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Comment by adamjb | Hacker News Reader

I think I found the Anthony Bourdain quote:

Like most other chefs I know, I’m amused when I hear people object to pork on nonreligious grounds. “Swine are filthy animals,” they say. These people have obviously never visited a poultry farm. Chicken—America’s favorite food—goes bad quickly; handled carelessly, it infects other foods with salmonella; and it bores the hell out of chefs. It occupies its ubiquitous place on menus as an option for customers who can’t decide what they want to eat. Most chefs believe that supermarket chickens in this country are slimy and tasteless compared with European varieties.

from "Don't Eat Before Reading This", the essay which put him on the map as a writer.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/04/19/dont-eat-befor...

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Everybody that claims swine are filthy animals: that is absolutely not true.

They are filthy because they have to sleep in their own shit, because the farmer presses them together in such a small room that they literally cannot move without hitting each other.

If pigs are raised on an open field, they roll themselves in water to keep them clean multiple times per day. On the other hand cows roll themselves in their shit, even when provided with puddles of water...and are unable to clean themselves afterwards because they ain't gonna take a bath.

Source: me, my grandparents had a rather mid-large farm in Germany and tried to raise their stock as humane as possible.

They also tried to raise chicken in an open manner, but that's close to impossible because you would have to have a lot of bushes, puddles, mixed areas of grass, plants, and a lot of fences in between (so groups don't attack other groups) around the stable. Otherwise chicken won't leave the stable, even not when they get infected.

And the value of chicken stock is so low that it's a financial disaster if you would build up a healthy environment for them, even if you would own the land. They would just destroy the plants so regularly that you would have to replace the plants at least on a monthly basis to provide hideouts and shadow for them.

Pigs on alps keep themselves much cleaner than pigs in a sty[1].

Cattle use automatic brushes[2] when they're made available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ww5nuVZnmc

also pigs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD5fviQ_i3c

[1] Or at least the sort of stys which haven't been legal here for a long time. Ferkeln in austrian music videos are even cleaner, but on the other hand the farmer depicted is obviously also not in her daily outfit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw-g6X8qob0&t=128

0:35 damn, that's a sweet New Holland...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23474129

> Cattle use automatic brushes when they're made available.

Damn, that's actually a very nice idea. We didn't have those back then.

For poultry, what a former VC of mine tried to do was to have coops on wagons, moving them around his large-animal pastures on a semi-daily basis.

Looks like it's a thing here, too: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobiles_Haltungssystem

FWIW, we only take "Freilandhaltung" eggs these days.

For Ländler-fans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euIrO9spk2A

In the US, it's called a chicken tractor.

>I’m amused when I hear people object to pork on nonreligious grounds. “Swine are filthy animals,” they say.

Is this actually a thing? That is, an agnostic/atheist refusing to eat pork because it's dirty? Also AFAIK "swine are filthy animals" is the justification for not eating pork in abrahamic religions.

I personally am somewhat grossed out by pork in general. I don't like the taste of most pork products. I will eat bacon or a slab of good belly at a good restaurant but otherwise I stay away.

Or if its heavily marinated..

Thanks! That's the essay which was expanded into his first book, Kitchen Confidential, so it's likely in both in some form.

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