Chinese the pigs eaten every year can circle the earth 26 times (700 million heads), the world's first, but only 2% are local black pork, no wonder the pork eaten now is not as fragrant as before.
Earth pigs used to be brilliant
China, the world's earliest pig breeding country, according to research at least 9,000 years of history. In the oracle bones excavated from the Yin Ruins, there are records of the word "豕" and the castrated pig.
In chinese characters, the original meaning of home is not that there are people in the house, but "there are pigs under the house", and only people with pigs call it home. From the Book of Poetry to the Qi Min Zhi Shu, from Zhuangzi to the Book of Wang Zhennong, China's native pigs play an important role in our farming civilization. "宀" baogai is pronounced mián, meaning house, and below "豕" is pronounced shǐ, which means pig.
▲ The meaning of "豕" is: pig, Chinese native pig
9,000 years ago, Henan people first lit up pig breeding skills, since then the pig love has not been, in order to feed the People, the earth pig evolved from an inverted triangle figure to a fat house, and became a farmer fertilizer producer, making 2 tons of manure a year, fattening the farmland in the Yellow River Basin of the Yangtze River.
How much does Chinese love pork?
At its peak, the C position of sacrifice was it, and 90% of the meat of the Central Plains people was it. As we all know, when the Chinese people sacrifice gods, a large pig's head must be placed in the middle of the offering table, because the ancients believed that it could communicate with the gods. You read that right, pigs are famous mythical beasts in ancient times, pigs especially like to play with water, super love live mud, when it is about to rain, they are extremely excited, and then take a bath in the rain to wash the living mud. Therefore, pigs are believed to be able to predict the weather and are messengers of the god of rain. Since the pig can pass through the rain god, then the pig's head must also be able to do it. Therefore, the pig's head was used to pray for the wind and rain to be smooth, and the grain was abundant. This custom has been followed to this day, and countless pig heads have led the table.
In addition, Han Cheng xiang also walked with it by the sea, Su Dongpo wrote poetry for it, Zhu Yuanzhang called it fat, no pig in the house is not "home", but also to the world to open branches and leaves, the world's famous pig breeds are shed its blood (Whitefield pig, British local pig, Roman local pig, Bozhong pig, Baksha pig, Napoleon pig).
In 2018, a total of 113 million tons of pork were produced worldwide, and 55.95 million tons of Chinese ate away. In other words, China consumes nearly half of the world's pork with less than 1/5 of its population. In 2014, Chinese ate a record 57.19 million tons of pork. After that, although it fell slightly, it was still invincible in the world.
If you count from the 1960s, China's pork consumption has increased by as much as 15 times in the past half century. Behind this is the rapid increase in the average pork consumption of Chinese, especially after the reform and opening up. From the 1970s when the average person was less than 10 kilograms, looking up at Americans, to the late 90s, catching up with each other for the first time and riding away. Today, each Chinese eats an average of 40 kilograms of pork per year.
The extinction took less than 30 years
Over the past 100 years, more than 1,548 livestock and poultry species worldwide have been endangered. Livestock and poultry, belonging to the category of artificial breeding, many people believe that after human intervention, the extinction rate of poultry is almost zero, they are not like wild animals, because of the overexploitation of the earth, the destruction of the environment, so that they lost their habitat and thus extinct. But in fact, they also face an extinction called "market choice".
Take our Chinese native pigs, in the 1980s and 1990s, everyone fell in love with eating lean meat, these pigs (American Duroc pigs, British Yorkshire pigs, Danish long white pigs), eat less, long fast, lean mixed breed foreign pigs worth 30,000, go abroad charter flights, quickly occupy 90% of the Chinese pigsty. Even the image of the second master brother changed from black skin to white skin (1960 "Sun Wukong Three Dozen White Bone Essence"), you know, it was originally based on the Taihu Lake black pig.
It can be said that the 1990s was a watershed, and the invasion of imported pigs was almost the same time as the demise of local pigs in China. Before 1994, China's native pigs accounted for about 90% of the market share, and after that, they were squeezed by large commercial pigs, and in 2007, the market share of Chinese native pigs did not exceed 2%.
In addition, an epidemic in 2010 affected this balance, resulting in a sharp decline in the stock of live pigs, and in 2011 pork prices rose to a high point, giving low-priced foreign pigs the opportunity to enter the Chinese market. That year, China imported more than 1 million tons of pork, more than three times as much as in 2010. Foreign pigs smell the cracks in the Chinese market, so the United States, Mexico, Finland and other countries have organized groups to carry out "pork trade" in China, and even countries such as Argentina and Uruguay that do not have as many pigs as a county in Henan hope to get a piece of the pie.
Whether it is breeding, breeding, breeding, breeding, slaughtering, the domestic technical level can not keep up with the growing huge Chinese market. The domestic meat and processing industry market concentration is very low, and more than 90% of commercial pigs are slaughtered by small workshop-style slaughterhouses. In 2010, the Ministry of Commerce required the elimination of 50% of the backward pig slaughtering capacity within five years, which means that large processing plants such as Shuanghui, Yurun and Jinluo will occupy a larger market share.
It was also in this context that Shuanghui acquired smithfield in the United States, which slaughtered twice as much as it did. In the United States, where the industrial standardization process is complete, the cost price of commercial pigs is 9 yuan per kilogram, compared with 14 yuan in China. If Shuanghui can introduce Smithfield's feeding and slaughtering technology, it will benefit from exporting more low-cost pork to China in the future.
Originally, there were more than 300 kinds of pigs in the world, and there were 125 kinds of pigs in China, and 88 kinds of local pig breeds existing.
However, the second national survey of livestock and poultry genetic resources shows that about 85% of the 88 local pig breeds unique to China have dropped sharply, of which 31 breeds are endangered and endangered. Among them, 8 are directly extinct (Hongqiao pig, Yayang pig, Pingtan black pig, Fuzhou black pig, Panlang pig, Beigang pig, Hexi pig, Hengjing pig). And the authentic Sichuan hui pot meat (Chenghua pig), Yunnan roast suckling pig (Yunnan small-eared pig), Jinhua ham (Jinhua pig), is about to become a memory on the tip of the tongue, if you are not careful, these past delicacies have become rare animals.
And all of this happened in less than 30 years. In 30 years, only one-third of our human life has gone, and a species is facing extinction. I really don't know how many species my generation will have to watch go extinct?
Foodies save native pigs
According to the data, more than 95% of the pork food on the Chinese table currently contains "foreign" genes. Wanting to eat pure Chinese pork is simply a luxury.
Nowadays, most of the pork in the Chinese market is the offspring of foreign ternary hybrids after breeding pigs, and a small number of sows after hybridization of native pigs and foreign pigs, and then the offspring of internal ternary hybrids after hybridization with foreign pigs. If "China on the Tip of the Tongue" shoots a pork feature, it is necessary to cross the mountains and mountains to find China's last native pig, and eating pure native pork has become a luxury.
Fortunately, however, in recent years, with the appeal of agricultural experts and the gradual attention of the authorities, it is gratifying that the current situation has improved.
At present, the incense of native pigs is continued by 79 protected areas and 37 gene banks, including 3 national conservation areas such as Ningxiang pigs, Rongchang pigs and Tibetan pigs, and 35 pig genetic resource breeding farms such as Taihu pigs, min pigs and Huanghuaihai black pigs. We firmly believe that only by raising local first-class breeding pigs will we not be like the 1 kg of pork in South Korea next door for 75 yuan.
And unlike other species protection, species protection at the national level is not "protection for the sake of protection", how to achieve commodity industrialization and market promotion, is the key to protecting local pig breeds. Therefore, what is needed to protect local pig breeds is to "eat", and we must always remember that "foodies can also save native pigs".