Is that pork on your plate really white meat?

It’s the season for eating white meat: chicken and fish have been flying off the supermarket shelves over the past couple of days. And in recent decades pork has also been marketed as the “other white meat”.

The pork industry has been promoting it as an alternative to chicken for families looking for a cheap, low-fat, and nutritious form of protein. But is pork actually a white meat and what is the difference between red and white meats?

We’ve been chewing on this a fair bit lately, as one of the biggest differences we’ve noticed about our free range Wessex saddleback pork is the colour of the meat – it’s a lot darker (and that’s apart from the extra flavour and juiciness). It’s particularly noticeable with the meat found in the legs and shoulders.

Wessex Saddleback pork shoulder cross section

So why is meat light or dark? It all comes down to two different types of muscles: slow-twitch and fast-twitch. Animals will have different coloured meat depending on what type of muscles they use and their ratio of slow to fast-twitch muscles.

The slow ones are used often, for extended activities like constant walking, standing or flying. They’re the muscles found in the shoulders of pigs or the thighs and legs of chickens. Slow-twitch muscles are slower to contract, good for endurance, and are the muscles needed to help a marathon runner go the distance.

They need a lot of fuel and they get this through the protein myoglobin, which stores large amounts of oxygen to support the long-term energy use. Myoglobin is a reddish colour, sort of like hemoglobin in blood, which is why slow-twitch muscles are dark. They’re also linked with more fat or marbling, as fat has to be kept close-by for the constant demand for fuel.

In general, the more exercise a muscle gets, and the older the animal, the greater the need for myoglobin, and so the meat’s darker. Slow-twitch muscles, or red meat, tend to hold moisture better, have more fat, and hence are more flavoursome and forgiving to cook.

Fast-twitch muscles are used for sudden bursts of quick movement – like the breast of a chicken to help it escape from a predator. They have smaller amounts of myoglobin and instead need glycogen for their energy. They’re the muscle fibre types that a sprinter develops.

Fast-twitch muscles, or white meat, tend to carry less fat and while they can be tender if cooked properly they tend to be dry and bland and lack the flavour of slow-twitch muscles.

This explains why the working joints of free range pigs are not only darker in colour but also have more flavour, because of the marbling. An intensive pig that lazes about and is processed at a much younger age will have less slow-twitch muscles and its meat won’t be as dark and when cooked it is usually dry and lacks flavour.

Over the years meat breeders have been selecting animals that grow fast, and so they’ve got more fast-twitch muscles – making the meat leaner and whiter. This is what’s happened in the pork industry, because of its desire to sell itself as the “other white meat”.

The real casualty has been the loss of breeds with a higher ratio of slow-twitch muscles. Fortunately we’ve still got some old breeds like the Wessex Saddleback that haven’t been influenced by modern genetics and the push for fast, lean growth. They have the unique property of a lot of slow-twitch muscles, marbling, and best of all, moisture and flavour.

So if you’re having white meat this Easter, you’d better stick to your fish or chicken breast, or, the loin of an intensive farmed white pig!

Compromise in the cabbage patch

One of the things we aim to promote is the fantastic lifestyle that is based on growing your own food and being self sufficient. It was one of the values that brought us together and while it is hard work, it is so rewarding to have bought out own patch of Tasmania and to be able to source virtually all of our food from our garden and farm.

Both Eliza and I grew up on family farms in the hinterland of north-west Tasmania and had access to the most amazing home grown produce. Our family was the classic self-sufficient smallholding: we had a massive orchard, two extensive vegetable gardens and berry patches, and we always had access to our own lamb, pork, chicken, ducks, geese, rabbits and beef.

If you were hungry, you would go and pick a fresh carrot from the garden or raid the berry patch. If you had more time there were always enough ingredients to make a big pot of soup. I didn’t realise how lucky I was to have access to a freezer full of yummy, ethically produced meat or a garden and storage shed full of home grown organic vegies.

In fact, it wasn’t until I went to high school in the big smoke of Burnie that I realised not everybody experiences this sort of lifestyle. It’s funny looking back at being tormented about coming from ‘the sticks’. I clearly remember when we had a grade eight Christmas party and we had to bring a plate of supper to share. At the time Mum had forgotten to make something, so I was forced to take a plate of carrot sticks. The town kids thought that was pretty funny. It wasn’t until I travelled that I appreciated how lucky I was to have grown up in this environment.

One of the things that happens though when two passionate gardeners ‘shack up’ is working out who is going to be responsible for looking after the vegetable garden. To avoid conflict we have decided that Eliza will be the main vegetable gardener, while I will look after the orchard and berry patch. So far that has been working well and I have learnt that it is best to stay out of the vegetable garden and that friendly advice is not always appreciated.

Eliza certainly has passion for her garden and thrives on the garden-to-plate mentality. Every time she serves a meal, it’s like we’re eating at a quality fine-dining restaurant and it goes something like this: “Tonight, dear, we have from the garden seven home-grown vegetables to accompany our free range Wessex Saddleback pork shoulder. The parsnips have been roasted with garlic, sea salt…”

I think that since her trip to Hobart and eating out her service skills and product knowledge delivery have even gone up a level. I think she was inspired by our time at Piccalilly.

To help promote the self sufficiency lifestyle, I have been part of an enthusiastic team organising the Penguin Organic and Sustainable Living Festival. It’s a grass roots event being held at the Penguin Sustainable Living Centre on Sunday, March 28.

It’ll be a great day with an impressive line-up of guest speakers including the founder of permaculture, Bill Mollison, SBS’s ‘Gourmet Farmer’ Matthew Evans, and agricultural scientist Bruce French who has put together a database of the world’s edible plants. He’s working in third world countries to encourage the locals to grow their native foods, rather than western varieties that do nothing to help their malnutrition problems.

For more information on the festival, have a look at the flier.

In the name of poo

It’s a dangerous time of year to be out at dusk.

The dung beetles are swarming.

Just as the sun sets the beetles take to the air, at break-neck speed, looking for fresh manure to munch on.

They’re after the bacteria in the poo, and they’re also looking for a place to lay their eggs.

When they’ve found a pat that’s fresh and runny, they dive into the soil and dig tunnels ruler-length deep. Then they roll up balls of poo and take them to the bottom of the tunnels where they pop in an egg – which won’t hatch for maybe three, six or even 12 months depending on the season. The larvae’s then got a ready-made meal when it hatches out.


We’re seeing a lot of over-enthusiastic dung beetles on our barbed wire at the moment. You’d think with so much air above the fences they wouldn’t put their flight paths between the wires.

There are also quite a few beetles laying on top of cow pats, toes in the air, who I think may have over-indulged.

Dung beetles play a vital role on farms in cleaning up effluent. When they drag it down into the soil they’re adding organic matter, aerating the ground, and removing the temptation for flies.

They’re also good for the health of our animals. Within manure there can be larvae of nasty parasites like roundworm. But at 30cm underground the larvae can’t survive. Dung beetles can destroy 70 per cent of roundworm larvae in manure.

The type of dung beetle we see most often is the Blue Bomber, a Spanish species introduced into Tasmania 20 years ago by our friend Graeme Stevenson. We do have native beetles, but they’ve got more of a taste for wallaby and possum poo.

Graeme now collects the beetles and sells them to farmers on the mainland. A year ago I went on a trapping expedition with him. You can hear some rather funny audio from the trip here.

Over the next few weeks I suggest wearing a helmet and safety glasses if you’re out at dusk.

It’s the time of year when “injury by dung beetle” starts appearing on hospital emergency lists.

Tasmanian Gothic

Apologies to Grant Wood (1892-1942).

A trip to the city

We've been at Mount Gnomon Farm for nearly nine months now, and we've just had our first proper weekend away together. When you've got a farm you can't just pack your bags and lock the door. Going away involves organising pig-sitters, chook locker-uppers, cat-feeders and long lists of instructions (e.g....only let Eliza's ducks Roger and Dylan out of their pen for the night shift AFTER all the other ducks have gone to bed, otherwise they'll chase them...). Fortunately Guy's got a muscly and dedicated brother who doesn't mind lugging buckets of grain, and our 14-year-old neighbour has great attention to detail for all the little animals.

So we took off to Hobart and Launceston for a long weekend of catching up with customers and foodies. I think we ended up meeting more than a dozen people who we've been corresponding with, but never met.

It wasn't till we went away from the farm that we realised how busy we've been since we bought the property. Every weekend has been filled with fencing, moving pigs between paddocks, digging up lawn for the garden, planting trees and trying to work out the underground water system.

And that means wearing farm clothes every weekend that end up being soaked to get the red dirt out. So it was quite an effort going through the ironing basket and dress cupboard looking for "city" clothes for us to wear this weekend.

On Friday night we went to Piccalilly in Battery Point for dinner. No, actually it was a lot more than that - it was the eight-course degustation, of which one of the courses was our pork. Chef Iain Todd slow-cooks the pork and serves it with egg-yolk pasta, corn puree and bechamel and of course crackling. It was about ten o'clock when it was served - about three quarters of the way through the degustation - and we were so excited to be eating our own produce in such a fine setting.


The next morning we caught up with Hobart's food bloggers at Red Velvet Lounge at Cygnet. We gave our host Steve Cumper a sample of our shoulder pork, which he tested out later in the day (find out the verdict here). We also met prolific food blogger Rita, food tragic Stephen Estcourt and his wife Mary, food trailer Victor, and Reb of the Gutter Trash.

On our way back to the north-west we went to Festivale in Launceston. It had such a great atmosphere and genuinely good food. There was a 'produce to plate' section where you could try olive oils, wasabi pickles, chilli ginger beer, rhubarb drinks, beef, lamb, garlic, and talk to the people who grew it all. I think we might have to have a stall there next year so we can tell people what's different about free-range, rare-breed pork.

And it seems some of our piglets have learnt some very bad habits while we've been away...although Guy says he deliberately left the barn door open so that the piglets could get used to life away from mum, eating grain.