Participants at the first “Hog Heaven: A celebration of local pork from snout to tail” got more than just a smorgasbord of different types of pork-centered dishes.
Attendees to the event, which was part of the weekend-long conference Bloomington Eats Green, enjoyed a casual atmosphere, sampling the various pork dishes as well as listening to a bluegrass band.
Political science professor Christine Barbour helped organize the event.
“We shouldn’t just pick and choose what part of an animal we want to eat. We can make delicious food from everything, thus ‘snout to tail,'” Barbour said.
The event, which took place at the Indiana Memorial Union Alumni Hall showcased many of Bloomington’s local restaurant’s top chefs. Fourteen chefs from 14 different restaurants cooked meals featuring different parts of a pig, including the head, which was one of the more popular dishes as many people had never been exposed to it.
“I really liked the head portion,” senior Brad Good said. “It was more amazing than I ever thought the head of a pig could taste. I was a little tentative, but I am now definitely more inclined to try more unusual parts of an animal now.”
Other dishes included classic ribs and international dishes such as Brazilian Feijoada, while the owner of the BLU Boy Chocolate Café & Cakery David Fletcher created Maple Bacon Caramel Bon Bons.
“These are just for the event, bacon and chocolate seemed fun to combine, bon bons basically have bacon and maple syrup filled with standard caramel so all you taste really is the caramel,” Fletcher said.
Promoting sustainability was one of the major focuses of “Hog Heaven,” as it is quickly becoming a hot topic on campus.
“Sustainability is about making sure that we leave the world the way we found it,” Barbour said.
The price to attend the event was $20.
“We kept the prices as low as possible, basically giving attendees all the pork you can eat, to try to encourage students to attend the event,” Barbour said. “We grow a lot of pork here, and eating animals that are raised locally, you know how they were raised and the kind of lives that they lived. Eating the whole animal is a way of respecting it.”
Chefs cook food from head to tail at Hog Heaven event
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