Saving Haiti's Bacon, Porc Noir Gascon

Porc noir de Gascon

There's an interesting article about scientists creating a pig breed to replace the extinguished Haitian pigs. The high-input pink pigs they got from the USA weren't working out; they needed low-input, all-black pigs that could live cheaply.

They constructed the breed partially with the Porc Noir Gascon, a European breed from the Pyrenees similar to the Iberian Black and Mangalitsa. It has taken a lot of effort (translation from French) to stop them from disappearing. That breed, like the Mangalitsa (and unlike the Iberian Black), isn't well known.

Nowadays it is for very high-end products like Jambon de Porc Noir Gascon. Here's more info about the pig and the breed. It is too bad that even in France, they couldn't stop their best-tasting pigs from nearly vanishing.



They are a bit leaner than Mangalitsa. There's more photos of them here. Here's more info on the breed (in French).