col-lec-tion [kuh-lek-shuh n] -noun:~alle gegen alle~

I enjoy gathering and collecting, but had never thought critically about these practices prior to our group's discussions. As a result of all these talks about how collections do some sort of damage to original context, whether or not original context matters, and who collects with what intention, I had some difficulty in deciding on which collection I could use to make some sort of point about these issues. For the most part, I consider my library a(n) (incomplete) collection because I like grouping my books by author. I have no author's completed works on my book shelves so I've decided not to portray that collection but in passing fashionable talk about how an incomplete collection of books demonstrates a manipulated context from that of a collection of works by an author. This manipulated context allows for competing naratives whereby the audience or collector would construct meaning based on an incomplete data set. This is troubling, because as I've mentioned in prior blogs, I don't like other people trying to create a narrative about my shit. You can have my narrative about my collections, but I don't like the idea of "everyone vs. everyone" when it comes to talks of my personal belongings.

My next idea for a collection to display was no better than the first for very similar reasons -- context destroyed. However this time, said collection is already on display and people have already constructed narratives. I speak of my myspace page. I'm not ashamed to admit I'm on myspace. It's not like I'm on facebook also -- one is bad enough. But I digress, the point is that for all the prompts on the myspace profile I simply copy and pasted a myriad of philosophy quotes ranging from Chairman Mao to Nietzsche to Godwin. Talk about taken out of context, all these guys come together in a gross compilation without even a mention of the books they actually came from!

Then one fateful Tuesday evening (last tuesday), whilst driving about and taking pictures of random Pullman crap, the idea came to me. Or perhaps it had always been with me. I had packed my fridge hours before full of packages of sausage and bacon as well as the many previous blogs which further profess my love for all things swine. Perhaps the idea to present a single pig as a collection really came to me after my colleague and I stopped at Minh's Asian Bakery, on the corner of Stadium and Grand, for pork buns. Inspired by Emily's wonderful food pictures, I prepped my pork buns for their photo-op and then the wonderful pig idea came to me in a mediocre mouthful of warm dough and sweet pork.


The following is my attempt to find and take pictures of various cuts of pork along with a picture of my favorite aisle in the grocery store, which as a thing in itself, serves as a collection of porks. For starters, I decided it best to use a cut chart as a frontispiece of sorts, but I couldn't decide which of these two was more informative:

Two shoulders? This is my least favorite pig place because aside from feet and head/jowls, the shoulder offers the leaner pork meats. The upper or Boston shoulder includes part of the back and hasmore fat than the picnic shoulder which is situated lower on the front leg. The Boston shoulder is commonly cubbed or roasted, as per the chart, whereas the lower shoulder is chiefly sausage meat. The picture to the left is a cut from the lower/picnic shoulder -- sausage time!

Our next stop on the pig tour is arguably the most popular and used area, the loin. Covering most of the pig's back, the loin includes the best cuts like the sirloin (near the rear of the back) and the infamous pork chop (seen on the right). Also included in the loin are the top ribs. Not to be confused with spare ribs, the top ribs commonly contain more meat but also more muscle and less fat than the spare ribs (located in the belly area).

Rump roasts and ham come from the leg/butt section of the pig. Popular on holidays, (spiral cut) ham is a traditional feast usually coated in brown sugar or pineapple. I have not included a ham picture, but (on the bottom right) the rump roast is a deliciously fatty alternative.

My favorite location on the pig is the belly. Famous for its fatty cuts like bacon and spare ribs, the belly includes, by far, the most fat. The belly also contains tripe, but I've got a section devoted later on to all the nasty bits and uncommonly used parts still to come. Spare ribs dominate baby back ribs in my opinion -- again the fattier the better when it comes to my cuts of pork.

Tripe, head cheese, and feet are the most common of the uncommon. Coined, "The Nasty Bits," by famous chef and author, Anthony Bourdain, these three cuts are often made into dog food. By and large, dishes that rely on the Nasty Bits are usually indicative of any given culture's reliance on the pig. Chitlins, a southern American dish, is pig intestine usually boiled at length or put in a pressure cooker to tone down the rubbery texture and embolden the deliciousness of pig fat. Tripe is generally divided into two different parts of the pig's stomach, intestines and stomach lining. On the left, intestine and chili oil, to the right is a cooked dish of honeycomb tripe, or stomach lining. Finally, pig's feet are strangely common in pickled form. My grandparents loved the stuff but I could never keep any of it down. I have nothing else to say about pig's feet, despite the fact that I have a picture here of them -- not a huge fan of feet, but stomach parts are okay in my book. Along with the feet, worth mentioning is the shank or hock. More or less, the shank is an ankle cut from the foreleg. Again, eating the feet of any animal makes me a little suspicious. Usually animals walk around in poop, and while I know things are cooked thoroughly, its a hard image to overcome.

You can find most of these pig parts in various sections of your nearest grocery store. My favorite, the belly section, is generally not found in close vicinity to the sausages and the loin cuts. Each section in the store is a microcosm of what I propose to be a collection of swine, insofar as each different pig section in the grocery store has a variety of different cuts from the same area of the pig. Belly section photos brought to you from Pullman Safeway. Thus concludes my mapping of how a single pig counts as a pork collection -- my favorite kind of collection.

(Note: Many of these images are stock photos found on a google image search: "Pork")