Eating Wilbur, or The Year I Ate a Pig- THE RULES

mmmm... butchery

I’ve had a pretty interesting response from my post a few weeks ago about my New Year’s resolution to eat a whole pig and blog about it. I’ve had offers to host a joint pig-roast (Thanks, Mikey P… We need to make this happen). I’ve had people tell me that they are going to mirror my experiment. I’ve also had people tell me that I’m crazy. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about is how do I document this tremendous feat of porcine consuming strength. (Side Note: I have no idea if it is, in fact, any sort of feat. For all I know I eat like 3 pigs in a normal year. I guess this is one of the reason’s why I’m doing this). One of the biggest thoughts that ran through my head after my initial blog post was how to measure such a feat. So, here are the rules.

After much research I’ve decided to use THIS PAGE from Sugar Mountain Farms as my guidelines. They offer a half-pig share and have some amazing info on their pages. Next time I’m in that particular area of VT, I’m going to have to stop by. The are the one’s who supplied that awesome “pig chart” at the top of this post. This comes right from their site:

If you take the whole pig, nose to tail, that will give you about 160 lbs which includes great stuff like the hocks, soup bones, lard, liver, jowls (like bacon), head, trotters and other things. The pig is good to eat, end-to-end.

So, here are the assumptions:

• For the purposes of this experiment, when I speak of eating a whole pig, I am talking about a 150-160lb butchered pig.
• I am going to try to eat all of the consumable pieces including trotters, offal, lard, and tail.
• I am going to make headcheese from the head
• I am going to make soup from the bones
• I will eat a bit of cracklin’s, but I will not eat the skin from the entire pig… and NO fur
• I will summarize my pork consumption at the end of every month with a post in a special section of this blog… I’ve decided it’s going to be called “Eating Wilbur”

Here’s the breakdown of the pig… and what I’m going to attempt to eat. I rounded some of the numbers down in my favor- Hey, I’m the one eating a whole pig, not you.

The more I look at this, the more I question whether or not it can be done by me. I mean, my goal is not to do some crazy Man vs. Food type stunt. I genuinely want to know how much pig I eat. I also want to concentrate on the cuts that are not very popular. I guess what I’m saying is that I doubt I’ll be able to eat 2 whole pig’s legs (28lbs of ham), but I’ll make sure that I concentrate on the weirder cuts instead. I feel like eating a pig brain has to count for like 10lbs of ham in this little experiment.

This should be interesting.

If anyone is having a pig roast and wants a part-time blogger to help out, let me know! Also, if anyone wants to help me make headcheese, I’m looking for someone to share this experiment with. I don’t think Mrs. Notafoodie will be too much help in shaving a pig head.