we have close to 23.5 million wild pigs in Australia. So yeah, almost more pigs than humans. And yet if you asked the average Australian if they eat pork, they’d probably say. Speaker Really. Wow. Evelyn Lambeth No. Craig Norris So, so OK, first point is I guess there’s a lot of well, pigs and those, those are wild pigs, right? Are we talking like tusks and fur, like, these are back? Evelyn Lambeth It depends how long they’ve been in the wild. Picture really interesting. They’re really adaptable. Of course, they’re very destructive. To, especially to. Craig Norris Because they’re truffle finders. That’s all right. They get their snout and everything, and they’ll just root around, which is great for, like, finding truffles, but pretty damaging for, you know. For and for. Evelyn Lambeth Fragile ecosystem. Taylor Lidstone And they like eating everything, don’t they? Pretty much, yeah. Evelyn Lambeth They do. They’re omnivores. They did everything. But they. Yeah, really adaptable so. All the wild pigs in Australia obviously were escaped from domestic pigs because they are not native to this. Craig Norris Would have been and they came here on. Evelyn Lambeth The ships the ships pick a ship. Any ship. Speaker Right. Craig Norris Asian all ships have them on them. Evelyn Lambeth Yeah, whether they’re in barrels or whether they’re running around. Craig Norris That’s right. How many? Anyway, the colonial time we’re talking the, the, the, the, the, the, the English invasion. Colonisation of Australia, part of the the species, they’re going to introduce. Into Australia, where pigs. Evelyn Lambeth Absolutely. Arguably, before that too, you had French, Dutch, Chinese merchant ships. We had pigs earlier, but I chose to start with the Captain cookers, which is what the pigs were called, really. Had a really. Craig Norris Right. Evelyn Lambeth Prolific habit of like leaving pigs to breed wherever he left so that he could come. Craig Norris Back and have food. And are they one of the species that’s able to do that really easily? Like if you just leave a couple of pigs there and then you come back on your next voyage in a few years time, you’ll have, you know, a a decent pig population that you’re gonna be. Able to harvest and. Evelyn Lambeth Absolutely adaptable and they’re extremely what’s the word? Speaker Really. Craig Norris Fertile is that unusual in introduced species to some species like not become fertile like as soon as like pandas. Yeah, OK horses right. I imagine like, I mean, yeah, the Chinese colonialism and operation never existed. Well, in terms of the British East India level, it would be funny if they were trying to introduce. Taylor Lidstone Pandas. Craig Norris And it’s it’s part of their food source space, it’s. Tangent, but yeah, in terms of what what I mean, you got chickens, you got your pigs, you got your cows. I mean pigs, though. Have you found that pigs are particularly good at kind of living somewhere and. Evelyn Lambeth They are particularly good, of course, it’s contingent on many things. The ecosystem, you know, temperature. We think of the pig, but they’re before the species of pig brought to Australia was a very specific pig, that was. Craig Norris What date is that? That’s the 18 Australian history my history teacher hates me now. Did you how old? When did the Captain Cook? Taylor Lidstone Where’d you get me? I don’t know anything. Craig Norris You’ve got your phone there. Touch your PT, bro. When did Captain Cook come to Australia? My American guest to. Evelyn Lambeth Sail the ocean sea. Oh, wait, that’s Columbus 1788. Craig Norris 1788, so pretty much from 1788 on we had the British ones. As you’ve seen before, Dutch French colonises had been also doing Spanish, have been doing the same thing so. Yeah, there’s various fluctuations, but pretty much, yeah, that that was introduced then 17. Evelyn Lambeth 88 that was introduced then, and the breed was specific to a Chinese breed, actually. The history of the East India Company and trade with China is really specific, but the the port where they were trading pigs, they wanted pigs that could fatten more quickly because the wild pig is very lean. Craig Norris Right. So previous to that you had a A European British pig that was. Like a a ball or something like it was like fairy long legs or something and. Evelyn Lambeth Furry, far from the ground. Yeah, I tusks. They subsisted mostly on, like pannage. They would just broom wherever they go, eat nuts, acorns they were. Their value is and their ability to feed themselves. Craig Norris Yeah. Yeah. And so here we have a case of that that industry wanting. To genetically breed what they wanted, right? Which was what? More meat? Something that would have more. Meat on it. Would be less intelligent. Evelyn Lambeth More fat, actually. The fat. They liked. The lard. The lard was useful. Yeah. To make things like candles. And you. Speaker Or. Craig Norris Chance. Right. Evelyn Lambeth They were using every part of the pig quite literally. Craig Norris Yeah. So you were showing me the what was the website called the the? Evelyn Lambeth Everything but the oink. Craig Norris Everything about the ice, so everyone check that out. Everything but the oink and it’s going into this idea of how use how how we make use of animals and there’s some fantastic information about pigs on there. And that that’s been baked into the pig. Or human engagement with the pig early on right that that genetically getting this Chinese what’s what’s the story about the Chinese pigs? So they, how did they get arrive at that being the best pig? Evelyn Lambeth I. Sorry, just so I understand your question, you’re asking how the English got to that specific breed or? Craig Norris Yeah. So you had the well, I guess the greater was the East Asia. Evelyn Lambeth How the Chinese got that? Craig Norris Trading company. And how did they find the Chinese pig? What was that history of colonisation? Evelyn Lambeth That. Big and broad, the pig is actually from a really specific region called the Guangdong region, and it’s was based on a period of trade for 60 years. Because most of the other ports were closed, there was a war. There’s yeah, the opium Wars, different sort of things that affected. Craig Norris Yeah, right. Evelyn Lambeth Which species we’re allowed to leave based on who is allowed access to whatever given Yep region but. Craig Norris Then they found this pig. They’re gone. Evelyn Lambeth Yeah, they found the pig, and Chinese pigs had been. Yeah. Chinese pigs had been. Craig Norris And is it like the pig that? We know like it’s the pig, it’s the pink. Evelyn Lambeth Much bigger, smaller to the ground they’ve been cohabitating with them for much longer than European civilizations. Craig Norris Ryan. Wow. And so that’s the pig that then became this. You know, colonising force along with the European powers, and that’s the one that’s that was then introduced into Australia. So many of the wild pigs are that. Evelyn Lambeth Time, and particularly British pigs, bad the. Dutch have their own breeds of pig. The French have their own breeds of pig, so other breeds of pig out there. But the one that is prolific in Australia was the British Chinese mix. Speaker So. Craig Norris This kind of cultural shift, what’s the cultural shift around our attitudes towards poor consumption then? Like I mean, I feel it’s always been part of my diet, but is that historically has historically been the case? I mean it’s it’s being used as a, as a kind of handy resource for, for fats and meat. It seems like the attitude been positive in terms of its exploitability, but am I missing something here? Evelyn Lambeth Yeah, that’s part of what made this research quite difficult. As an historian, my methodology, I deal with a lot of archives. I read a lot and. Where you find pigs in the literature. They’re often combined with livestock, whereas like mutton or beef or Countess or cows and sheep are counted individually. It’s much less the case with pigs. You do get some statistical analysis of them. But it forced me to then think through like, well, who’s eating the pigs if we’re not exporting them? Because Australia really, when it was a colony. All of the money came into gold. Wheat and then eventually mutton wants refrigeration and things came out for export commodities and so. Craig Norris Not, and that’s cheap. I see I struggle with. Words. It’s like. Evelyn Lambeth Ohh, sheep and mutton. They are different. Lamb. Yeah, it’s because I. Didn’t grow up with sheep. Craig Norris That’s alright. No lamb, lamb is mutton. Right. And sheep is what sheep is. Speaker Plasma. Craig Norris Lamb is lamb is lamb. Yeah, no man English. Evelyn Lambeth The woolly sheep, right? Craig Norris And and and so yes, the in terms of the romanticism, I guess around food stock or livestock like sheep will really like Australia was living off the sheep’s back. I think it’s the phrase like it was A and the whole romance around sheep shearers. And then you’ve got drovers for. Cattle and they’re kind of Cowboys. So you’ve got these romantic associations of attitude towards these livestock animals. Yeah. Pigs are there as well in Australia, but they don’t have any romance like saying you’re a farmer for pig is like, well, I haven’t seen the man from Snow. A pig place. And it doesn’t. I’m trying I mean. Evelyn Lambeth Absolutely clear. But so just. Craig Norris Until babe, until. Babe. Yeah, my. Taylor Lidstone What is it? My grandfather’s brother is in, babe. Evelyn Lambeth Wait, your grandfather’s brother, your great uncle? Craig Norris To see. Taylor Lidstone My great. Uncle. Yeah. Wow. Craig Norris Wow. Taylor Lidstone And he’s the bad. Guy, really. Speaker What’s? Craig Norris He’s the pig. Ohh yeah. Because it’s interesting, isn’t. I mean, in terms of media representations, trying to think of attitudes towards animals and pigs in. Ridiculous, I guess. While I can talk about it as as it’s always been there in the supermarket and I’ve not felt any real, you know, kind of reluctance in terms of choosing it over, you know, well much more easily than than kangaroo. Nevertheless, yeah, there are negative associations towards the type of cleanliness of a pig and the type of. Industry around it, right? It’s not considered glamorous. In terms of the past history like Human Snow River with cattle. And your shearers like there’s a couple of Australian movies that are all about sheep sharing. So. So is this is this also part of, I mean, the struggle that attitudes have towards pigs, they’re just. Evelyn Lambeth Yeah, there’s a large taboo list, almost a demonising of them as a species, but historically, like if you read the convict documents about why people were shipped to Australia. Oftentimes it was for pig stealing, like people would be sentenced for life or pigs stealing. They were in Britain, and so they get here and they’re raising pigs again in the prisons. Craig Norris In Britain. Right. And there was a lot of pigs stealing in Britain because there were animals that could be grabbed reasonably easily, I imagine, right. They’re not going to. They’re gonna be in pens. Evelyn Lambeth Not really at that point in the early to mid 19th century, there’s a lot of starving big mass movements into urban areas. Pigs can have anywhere from 11 to 18 piglets per litter. So when they’re babies they run, they run wild. You could just like let a pig fatten itself up and then ****** one off the street and bring it. Craig Norris Right. Evelyn Lambeth To market, all right. But. You know, domesticated animals are property, so if. Craig Norris Someone they’d be branding or something going on and OK, so right. So there’d be a lot of convicts or some convicts would have been brought down here to Australia. Van Demons land, even in, like, Port Arthur, we’d have some pig. Evelyn Lambeth Or hearsay. Ohh yeah, pig pans. Yeah, yeah. So they made a lot of shoes in Port Arthur and Ben, Demons Land and pigskin pigskin would be the. Taylor Lidstone Action. Craig Norris Pictures. Speaker Why? Evelyn Lambeth In the back of the shoe or that soft bed is pig. Craig Norris Leather. Great. So quite a nice so that leather can be used and that’s going out of style, right. There’s not. Pig leather is not really a. Thing anymore? Oh, it’s still it is. Evelyn Lambeth A thing? Yeah. Craig Norris Where can I get it? Evelyn Lambeth It’s really soft and and historically wasn’t used as much as other Leathers because if you think about toothbrushes, for instance, the bristles, that’s about how thick a bore hair is, right? So big bristles were historically used in toothbrushes. The holes in the skin are quite porous. Craig Norris Right. So toothbrushes used the bristles from all their bristles were from. Boards and boards. Evelyn Lambeth Yeah, I mean, camels too. There were other species used, but they’re ones. Speaker Really. Taylor Lidstone Snake. Evelyn Lambeth Snake. No. Snakes don’t have fur. Not that I know. Maybe. Craig Norris Hey. They do. You and your snake interests. Erase me. Evelyn Lambeth Yeah, yeah. Interesting though there is an operation, pig bristle. I’m sorry. Yeah, it was operation Pig bristle after World War 2:00 we we also used them in paint brushes. But after World War 2, when the soldier settler scheme was happening the second the second one soldiers would get homes and farms, they really went into the dairy industry to try and cultivate a market after the war. But we didn’t have any paint brushes because they’re also used to paint the war machine. So like US, imports of paint brushes were wild Australian imports. So we ran out and we like literally forced our way into Hong Kong into chunking to go and get pig bristles. Craig Norris Wow the. Need to secure that. Resource resulted in a military operation. Evelyn Lambeth Exactly. And I think it goes to show how diverse pigs are. The pigs in Australia were domesticated to the point that they didn’t grow bristles that were useful for. Kind of operation they were intended for. Craig Norris That’s crazy. That’s one of those kind of scientific. Butterfly effects, something rippling to have causal effects on something else that you’d not at all imagine. That right. OK. So so the use of that’s no longer the case. I imagine there’s like plastic bristles that we use. Evelyn Lambeth Once nylon came into the mix, you had more nylon bristles. But pig bristles are definitely still used a lot of times in shaving brushes because they’re. Craig Norris Soft. Yeah, right. Evelyn Lambeth Badger brushes badger fur is still really useful. Yeah, another interesting. A side that was uh. Related to Captain Cookers, so when he would just leave pigs all over the place, he left someone on Auckland Island and that’s in New Zealand, not Australia. Still the same species of pig, but the difference was on Auckland Island. It’s the humans that live on Auckland Island. It’s just a really rugged, a lot of different animals, native animals. But the pigs are really destructive on that island, but they’ve also adapted to be like a really robust, you know, it’s heart conditions there. But in the we use a lot of pig insulin for diabetes, diabetes, treating. And in the 60s. And. You know, globalisation had been a thing for a long time by that point, but the there was a mutation in the genetics of insulin around the world. And because, you know, we crossbred and pure bred, so many things, most of the pigs around the world had this genetic mutation. So we couldn’t use the insulin in humans, but not Gland island. There was this whole strategy. Like we got to kill the pests. But then a scientist was like, oh, let’s just check them. Let’s, like, let’s quarantine 1 and see what happens. And it was the only insulin that we could use for humans at the time. And when? For being a pest species to a $300,000 sale. Tonight. Craig Norris Isn’t that fascinating that suddenly it can turn so dramatically as the opposite, right, the the this, this waste kind of pest species suddenly turned to thank goodness we didn’t extra eradicate them? Wow. That that’s so this this was only recently recently recently in history. That, that, that. Evelyn Lambeth Yeah, they’re still there. Wow. Yeah. It’s just really expensive to quarantine them. Yeah, they’re big animals, yeah. Craig Norris So you were talking there about I guess earlier on the the role that colonialism played in in shaping our perception of pigs. But I guess as a resource, a thing to be exploited, is that still the case today? Is there still that same? Kind of British colonial attitude towards this is simply a resource. Or has that changed or are we still, you know, basically perpetuating these British colonial myths? Evelyn Lambeth Yes, I would say it’s gotten worse. Yeah. Prophet. Craig Norris See, I just have this view of history always being better. Thank you. OK, so that might be, but I was kind of expecting. Yeah. No, no, no. The industry has cleaned itself up. It’s really good. But no, there’s there’s still some. OK, let’s break it. Evelyn Lambeth Down. Let’s break it down. I think more than anything. Globalisation has. Commodified animals, even more trying to find the the baseline to make things as cost effective. Australia still imports 60% of its pork from Denmark and the US mostly. And so I guess what I’ve trying to get people to look at in my research is it doesn’t matter. It does matter what happens in Australia with pigs, but it also matters how pigs enter the country and what form, and then also the conditions where the pigs are raised, where they’re coming from, still complicit some of those conditions are horrific. Conditions here are also horrific, but. Yeah, I guess we’re beef and wheat are I was thinking about this when I was riding today. If we lost the cow, the kangaroo or the pig and the social imaginary Australia, like which one would be missed the most? Yeah. Do you have? Craig Norris An answer ah, it’s interesting because you can see the reality of it. The mad cow disease strikes and suddenly beef is completely eradicated. So the question was, which of the what was? It it was. Evelyn Lambeth The cow, the pig and the wall of beer kangaroo. Craig Norris OK, which one would be the most devastating in terms of our cultural imaginary and sense of quality of life? Evelyn Lambeth Economic well being. Craig Norris Well, yeah, the cow, right. Because where’s my neck is? Big Mac, you know. I mean it just that would be the obvious. Evelyn Lambeth All do Australians do have to. Abbreviate everything. Craig Norris It’s not McDonald’s maccas, it’s a bikie. It’s not a biker, you know. And yeah. Evelyn Lambeth Nice. Taylor Lidstone Is there any reason why chicken wasn’t on that list? Because I would say that’s probably all the people that I. Know. Mostly eat chicken compared to everything else. Craig Norris Yeah, the crisis with eggs at the moment. Evelyn Lambeth That’s a. That’s just because it’s my own fault. I just made the question up myself. Maybe it’s because I’m, like, aware that there’s a chicken. Taylor Lidstone OK. Evelyn Lambeth Shortage. Yeah, tickets are interesting, but the so if you go to like Kangaroo Island on the southwest or southeast of Australia. The breeds that we consume the flesh of are not the same breeds that we consume the eggs of. So the once we consume the eggs of have a life and then they’re cold, they’re meats wasted. There’s different boiler chickens that are raised for food consumption, yeah. Taylor Lidstone And that’s on Kangaroo Island. So is there like Kangaroos on Chicken Island then? Ohh jeez. Evelyn Lambeth Yeah. To be honest, there’s Pig island. Yeah. If you follow the pig, it’s really good. But there’s a Big Island. Yeah. Craig Norris All right, so there, there. She misses as a little pigs. Evelyn Lambeth Yeah. Yeah. It’s in the Pacific islands, and it has a lot of pigs. Craig Norris And it’s one of. Evelyn Lambeth Really. Really. Craig Norris It’s been bequeathed. It’s one of those those little lions that was bequeathed a lot of pigs as a key stop off point for the Spanish and the French and the. Evelyn Lambeth British eating all your turtles you could. Craig Norris Turtle. Yeah. What is it about turtles being the most delicious flesh ever that’s been eaten? I’ve heard that story said and. Evelyn Lambeth Well, I think if you were starving on a ship for six months, anything would be delicious. Craig Norris Yeah, I think it would be. Basically, it’s crazy. Yeah, it was an IQ. Stephen Fry was talking about how. Yeah, turtle, they they had to prohibit and they were trying to bring them back for scientific curiosities. But they’d be eaten by the time. They kept there by the crew and. Taylor Lidstone Have you ever heard of that? That French dish, which is said to be the most sort of, like, purest form of gluttony? Craig Norris Ever. That’s something within something within something. Taylor Lidstone No, no, no. It’s a songbird. Craig Norris Oh, OK. Taylor Lidstone And they drown it in whiskey. So the whiskey enters the lungs. Yeah. And then you eat the whole thing whole. And all of its bones stick into your mouth and the blood rushing out of your own mouth is the major part of the flavour profile of the dish. It was Henry, the eighth favourite dish. Speaker Oh really? Craig Norris It looks into that way deeper. Evelyn Lambeth That doesn’t surprise me. About him, yeah. Craig Norris I mean, it does speak to the attitudes towards an animal that you’re willing to convert it into a a torturous form of pleasure and it’s it’s. Evelyn Lambeth Have you eaten it? Taylor Lidstone Of course not. Evelyn Lambeth Yeah. On that note there, I guess this just goes back to your question of had things gotten better? And I think this has been done for a while, but I think. The amount of information and how quickly it’s shareable now is maybe just illuminating things more than shaping new technologies, but one of them, there’s something called Canada Trippin, which is a. It’s a hormone based product from horse blood, so there’s wild. Craig Norris Right. Evelyn Lambeth Horse farms, they’re only legal, and for this production we have horse farms all over the world because horse blood is really useful for oestrogen treatment, many hormone therapies. Speaker Ah. Evelyn Lambeth But in terms of food production, the only three countries that allowed Uruguay, Iceland and Argentina, so they let the horses run wild, get the mayor pregnant, take 5 litres of her serum every week while she’s pregnant, ship it to piggeries, introduce it into the sow just after she gives birth, because she can reenter estrus. Craig Norris Horse glad into the. Evelyn Lambeth And then they introduced it into the baby stows. Sorry. The baby piglets. And because they can enter puberty much earlier and then they abort the foetus, get pregnant again. And it’s the conditions for the horses are horrible because it’s a hormone. So it doesn’t matter about the size of the animal. It’s concentration of blood. Speaker Really. Craig Norris Holy cow. Taylor Lidstone Holy horse. Evelyn Lambeth Holy. Craig Norris Horse. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I mean, this brings this question of, I guess, food safety and sustainability. Are there things? We should be. Concerned about that you found in your research around some of these concerns? Around pork in in Australia. Evelyn Lambeth Absolutely. I think. Craig Norris It’s that that’s not happening in Australia the the. Blood being introduced. Evelyn Lambeth We’re importing the pork, so it depends how you how you can stick it. Yeah, I thought. Taylor Lidstone Right. We’re complicit. Evelyn Lambeth You got off. Yeah, I think. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I hope to do with this research and like I don’t want to scare people away. A lot of people are never going to read my thesis, but it’s like. Speaker Hey. Evelyn Lambeth Where I see the biggest availability to make impact would be if we centre the human because I think it’s much harder. You know, people be like I’ll be a vegetarian and even if I tell them all the things that they seem, well it’s still better than eating meat and you go OK, OK, so. But if we are going to eat meat and if we do need the pigs for all these other. Vital resources how do we care for them better and subsequently care for ourselves? So, but looking at ways to maybe consider that and there’s definitely some researchers out there who’ve thought about slaughterhouses and looked at human labour policy and how to make that better. But again, like, I think part of history is looking at continuity and change and the things that remain the same are usually the most problematic. So there’s like. Do you all know Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle? Craig Norris No Upton Sinclair’s the jungle. The jungle, is it fictional or not? Evelyn Lambeth The jungle. It is fictional actually, but based on. Fact. OK. If it’s a an expose, if you will written in or published in 1906. But it was looking at the Chicago meat packing industry and talking about the just. Sounds like you’re reading a sci-fi novel. But out of that. Craig Norris Is it small and green? Is that what we were eating? Swelling green. The the great Charlton Heston sci-fi novel about food? Where? Evelyn Lambeth What’s that? You know what? I recently also thought about Margaret Atwood’s maddaddam series, so it works. And Craig is of one of that series and she has like chicken Nuggets. And is it Pugliese? It’s like a pig human combination. Anyway, it was written a while ago, but it’s like, super relevant. Craig Norris But Sinclair’s book on the meat packing industry. Evelyn Lambeth Going back 1906. He wrote that to talk about the conditions and so people took food safety out of that which they were legitimate food safety concerns. But the other point he was trying to make were he was looking at a Lithuanian family that had immigrated, and the only jobs they could get. Were in this. Certain meat packing industry, which is true, is still across the world today. 70% of the world slaughterhouse workers are migrant workers, so there’s an effect. It’s called the Sinclair effect. Craig Norris Yeah, right. Evelyn Lambeth But basically there’s a direct correlation between domestic violence and slaughterhouse work. And so when you think about that, the what bleeds out of the slaughterhouse is much bigger than the meat that’s packaged for you. Craig Norris And that’s almost the kind of metaphysical point around. One’s exposure to a particular. Well, the type of violence, right? This is a very sanctioned violence of human to animal, which is normalised. And, you know, we don’t at all have any contact with it. When we go to a supermarket. To get up the packaged. Pork mince or something, so it’s frightening to think of when you’re at the coalface of actually beginning that food chain process. That I’m very foreign to. There might be some flow into domestic violence through. Evelyn Lambeth Harsh reality, so I think. Bringing people’s awareness to that, not in a way to minimise or steer them away from wanting to enact change. But it’s it’s much bigger than just how, so how we care for animals inevitably impacts how we. Treat each other and from from Australian context I think a. Craig Norris And that’s a really good point. Evelyn Lambeth Lot. About the legacies of wealthy countries and how that wealth came to be and. Particularly around things like phosphate and all these precious minerals and mining, and it’s everywhere in the news right now. When you devastate a countries, resources like Nauru, for instance, we mine 70% of their phosphates in the 60s and. There’s like a list of nine countries that are used in agricultural work in Australia and a lot of those. Come. From now we’re being but one example of places where we’ve desecrated the local landscape to extract things that we need in Australia and then now. Use some of that work in remittance schemes and slaughterhouse work as a. We’re inviting you into the country, but it doesn’t go back. You know, there’s remittance. Craig Norris Yeah. And within these concerns, yeah. And and because as you’re mapping out within these concerns, there are questions of the how, how we can see the future of pork, right, if we’re highlighting these concerns as you’re saying, well, where do you see the future of pork going? Evelyn Lambeth You need it and you don’t, but yeah. It feels very dystopian, I think. A couple of years ago they opened a 1.2 million capacity piggery in China. It’s 23 stories. Craig Norris 1.2. Of 23 Storey piggery. Evelyn Lambeth 20 three Storey in the middle of a city. Craig Norris Holy cow. Evelyn Lambeth Yeah. Craig Norris And it’s just mass processing pigs. Evelyn Lambeth Takes. Craig Norris It’s a huge slaughterhouse 23. Evelyn Lambeth It’s a huge slaughterhouse. A lot of it’s. It but. We’re not using their manure for anything productive. When you think about genetic diseases, they can jump species. Now things like COVID and you know if everything gets blamed on. Craig Norris Yeah. Evelyn Lambeth China, for that particular disease, but the bird flu originated in the US, the bird flu that’s going around right now, right. There’s it’s a species problem. It’s a it’s a human problem. It’s not a a race or a nationality problem. Craig Norris That’s devastating. Yes. Yeah. So as you’re saying, yeah, the in terms of the future of of consumption and production. Of livestock where seeing some really troubling previous practises that are now, yeah, combining with globally and then as you’re saying, yeah, there’s 23 level pig harvesting slaughterhouse. Wow in the middle of. The uhm city. Evelyn Lambeth In the middle of a city? Yeah, and. When I think. What I hope will happen is that we go from seeing food not as a commodity, but is it good again as a as a human right, I think you know, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it went from being a good to a commodity, but that shift. Craig Norris Is pervasive, so by good what would be an example of? Of that category, something which hasn’t. Evelyn Lambeth Good. Craig Norris Yet been changed into. Evelyn Lambeth Or maybe good or resource if we want to use commodity or resource. If we think about it as something that is finite, not something that we can. Make more of indefinitely like water as a resource, air as a resource cobalt phosphate. Craig Norris Yeah. And and certainly I think that that takeaway of demonstrating some kindness in that equation rather than a kind of. Violence was going to say dehumanising, but I guess that’s the answer proceedings still right that that I can’t think outside of a human centric. Explanation of judging the ethics and morality of that, and it’s very tough talking cross species to say, you know we’re dehumanising pigs. Well, they’re not human. Well, what am I expressing there? What? How? How? How, how how? How do we teach kindness? Evelyn Lambeth Yeah, and it gets, yeah, those stories we tell about them dehumanise what is a human. We introduce human DNA into pigs so that we can grow organs and heart valves that are adaptable. Craig Norris Beyond the heat. Ranks. Evelyn Lambeth So. I just think like, oh, well, I don’t have a kidney need from a pig. And I’m like, but some people do. And like, if you care for this child that has kidney disease, if we think about that is an amazing resource, like what technology and science can do, that’s incredible. If we can potentially use pig hearts, where there’s such a shortage in a human and it works well. But it matters. I want a heart that I would want a heart from a pig that had a good life. Craig Norris Yeah, yeah, yeah. Looking it was striking to hear about the diabetes. Insulin linked to pigs. I had no idea that the history of insulin and diabetes went something synthetic or something about penicillin and mould. It was, actually. Animal based. Yeah. Wow. And yeah. Yeah. I hadn’t even thought about the use of pigs for replacement organs. Wow, yeah. Evelyn Lambeth So I guess through all of this you asked a while ago what? Speaker 2nd. Evelyn Lambeth If I’ve noticed any cultural shifts and. Pigs are demonised. The metaphors we use about pigs are really. Mostly problematic. But not often times true, like based in fact. Craig Norris Because when you’re. Because if you’re seeing someone being a glutton and eating a lot of food, you will you call a pig. Evelyn Lambeth Sweating like a pig. Pigs don’t really sweat. Craig Norris Putting like a. Taylor Lidstone He’s looking a bit Porky. Craig Norris OK. Yeah. Evelyn Lambeth Yeah, spreading like a pig goes back to pig iron it. It refers to the sweltering, sweltering process of when it when it condenses and droplets form on the pig iron, which is the shape of the. Speaker Oh. Craig Norris Now wait. Little bit of iron, so it was the fact that iron for some reason was referred to pig as pig iron. That’s crazy and didn’t help pigs at all. Evelyn Lambeth And maybe you would not call someone like, say, someone sweating like a pig. You knew that it wasn’t even like, oh, you look like. Craig Norris No, no, no. Evelyn Lambeth Some. Iron. Well, thank you so much. What a compliment. Craig Norris I am an Iron Man. Well, we’re pretty much at time. Everyone. This has been such a fascinating little entry point. If people want to find out. More about the research and studies you’re doing. Where can they find you? Evelyn Lambeth That’s a great question. Well, hopefully I’ll finish writing this thesis soon. I reckon if you just search pork problems and my name, there’ll be some stuff that I’ve published that comes up. Yeah. And then stay tuned. Craig Norris Excellent. Well, Evelyn Lambeth, absolute pleasure to have you. Evelyn Lambeth On thanks Joe, for having me. Craig Norris We’ll post whatever links we can to the material you’ve mentioned the what is it? The what’s the link one? Evelyn Lambeth Everything but the link. Craig Norris About the link and and some links you’ve you’ve had when I send you some, you’ve had one paper published, probably some other research as well, and if they search you on, you know UTAS and other spaces, they’ll be able to. You got that great work well. Good luck. You’re in the home stretch. I guess in your third year now. So fantastic stuff. And yeah, a lot to think about there. Evelyn Lambeth Thanks. I appreciate it. Thanks for. Craig Norris Listening. Thank you. So keep listening now to Edge radio. Coming up, we’ve got Edge ID because there’s never a song in the system. We’re gonna play a song, but eventually there’ll be. Speaker Music. Yeah. Listen to radio.