What a nice pig, Daddy, let's eat him! Turning a pet into sausages isn't for the squeamish, you may need help from your children



When the Masai of East Africa kill a cow, the herdsman first coaxes it to the ground and then lies beside the animal, stroking and calming it. He whispers in its ear to explain why it must die and asks its forgiveness. Then he smothers it.

I'd planned to do something similar when our pig Spidey's time came, but I didn't get the chance. Smothering is not an acceptable practice in the modern British slaughterhouse.

But what I would have told him is that, while his death was ignoble, the butchering would be glorious. A food hero with proper respect for good pork was flying in from Italy to do the honours. And we, who had fed him and visited him, were going to enjoy every bit of him.



Piggy in the middle: Alex Renton with his children and the family Tamworth, Spidey, before he was slaughtered

In turning Spidey into food, we were going to bide by the chef Fergus Henderson's wise dictum: 'If you're going to kill an animal, it seems only polite to use the whole thing.'

Indeed, Spidey is still with us in the form of salamis, bacon, a whole host of roasting cuts and some coppa ham that I'm very excited about. But the first lunch he gave us - on the day of his slaughter and halfway through the butchering - was the finest so far.

We ate it round the table with our Italian guru Renato Toros and a bunch of foodies from Friuli in northern Italy, who had come over to see what the Scots do with pigs.

The Italians cooked. We ate the liver and the cheeks, sliced and fried with onions, juniper, bay and a little white wine; a traditional Pig-Butchering Day meal, when the offal and the parts that can't be cured are eaten.

We drank a crisp white from the Veneto, and on the side each of us had a piece of home-baked bread and a frittata made with the pig's brain.

It was noisy, jolly, filling - a proper workers' meal. And after it, we went back to turning the lean meat into salami.

The story of Spideypig Curly Bacon - to give him his full name - started nearly a year earlier, at Peelham Farm in Berwickshire. We knew Chris and Denise Walton, the farmers, and the fantastic organic pork, beef and lamb they sell at Edinburgh Farmers' Market.

'He seemed to double in size on each visit' //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

And at a time when more and more of us are doing it - even B&Q is now considering selling pigsties - we decided we wanted a pig of our own.

On our first day of pig ownership, we drove to Peelham and picked our piglet, one of a litter of ten Tamworths we found playing tag around the vast shape of their mother.

I wanted to take him straight back to the terrace street in Edinburgh where we live and keep him in the back garden.

But I was dissuaded. My next-door neighbour pointed out the 'no livestock' clause in the title deeds. So, instead, we did a deal with the Waltons: remote pig ownership.

They'd look after him - and we'd pay his bed and board at £18 a month and come to visit him. My children - then nine and three - chose the name. I was glad, because in it lay the story of the pig's ultimate fate. I wanted to avoid misunderstandings come slaughter-time.

Like all the Waltons' pigs Spidey was a Tamworth, with a rough ginger coat and a long snout. The breed is known for being hardy, clever and quick, only a few genes removed from their wild-boar ancestors.

Throughout last spring and summer we went down regularly to visit him, taking plenty of organic treats - he was the perfect outlet for unwanted roots and leaves from our veggie box.

The children decided he deserved sweets, too - and since we had to abide by the farm's organic rules, Spideypig became the only pig in Scotland to savour Green & Black's chocolate.

It was a little like having a child at boarding school. 'Well, he looks happy,' my wife and I would say wistfully as we drove home after a visit. The children were less sentimental. 'When we eat Spidey, we can eat all of him but not his nose,' said the three-year-old.



Tradition: For many British butchers the head of a pig goes straight in the bin

Spidey seemed to double in size every time we visited him. Pigs convert food to weight faster than any other domesticated animal, and he and his siblings swelled on the barley and peas that the Waltons grow as fodder.

They lived very happily in the muddy fields on the bare Berwickshire hills. His total vet's bill was £1 and I was proud to own a remote pig, free range and organically fed from the fields next to his own.

And as he got bigger, I got smugger. What had begun as a practical project motivated partly by economy but mainly by greed became something of a moral crusade as the months passed.

After all, as last autumn and winter went by, more had emerged about the horrors and failures of industrial pig farming.

It became clear that if you pay less than £10 or £12 a kilo for bacon, you are probably buying pork farmed on the Continent in cruel conditions.



Indeed, with supermarkets relentlessly driving down prices, no ordinary British pig farmer could even cover their costs for most of last year. According to the National Farmers' Union, they were typically losing more than £20 per animal.

Boycott: Jamie Oliver in Jamie Saves Our Bacon, where he reveals the horrors of the pig industry

The awful stories about the origins of swine flu - a virus probably bred and mutated in the vast pig factories of U.S. corporations - have made the case for returning to humane farming methods even more convincing.

In January this year, Jamie Oliver uncovered more in his TV show Jamie Saves Our Bacon.



He revealed the European sows that are kept all their breeding lives in cages too small to turn around in, and how supermarkets habitually bend the truth on labelling, describing Dutch or Danish bacon as 'sourced in the UK', even if it is merely packed here. He advocated a boycott.

Against all this, the remote pig concept seemed so much better. And so I started boasting about my ownership of an interactive, educational pet-cum-recycling-machine who would end his days as very cheap, decently-produced bacon, which gave a proper return to the farmer.

When the time came, Spidey was taken to a nearby abattoir. There were no sad farewells - we sent him to his death alone, but someone from the farm ensured his well-being until the end. After 'processing', Spidey was returned to the farm, where we would butcher him.

Back at Peelham Farm, we all stood in white coats in the meat-processing room. Spidey was laid out on the table, gutted. It took about 45 minutes to turn him into piles of meat, skin and fat, and a bucket of bones.



We were butchering two pigs that day - the other was farmer Chris Walton's. His was to be butchered Italian style and Spidey in the British fashion - we would share the meat of the two pigs.

The two butchers watched each other with keen interest. Andy Winterburn, the butcher from Berwick-upon-Tweed who works at Peelham and was taking care of Spidey, sniffed as Renato from Friuli made incisions to take out the spare ribs from the Italian pig's belly.

'No butcher in Britain would do that,' he said. And when Renato started stripping down the pig's head for meat, Andy muttered: 'I could have done two pigs in the time this has taken. This is just not cost-effective.'

But, as Renato pointed out, there was 2kg of good meat on the head, including the cheeks - a delicacy once sold in Britain as Bath chaps.

'It was the best dinner party ever' //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////



Nowadays, in most British butchers, the head goes straight in the bin. When we'd finished, we totted up the proceeds. Spidey had started out at 75kg - and yielded 42kg of usable meat. The Italian pig weighed in at 62kg and produced 52kg.

The disparity shocked even Andy, who spent his career working in a busy butcher's shop.

A leg and much of the belly and shoulder of Spidey then went into brine, the beginning of the bacon and gammon-making process. More was put aside for sausages, and the rest for shrink-wrapping as joints and cuts to go home with me.

But Renato's work on the Italian pig was only just beginning. First, we took the best meat, about 15kg of it, and minced it up with seasoning for salami. With the children helping, the mixture was then pumped into sausage skins and tied off with string by Renato.

No waste: Spidey was turned into salami

The osso collo, or pork neck, was then spiced, wrapped in sausage skins - the cleaned intestines of another pig - and put away to cure. It will emerge in three months as a coarser parma ham.

And the Italian pig's deliciously fatty belly meat, which would become streaky bacon here in Britain, was salted, rolled and trussed up to cure as pancetta.

Wine and pepper-heavy salsicce sausages for immediate frying came next. And then the last of the piles, which seemed to be largely fat and skin, became fat sausages - called cotechini in northern Italy.

The best fat, snowy white, from the back, we salted and peppered and put away to dry, for up to a year, as lardo - in Italy, this is a delicacy and is cut petal-thin and served on bruschetta.

The rest of the fat was taken off to the kitchen to render it into strutto - cooking lard for frying and pastry-making.

Herein lies the secret of why so little of the Italian-butchered pig was wasted: everything was used. It was extraordinary. I thought I might faint, I was enjoying myself so much.

Meanwhile, my son was attempting to cleave open our pig's head. He wanted to get the brain out. I watched him, with a deep and ancient pride brimming in my heart. He finally knew where his food came from - and he wasn't squeamish at all.

It was time for a celebration. And so a week later, I held a pig-out for friends. We started with a pig's liver and lean meat terrine encased in trotter jelly and the strutto fat, served with capers and gherkins.

On top, I laid snippets of Spidey's ear, brined and fried until they were crisp. That went down all right.

Then there were roast pork fillet slices, with a spicy apple sauce. Gone in a second.

And finally, served on a mound of puy lentils that I'd boiled in pork stock, the cotechini sausages. And they scoffed the lot of them. Everyone got a going-home present of half-a-dozen sausages. I think it was the best dinner party I've ever held.

And what of the children, you might wonder. There have been neither tears nor nightmares.



They've declared Spidey's bacon very good - my son, who likes to cook breakfast on Saturday, is impressed that when you put it in the pan there's no need to add any cooking oil. And no evil white gunk comes out either.

He even thinks roast pork might now be a competitor for his usual favourite: beef steak.

And my daughter? As we drove home from the pig-butchering, she looked out of the window at the first of the spring lambs. 'Can we get a lamb? Please!' she asked.

We waited expectantly for her next line - and then it came. 'We could eat him.'