My Thoughts on Slow Food's Remarks on Hungarian Presidium

Slow Food has something to say about Mangalitsa pigs:

All 17 farmers who are members of the Presidium raise the animals in a semi-wild state and grow the materials used to prepare feed. Two significant issues emerged however. In recent years Mangalica pigs have become highly prized due to the outstanding quality of their meat and fat. Seeing easy profits, many large producers (in Hungary and other countries) have begun to cross Mangalicas with international hybrids such as Large White to reduce the time required for growing and fattening.

My understanding was the Hungarian producers, like Olmos es Toth, were crossing the pigs with Durocs (the way the Spanish cross Iberico with Durocs), not Large Whites. Here's more info - on why they'd cross the pigs - and how it, in some ways, benefits the smaller farmers raising purebreds.

In addition, the Presidium producers are mostly unable to meet the extremely restrictive requirements of Hungarian legislation for meat processing and this means that almost all the Presidium sausage production is sold on the local market, in more or less illegal fashion, by word of mouth.

Hungary's meat inspectors must love Slow Food and those illegal Mangalitsa producers.

At the same time efforts will be made to raise public awareness of the difference between intensively farmed hybrids and the Presidium Mangalica pigs.

Historically, the Mangalitsa triumphed over the feral breeds that preceded it because it did well when intensively farmed (as opposed to being raised in semi-wild conditions, like the Mangalitsa's predecessors).

My general sense is that if the consumers can't tell the difference in eating quality between the intensively farmed hybrids and the purebreds raised in semi-wild conditions, there's little point to Slow Food's educational efforts. In fact, if Slow Food can get people to pay more for otherwise equivalent pork, based on credence claims like "raised semi-wild" versus "raised intensively", they'll just encourage fraud - as has already happened quite a bit in Spain, where you've got pork being marketed as raised in one particular province or country, when it wasn't - it was just super-premium pork that had been relabeled to suit the demands of the market.

Slow Food sounds a bit shrill with their, "Seeing easy profits, many large producers ...," as if the Slow Food Presidium producers are necessarily more virtuous and less profit-oriented than big producers (despite the small ones, by Slow Food's own admission, failing to comply with the slaughter and processing regulations, potentially endangering the health of consumers).

On the positive side of things, the Mangalitsa looks to be conserved, in Europe and America, due to companies making the Mangalitsa pork and products that people want to eat. I would hope that Slow Food would see the upside to that.