In the war years, if you eat a meal of pork stew noodles and flatbread rice tonight, tomorrow is going to be a hard battle. In the movie Armageddon, the commando team that attacked the first fortress of Jinzhou with a pool of water on the day's food was pork stew noodles and steamed buns.
And eating pork is still a reward in ancient China. During the Spring and Autumn Period, in order to expand the source of soldiers, the Yue Kingdom required more children. No matter what your status, as long as you give birth to a son, I will reward you with a dog and two pots of wine; if you give birth to a daughter, I will reward you with a pig and two pots of wine. "Yue Language": give birth to husband, two wine, one dog; give birth to a woman, two wine, one dolphin. Until now, China is also the world's largest pork consumer, eating 700 million pigs a year, basically an average of 2 people eat 1 pig a year. Half of the world's pigs are kept in our country. China has been domesticating wild boar since the Hemudu period more than 7,000 years ago. In order to reduce the animality of wild boars and make pork more delicious, the method of castrating pigs was also invented. The Book of Rites mentions: "Feng Yue Gang Mane, Guinea Pig Day Fattening." "Domestic pigs have two major roles, one is to eat, fatten up to eat pork; the other is to accumulate fertilizer, before the invention of chemical fertilizer pig fertilizer is the main fertilizer of farmland.
But now, most of China's pigs are actually imported breeding pigs. For example, the 1,000 breeding pigs airlifted from the Uk in December 2020 are great-grandparent breeding pigs, and the total price of these pigs is as high as 30 million yuan per head. In 2020, China imported more than 20,000 breeding pigs, and more than 90% of the pork we see in our daily meals are actually foreign varieties.
In other words, breeding pigs basically rely on imports. What about native pigs? Where did it go? Our native black pigs are high in fat, reaching 60%. That is, the ratio of lean meat to fat meat is 4 to 6. Moreover, the food requirements are high, eating 4-6 kg of feed, in order to gain 1 kg of body weight. At the same time, it needs to be reared for 1 year to be out of the pen.
The Duroc pig in the United States, the York pig in the United Kingdom, etc., can be out of the pen in 6 months, and eating 2-3 kg of feed can increase 1 kg of body weight. At the same time, the fat content is only 40%. Therefore, many pig companies will have profits as soon as possible in the future and will begin to use foreign pigs. But after a period of use, breeding pigs will degenerate. Then it is necessary to continuously introduce new foreign breeding pigs, basically 5-8 years to carry out a replacement. In this way, breeding pigs are monopolized by a very small number of countries such as the United States, Britain and Canada.
At present, there are 90 local breeds of "soil pigs" in China, but 8 breeds of pigs such as Hengjing pigs and Hongqiao pigs have become extinct, 5 breeds such as forked black pigs are endangered, and 25 varieties are endangered, and the stock of individual pig breeds is even less than that of giant pandas.
In fact, to say that pork stew noodles, braised pork and stir-fry, or our native pork is delicious. The Western white pig looks very good, but it is not as good as the local pig, and the braised pork is not fragrant.
However, some local specialty pigs have begun to establish indigenous source protection and breeding. Increase the number of native pigs bred in various ways. In fact, in the case of no shortage of oil and water in everyone's stomach, many people would rather eat 5 kilograms of native pigs than 10 kilograms of foreign pigs.