BRAD WEISS

College of William and Mary

Configuring the authentic value of real

food:
Farm-to-fork, snout-to-tail, and local food movements

A B S T R A C T
The partibility of pigs and the circulation of their
partsfrom snout to tail, as the popular culinary
phrase puts itare routinely celebrated in
communities committed to eating local. In this
article, I explore how different kinds of totalities are
configured in the practices of such locavore actors
with respect to pigs and pork. Approaches as varied
as Sausseurean structuralism, functionalist
sociology, and actor network theory characterize
their objects of inquiry as totalities constituted by
relationships among component parts. So too the
totalities in relationships forged via pigs become
(mis)aligned with the totality of pigs as embodied,
complex organisms. Such wholes from parts reveal
the overdetermination (or fetishization) of the
connections (between farmers and consumers,
chefs and diners, humans and animals) extolled by
local food actors. [local food, totalities, pigs,
animalhuman relationships, value]

hat is the appeal of totalities? Why do people find wholes,

completion, and integrity compelling, in aesthetic as well as
analytical terms?1 As anthropologists, we need to recognize
the long history of the whole, totality, holism, and structures assumption of invariant relations among elements
that unity, greater than the sum of its partsthat has marked most of the
history of the social sciences, to make sense of contemporary interest in
partial connections, multiplicity, rupture, and the fragmentary (Haraway
2008; Strathern 2005). All of these singularities carry the weight and plausibility they do precisely because they presume (or presume our presupposition of ) the force of totalization, understood as a kind of mastery or domination (perhaps fictive, undoubtedly contested) that can be productively
suspended, interrupted, or interrogated.
In what follows, I consider the kinds of alternative totalities that are
proposed and enacted in contemporary local food activism. And, as
wholes are always a relation of parts that can only be understood in terms
of the significance that derives from their dynamic organization (Weiss
1996:155ff .), these novel totalities are equally composed of reimagined elements (the new parts for new wholes). The totalities considered here instantiate a particular vision of circulation, a model of food as a means of
promoting unification and integration in and across a range of different domains: spatial, social, ecological, and culinary. Each of the twinned modes
of integration I examine, a farm-to-fork producerconsumer nexus and
snout-to-tail cookery, instantiates a complex whole. They do so in parallel if inverse fashion. Farm-to-fork, a theme that is taken up by restaurants,
grocery stores, specialty food purveyors, and a number of events (picnics,
dinners, wine tastings, etc.), is a spatial process that incorporates a range of
actors, set in motion (and, so, taking place) and brought together through
productive consumption.2 Snout-to-tail as a mode of butchery and
cookery (Henderson 2004) is also a spatial process, but here the space is an
embodied animalalmost always the pig (blessed of snout and tail) now

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 614626, ISSN 0094-0496, online
C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1548-1425. 
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01384.x

Farm-to-fork, snout-to-tail

understood not simply as a source of meat but as a onceanimate creature with specific life functions (an actual pig)
as well as a field of material forms that offer a range of
culinary possibilities (snouts, tails, and all the cuts in between). In both instances, though, these totalities are not
merely groups of related, substitutable elements but distinctive structures, whose distinctiveness lies in both the
specificity of the particular parts and the reconfiguration of
their proper relationship to one another. There is both an
aesthetic and an ethics at work here, for, as I shall demonstrate, not just any parts will do, and not all relationships are
given equal weight. My aim, then, is to think through how
and why these wholes are constituted as appropriate configurations of relations among particular, identifiable parts
and thereby to understand the forms of value that they generate.
My approach to these matters is informed by efforts to
understand the production of value in ways that take account of the specific materialities and concrete qualities
of the entities given value within wider sociocultural orders. Related studies (Fehervary 2009; Keane 2003; Meneley
2008; Munn 1986; Weiss 1996) that draw on Peircean semiotics consider such perceptual and qualitative dimensions
of objects as partibility, culinary uses, or gustatory appeal as
qualisigns of the value, or value potential, of those objects.
This approach to value allows us to consider production as
a material and qualitative process through which subjects
define attributes of themselves through their engagement
with objects in the world. This perspective is, therefore, by
no means incompatible with a political-economic analysis.
Indeed, in what follows, I demonstrate how the politicaleconomic implications of farm-to-fork and snout-to-tail
activities, as well as of the local food movement more
generally, are articulated precisely in terms of the concrete
qualities not only of things edible but also of the array of
persons, animals, things, and the relations between them
that constitute the contemporary U.S. food system and its
possible alternatives.

Political economy and demographic

(re)alignments
In political-economic terms, local food alternatives are
routinely advanced as a challenge to received wholes, a
disruption of the prevailing forms of totalization manifest most clearly in the agriculturalindustrial complex
(Niman 2009; Pollan 2007; Schlosser 2001). These challenges nonetheless depend precisely on holism and amalgamation, as an analytic and aesthetic, to demonstrate their
critiques. Opposition to industrial agriculture decries the
damage wrought by food conglomerates but nonetheless
embraces integration as an esteemed dimension of sociality and action. This embrace can be seen quite clearly in
the way that advocates for local food highly value, at the

American Ethnologist

most abstract level, a range of what are deemed connections forged between elements and actors, producers and
consumers, terrain and technique, seasonality and sustenance. As Heather Paxson notes, the American Raw Milk
Farmstead Cheese Consortium claims that raw cheeses reflect the connection between the land, the animals, and
the cheesemaker (2008:24), and the New York Times describes the burgeoning interest of chefs in slaughtering livestock as part of a new intimacy with the animals they
cook (2008).3 This privileging of linkage and interconnection is vital to contemporary ethicsand contemporary
materialismat a number of levels. It weaves through concerns with sustainability in agriculture and environmental practice; with health, animal welfare, and food security;
and with community-building efforts in new food political
movements. Such interconnections are further critical to an
overarching motivation and organizing principlea leading valueof the food reform movement, namely, peoples
desire for authenticity in the foods they eat and the social
processes through which this food is produced. I discuss the
value of the authentic at length below. What should be
clear is that the globalized consolidations of vertically integrated Confined Animal Feeding Operations (or CAFOs) are
also a complex set of manifold relations, which (somehow)
do not constitute connections to be valued in the same
way. Which connections count, then? How should proper
connections be forged, and what distinguishes the kinds of
complex wholes locavores aspire to assemble? How do we
confront vertical integration with a food ethics of integrity?
What kinds of linkages are displaced, and which are valorized by these projects?
In asking about both displacement and replacement of
this kind, I might also note that this new holism and the
totalities wrought are compelling to a certain kind of community that is itself displaced and replaced. Although these
new modes of totalization are not a prominent concern (especially in the region of central North Carolina that is the
focus of my research) among those industrial and agricultural laborers gripped by the ruptures of the present highindustrial moment, contemporary cosmopolitans have embraced them. What I hope to demonstrate, then, is how
such highly mobile and well-resourced communities seek
to reimagine the spaces they inhabit, cultivating an appreciation of valued connections in a well-integrated, and reconfigured domain. In so doing, I also show how the same
processes that have forged industrial agriculture (and especially animal production) have promoted the alternative
connections that critics of such industrial processes now
promote.
My project focuses on pasture-raised pork and the networks forged through it in central North Carolina (or the
Piedmont). My field research has been multisited and multiform. I have done actual field work with pig farmers across
the region; interned in the prep kitchen of a leading Slow

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Volume 39 Number 3 August 2012

Food restaurant that regularly features local pork on its

menus; and sold pork chops, bacon, and bratwurst (to name
only the best sellers) at my neighborhood farmers market each week. Working across these diverse sites provides
a vantage point from which to grasp the changing demographics of the Piedmont and, so, appreciate certain critical political-economic dimensions of the newly configured totalities that constitute the regions efforts to promote an alternative food system. North Carolina has the
fastest-growing population in the United States east of the
Mississippi (United States Census 2010) and the fastestgrowing Latino population in the country (Learn NC n.d.).
This shifting population has had a wide-ranging, if uneven, impact on the food systems of the Piedmont. I begin with the demographic particulars: Many recent arrivals
to central North Carolina are drawn by a combination of
tax incentives;4 the educational resources of the three major research universities that constitute the Triangle (the
University of North Carolina, Duke, and North Carolina
State); and the presence of so-called right-to-work laws that
weaken unions abilities to recruit workers and bargain with
management. This coordination of factors has contributed,
for example, to the growth of IBM in the Piedmont, whose
campus in the Research Triangle Park (RTP, established in
the late1950s), although subject to widespread layoffs in recent years, employs 11,000 people, making it the corporations largest operation in the country. Many of these employees have been relocated from such regions as southern
Minnesota, Californias Silicon Valley, and the Hudson River
Valley in New York. This pattern of shifting capital into
North Carolina, and the Piedmont in particular, is replicated in other industries, like pharmaceuticals, software engineering, communications, and electronics, that inhabit
the RTP.
The influx of a population drawn to high-tech industries (and their relatively high salaries), as well as university
employment that expanded in the region through the first
decade of this century, helps to define the cosmopolitan
community that has attempted to take root in the region.
Many of its members do so, in significant ways, through
their commitments to local foods and so provide a wellresourced and well-educated consumer base for the growth
of the burgeoning alternative food movement in the region
(Weiss 2011:441). That process of finding a place through
food is a central focus of this article, and of my work in the
region more generally (Weiss 2011). But, at the same time
that these demographic shifts have generated a powerful
clientele for alternative food producers, they have also
transformed the character of production itself. This is true
in ways that often seem contradictory. The same regulatory
environment that motivates shifts of capital in the hightech (and related) sectors has also led to the expansion
of industrial agriculture in the state. This expansion has
contributed directly to the influx of Latinos to the region,

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where the meatpacking and processing industry was responsible for the largest growth in North Carolinas Central
American and Mexican population from 1993 to 1997
(North Carolina in the Global Economy n.d.). The food
service industry more generally in the Piedmont (as in a
great many U.S. regions; National Council of La Raza 2011)
employs Latino immigrants in sizable numbers. Indeed,
my fieldwork with restaurant staff across the Piedmont
indicates that almost all of the prep work, as well as most of
the cooking, is carried out by a Latino (almost exclusively
Mexican) labor force in restaurants that explicitly endorse
local foods.
It is interesting to note, however, that many of these
restaurants (in contrast to the meat-processing industry) often celebrate their immigrant labor force. Consider
Miguel Torres, the chef de cuisine at the James Beard Award
winning, locavoracious Chapel Hill restaurant Lantern.
Torres has been featured in local newspaper accounts
describing his self-taught mastery of restaurant work
(Weigl 2011) and further extolled in Slow Foodoriented
cookbooks (Reusing 2011; Roahen and Edge 2010). In these
mediated representations of his culinary skills, Torres offers his recipe for carnitas (Reusing 2011:235336; Roahen
and Edge 2010:143). This is a telling form of representation. It clearly acknowledges the significance of Mexican
craftsmen in the Piedmonts local food scene and even
reframes the local as a place that incorporates Mexican
culinary heritage (carnitas, like tamales, are now branded a
Southern food). Nevertheless, offering Torress recipe for a
Mexican fiesta dish like carnitas as a demonstration of his
contribution to local foods belies the fact that his (and
his many Mexican coworkers) daily labors are spent cooking Lanterns Beard-award-winning meals, which present a
marriage of Asian flavors and North Carolina ingredients
(Lantern n.d.). In other words, the inclusion of Torress (and
other Mexican cooks) skills as critical features of the Piedmonts culinary world simultaneously excludes Torres by
situating him at a remove from that locality, as accounts of
his expertise in local cuisine represent him primarily as a
bearer of Mexican heritage (even as his skills are honed in
the Asian-fusion cuisine he cooks each day).
The movement of capital produces a widespread displacement and relocation of populations, even across class
and racial divisions. This movement, in turn, generates a
characteristic social and cultural dynamic in which relationships within and across communities establish modes
of belonging that are simultaneously inclusive and exclusive (a widespread feature of neoliberal restructuring
around the world; Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000; Weiss
2004). Erstwhile New Yorker software engineers perusing
the Durham or Carrboro Farmers Markets for artisanal bacon, as well as immigrant line cooks from Celaya, Mexico, are all participants engaged in remaking an alternative, local food system. And they do so in ways that

Farm-to-fork, snout-to-tail

reveal how the cultural forms of such local foods are constituted by practices that valorize certain relationshipsor
connectionsand incorporate certain participants into
these new totalities, even as they marginalize their very
presence in them. The cultural forms of the local, then,
bespeak a process that is at once inclusive and exclusive.5 The political-economic implications of this dynamic
are, of course, many and varied. In what follows, I focus on the forms of value present in the connections
that constitute local food (more specifically, pasturedpork) markets. These esteemed connectionsbetween customers and farmers, animals and humans, and the constituent elements of animals (i.e., their parts)are icons of
the sociocultural processes of value creation through which
they are produced.

Connecting with Carolina pigs

The Carrboro Farmers Market, where I work, celebrates its
commitment to connection in its bylaws, which require
that farmers or their immediate family members be present
at the market to sell their products. The market further requires that farmers actually produce what they sell, a stricture enforced by examining receipts for seeds and feed and
the occasional surprise inspection of a farm. All of this is
meant to ensure, as the presiding officer of the market put
it, that customers make that connection with our producers. Customers confirm this commitment. I like that every week I can look my farmer in the eye, know her name,
and feel good about my purchases, is what one recently
reported to me about this market activity. These commitments by farmers and customers to such face-to-face connections are central to the ways that authenticity is materialized in this alternative food system. Both producers and
consumers seek to demonstrate that such connections provide the assurance that they are trafficking in real food.
Such food is the product of uncompromising discernment
(Weiss 2011) on the part of consumers and the tactile,
hands-on character of labor, personified by the farmer at
the market. Such direct, indeed, bodily immediacy and selfevident quality (as registered by knowledgeable consumers)
are central to the way that authenticity is constituted by, and
works effectively within, this alternative food system.
This kind of commitment to materialized sociality is
deeply connected to the demographic transformations described above. Much of the Triangle population is looking to localize itself precisely through such highly personalized links. More generally, this kind of commitment,
and its celebration in such a shifting locale, is part and
parcel of what Robert Foster (drawing on Giddens 1991
and Tomlinson 1999) describes as a dialectical process of
disembedding and reembedding (2008:19). Under conditions of (post)modernity, systems of abstraction (like industrial production) that amplify social distance and de-

American Ethnologist

tachment are simultaneously reintegrated into regional lifeworlds (or appropriated), reflecting, in Anthony Giddenss
(1991) words, the mutability of local circumstances and engagement (Foster 2008:19).
Yet, far from a triumph over the disembedding forces
of alienation of the sort anthropologists routinely ascribe
to cultural appropriations, these face-to-face connections
can also be a source of anxiety, as the labor required of
farmers at the market, and in marketing more generally,
is a constant topic of discussion among producers. Direct marketing has been the preferred method for small
farmers hoping to bring their produce to market, and most
have discovered that the demands of such marketing in
transport, infrastructure, and, especially, time often outstrip the demands of on-farm activities. Moreover, the apparently straightforward requirement that vendors sell only
what they produce turns out to be rather contentious, especially for meat producers. Pigs, for example, are regularly
grown out from feeder pigs often sold by larger breeders to pastured-pork farmers (see Figure 1). Moreover, the
value-added productssausages and cured meatsthat
are a staple for many meat vendors are subject to additional scrutiny. Many meat producers have recounted the
challenge of assuring customersand other vendorsthat
they can vouch for their products when they have been processed, manufactured, and packaged by a third (and often
fourth) party. Such are the carnivorous challenges to a farmto-fork ethos.6 These challenges are ameliorated by certain producers who, on occasion, process their meat themselves and add their own value, producing what is often
called bootleg sausage. As the term implies, such unregulated efforts are almost always illegal, and necessarily subrosa, but they also confirm the value of connectedness,
as only those in the knowusually through direct, trusted,
personal ties to the farmercan participate in such underground circulation.7
The privileged connections of the farmers market and
related venues suggest that there is a kind of enhanced
value to the circulations that are forged at various levels
between producers, consumers, and the objectshere, the
meatwhose transaction constitutes these connections. I
suggest that this authentic value is an organizing principle of these connections that unites them into totality, as
well as a concrete quality that is materially present in the
objects themselves. Thus, the kind of value given to the
socioeconomic relationships formed between farmers and
customers is also present in the meat. The authenticity of
the former, we might say, is authenticated by the qualities
of the latter. This parallel, and the point of correlation between farm-to-fork and snout-to-tail, was illustrated for me
in a not uncommon discussion that took place at my neighborhood market. The pig farmer with whom I work each
Saturday, Eliza MacLean of Cane Creek Farm, was chatting
with one of her regular customers, a well-regarded chef at

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Volume 39 Number 3 August 2012

transactions described, as these forms of value are also embedded in the objects themselvesthe living, breathing animals raised on pasture as well as every piece of that life
that becomes the meat that customers consume. In effect,
the qualities integration and linkage (if the porcine adjective can be forgiven) are qualisigns of the modes of sociality and production that are materialized in the pork that
consumers desire.

Revaluing desire and virtue

Figure 1. Pasture-raised heritage breed pigs in the Carolina Piedmont.

Photo by B. Weiss.

a premier area restaurant, when she was approached by a

couple who were hoping to begin a culinary tourism service
that would take clients to restaurants across the region as
well as to farmers markets where they could meet and
in their wordsmake a connection with local farmers. In
the course of this discussion, they asked Eliza a very specific
question: What is the message youre trying to get across
to customers? Ever ready with a reply, Eliza answered that
her customers need to know that connection to the animal. And they, further, need to be aware that theres a
complete disconnect in the confinement operations where
the pigs are treated like car batteries, each bred to uniform
standards under inhumane industrial conditions. At which
point, the chef added that, from a chefs point of view, he
wants people to see that connection and to make them
think about how they use that animal, and what can be
wasted and what isnt wastedand so, how every piece of
that life that was sacrificed for us needs to be made use of.
Here is a clear concatenation of contemporary food
activism, coordinating producers and consumers; farmers
and chefs; tourists, towns, and markets; animals and humans; the agrarian and the industrial (although this last element is less included in the picture than recognized as
a condition that is actively excluded, as the standard practice that is negated by pasture raising) into an organized
whole, itself a virtual hieroglyph of the farm-to-fork principle. What is given value in these accounts are precisely
the kinds of privileged connections that are both generated
by the transactions among these various actors and presupposed as a premise of the orientation and motivation
of their practices. Why else would a farmer be presumed
to have a messageand not just a pork chophe or she
wanted to get across to customers, were it not for the prior
orientation toward creating a connection that underlies
these encounters. Note, in particular, that these privileged
connections are not just features of the social relations and

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In what follows, I consider two more-complex ethnographic

events. The first is an annual fund-raising picnic held in
the North Carolina Piedmont fortuitously entitled Farm to
Fork; the second was an underground butchery program
that was arranged for discerning pork aficionados in a small
town in the same region. My purpose is threefold. First, I
want to unpack some of the complex ways in which these
modes of totalizing connection are concretely manifested
in practice and, more specifically, how they are experienced
as features of reality itselfthat is, how food has value that
makes it part of a wider array of things and people in motion
(Farquhar 2006). Second, by describing the concreteness of
these qualities, I hope to specify the form of value that circulates through and is objectified in what I have called privileged connections. And, finally, I suggest how this form
of value might relate to the wider questions of cosmopolitanism as a mode of practice and political economy.
The Farm to Fork picnic is a kind of gourmands state
fairbut, instead of turkey legs and deep-fried Twinkies
on a stick, it matches over 200 farmers and chefs from
across the Piedmont of North Carolina, who offer up seasonal products expertly prepared. Attendees pay $60 to
well, pig out is too obvious a turn of phrasesupport
farm apprenticeship programs in the region. Not surprisingly, pork figures prominently on the menuas one chef I
worked with in 2009 put it, Hey, its North Carolina, people
expect to have pork at a picnic (Weiss 2011:456). What was
especially noteworthy about this event was the way the pork
was prepared. In May 2010, half a dozen pig farmers participated in the event, but only one of eight chefs who offered
pork served barbecue, usually a de rigueur component
of a Carolina picnic. There were, though, three different
preparations of headcheese and two applications of braised
pork-belly sandwiches. In 2009, a chef I worked with at a
pan-Asian restaurant offered braised, grilled pigtails. The
snout-to-tail aesthetic, and its implications, is exemplified
in the following encounter at the 2010 Farm to Fork.8 A
customer looks at an offering on a picnic table at a booth
manned by a leading chef in the region:
Customer: What is that?
Chef: Its headcheese.
Customer (grimacing): Uhhh.

Farm-to-fork, snout-to-tail

Chef: If I would have said pork terrine you would

have tried it?
Customer: If you had said what?
Chef: Its nothing youve not ever had in a hot dog.

Whereupon the staff starts to laugh, and one of them (the

sous chef ) chimes in, Thats for sure, only its better.
If youve ever had a hot dog, continues the chef,
youve had everything thats in that. And waaay more!
The sous chef goes on to describe the dish to the next
customer: Its a terrine, or some people call it headcheese.
Its made from the jowl of the pig.
Its a flat hot dog! someone pipes up from the staff in
the booth.
So, why the prevalence of headcheese? And why not
a hot dog? Just to be clear, farmers and chefs in the region produce ample artisanal sausageincluding some of
the worlds finest hot dogssome of which was available
at Farm to Fork. Yet, clearly, there is something compelling
about offering headcheesewhich has everything youve
ever had in a hot dogin such abundance and with such
advocacy at a fund-raiser designed to promote local farm
products and chefs skills. If headcheese is just like a hot
dog, only different, there are a number of factors that play
into that difference. The sociological indexicality of the two
foods is a somewhat complicated matter (Bourdieu 1984;
Silverstein 2004). Although it might seem that the hot dog
is the more plebeian of the two, in fact, headcheese is
often lauded by the chefs who prepare it, and occasionally by their patrons who eat it, as an old-timey concoction, known by local North Carolinians (following their
Pennsylvanian Dutch antecedents, who brought it to the
Piedmont, along with most things porcine) as souse (from

the German Sulze).

And souse is remembered, by those who
still remember it, as a meat of hardship, an admixture of
accumulated meat trimmings, boiled and congealed in the
natural gelatins of animal bone and sinew. According to the
people who recall eating it as souse, it is not consumed as
an appetizer, like a terrine or pate would be (Farm to Fork
style), but as a bit of side meat, sometimes fried for breakfast with grits and eggs. All of which is to say that the social positioning of headcheese is rather complicated. On the
one hand, the economizing praxis of the dishscrap elements prepared for maximum preservation and providing a
hearty energy source for agricultural laborsand the social
fragment with which it is prominently associated bespeak
a decidedly rural, working-class habitus. Here headcheese
seems a classic amor fati, as Pierre Bourdieu describes it,
the choice of destiny, but a forced choice produced by conditions of existence which rule out all alternatives as mere
daydreams and leave no choice but the taste for the necessary (1984:178).

American Ethnologist

At the same time, however, headcheese has plainly become emblematic of a rather different class fragment, a cosmopolitan cognoscenti that can afford to pay substantially
for the privilege of sampling a crackerful of handcrafted
heritage terrine. And yet, this culinary valorization is not
a simple act of sociological distinction, merely an embodied taste of luxury reserved for the dominant class. I would
argue, instead, that the prominence of headcheese at a local foods fair (and on a range of menus across the region,
where it is now found with some regularity) is a form of
revaluation motivated by producers and consumersthat
is, by their tasteswho do not seek to distinguish themselves from plebeian necessity but, rather, to reincorporate
the very values embedded in the necessary (e.g., economizing, heartiness, richness, robustness vs. delicacy) into
novel modes of gastronomic practice. From this perspective, headcheese is, indeed, just like a hot dogso long as
that hot dog is an emulsified artisanal sausage of grass-fed
beef and heritage-breed pork fat offered up at $8 a pound.
Each preparation is less about making a virtue of necessity
than about crafting an aesthetic that appreciates the necessary as virtuous.
This kind of revaluation is widespread among locavores. To assess its significance and specify more concretely
what kind of value is involved, it is helpful to look directly
at the materiality of the tastes that are desired in this way.
Headcheese, to consider this offering again, is, in its substantive form, just like a hot dog only different, in that
the dish is composed of various tidbits and remnants (like
a hot dog) but the form of the preparation draws attention to its composition (unlike a hot dog). It is plain to
see, that is, that headcheese is a collection of odds and
ends, of parts, that have been assembled into a totality (see
Figure 2). In this respect, it is an apt illustration of the commitment to snout-to-tail cookery, a truly iconic dish in the
strict Peircean sense, one clearly showing that every element of the once-living animal has been incorporated into
the final application. Again, this visible parsimony is presented not in keeping with the constraints of frugality but
to demonstrate an interest in caring for each bit of the
animalevery piece of that life, as chef Mike put itas
a form of inventive virtue, both desirable and caring. The
recognition of a regional narrative of hardship and the frank
incorporation of visceral pig parts both contribute to an appreciation of headcheese as a real food, an embodiment
of the authenticity that animates the wider food movement.
Note, as well, that this kind of preparationin its concrete
qualities, its historical recollection of economizing tastes,
and its performance within the setting of a fund-raising
picnic, where it can be offered to a highly discerning (and
well-heeled) clientelealso substantiates the dynamic of
inclusion and exclusion discussed above. The thrifty culinary practices of rural, working-class communities can be
included and even valorized but only by transformations

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Volume 39 Number 3 August 2012

Figure 2. Headcheese. Photo by B. Weiss.

(even in the simple recategorization of souse as headcheese) that decisively exclude working-class participation
in the actual eating of the dish, served up by the cracker to
customers who have paid a tidy sum for the sample.

The meats of the matter: The qualities

of substance
This is how David Chang of Momofuku in the New Yorks
East Village begins his recipe for pigs head torchon:
Pigs have heads. Every one of them does. Farmers do
not raise walking porkchops. If youre serious about
your meat, youve got to grasp that concept. And if
youre serious about sustainability and about honestly raised good meatwhich is something that were
deadly serious about at Momofuku and we try to get
more in touch with each dayyouve got to embrace
the whole pig. [Chang and Meehan 2009:201, emphasis
added]
Here, the cataloging of animal parts draws attention to the
whole beast, the living animal, and the connections among
its parts that make such committed cookerycommitment
to taste, to animal welfare, to sustainability, to community
well-beingpossible. These same manifold concerns can
also account for the prevalence of a host of animal, and
particularly pig, parts that, until recent years, might never
have graced the menus of fine dining establishments
long braised shanks, the aforementioned tails, an array of
porcine offal, and the truly ubiquitous pork belly. As a
farmer with whom I work put it, Id make a fortune if I
could figure out how to raise a pig with four bellies; in fact,
her pigs bellies are regularly presold to restaurants before
her animals are even processed. For ingredients like these

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to achieve the attention they have, there must first be an

appreciation of the distinctiveness of animal parts that both
derive from and contribute to a complex whole. The recognition of this wholepart relationship is, further, a way of extolling the carefor community, for animal life, for taste
that is both embedded in the concrete parts and meant to
be characteristic of the cuisine, indeed, of the production
and provisioning process as a whole.
In all of these ways, snout-to-tail cookery, with its emphasis on understanding the specific character and qualities of all the various cuts, and regions, and purposes of the
once-living pig and how to properly prepare them (which,
in the pork industry, is known as the utilization problem),
is a way of reconfiguring the relationship between the animal as a whole and its body as an assemblage of parts. In
this way, highly prized distinctive pork cuts become icons of
the sociocultural process that produces them (Munn 1986).
They are imbued with the qualities of a kind of esteemed
connectivity, for they are the revalued elements that make
it possible to enact an alternative food system that is actively seeking to energize a social field committed to integration, linkage, and reconnecting parts and wholes, farm
to fork and snout to tail.
This kind of revaluation runs directly counter to the
operational understandings of the meat-processing industry during the last century. As Noelie Vialles puts it in her
study of the French abattoir, We demand an ellipsis between animal and meat (1994:5). This ellipsis is achieved,
according to Vialles, by procedures that are designed to deanimalize the body of a steer, or pig, and so to make of the
carcass a foodstuff, a substance; all the links that attached it
to a once living body [are] severed (Vialles 1994:127). This
is the distinguishing feature of meat; it is a substance,
uniform, homogenized, and devoid of evidence of links,
qualities that serve to distinguish it from the idiosyncratic
contingency of a living animal.
It should be clear that this demand for an ellipsis,
which I think Vialles astutely identifies and describes, is an
anathema to contemporary locavoracious consumers, particularly those interested in pastured pork. In response to
my survey question What do you like best about pastured
pork? (September 2010), one person wrote, I like the idea
that Im eating meat from an animal that had been treated
well and then turned into food, rather than food which just
happens to have been attached to an object which unfortunately had to be fed and watered so it would turn into
meat. This sentiment is routinely offered by customers
at the farmers market stands where I work each week.
Clearly, the presence of the animaland in some regards, a
continuity of the animals life into the act of consumption,
rather than an ellipsis between themis valued by such
consumers. Such preferences are also evident in culinary
performances like the underground butchery program I
attended in May of 2010. The program was arranged on a

Farm-to-fork, snout-to-tail

strictly charitable basis, as it is illegal to process and distribute meat for sale in the kind of facility where the event
was held. Over the course of two nights, participants,9 each
of whom paid $40, were given the opportunity to watch
a pig broken down into its component cuts, the meats to
be prepared for a fund-raising picnic later in the week.
On the first night, the crowd was also able to help dress
a live pig for barbecue (i.e., to slaughter and clean the
animal carcass so that it could be slow-roasted whole). In
addition to emphasizing the seamless connection between
the living animal and its ultimate consumption, this event
was notable for the way that the pigs parts were made
use of. To begin with, the head had already been spoken
formeant to be rendered into headcheese, of course.
This, in itself, required special attention, as pigs heads are
not easily procured. Pigs processed in the Animal Welfare
Approved facilities of nonindustrial slaughterhouses are
shot in the head with a .22 to stun them prior to bleeding,
and U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations prohibit
the sale for consumption of heads that have been shot.
At this event, because the pig was not for sale, the head
was saved for one headcheese aficionado; two other participants were disappointed to hear that the head would
not be available for them to use. As parts were divided up
among the participants for their culinary experiments, it
was interesting to see the preferences expressed. Two of
the participants, themselves budding farmers and longtime
chefs who catered events around town, brought samples of
their charcuterie for the group to sample. They took a large
jowl home. The bellies were subdivided into enough pieces
to provide for everyone who wanted some. I was fortunate
to get a jowl on the second night.
Just as interesting was that, on one night, the full rack
of the pig went unclaimed. A length of ten pork chops, an
export rack incorporates the loin and tenderloin cut from
the lean and tender lower back of the pig. It is the very definition of eating high on the hog, and it is significantly
more expensive than any other cut of pork sold at any farmers market, or grocery store, for that matter. But it was all
the organizers could do to cajole someone into preparing it
for the fund-raiser. The pork in a rack most closely resembles that deanimated, homogenized substance described
by Vialles. The pork industry has bred hybrid pigs and promoted the sale of exactly this cut of porkthe Other White
Meatfor the last generation. Leaner than any other cut of
the pig, with no connective tissue or other viscera running
through it, the loin iseven in a niche-market, heritagebreed piga uniform slab of meat. It scarcely suggests the
animal from which it is removed, in name, function, or appearance, unlike the belly, head, jowl, tail, or shankthat is,
the cuts that have been revitalized on menus motivated by
an interest in snout-to-tail cookery.
In his well-known discussion of La Pensee
Bourgeoise, Marshall Sahlins details the symbolic

American Ethnologist

logic whereby edibility is inversely related to humanity

(1976:175). He writes,
Americans frame a categorical distinction between the
inner and outer parts which represents . . . the same
principle (of inversion), metaphorically extended. The
organic nature of the flesh is at once disguised and
its preferability indicated by the general term meat
(and) conventions such as roast steak and chops;
whereas the internal organs are frankly known as such.
The internal and external parts . . . are respectively assimilated to and distinguished from parts of the human
body. [Sahlins 1976:175176]
In the contemporary practices I am describing, the logic
remains the same, but the signs are exactly reversed. It is
precisely because the frankly known cuts of pig are assimilable to the human body that they acquire their edibility. Not, I hesitate to add, because humans are on the
verge of a cannibalistic binge but because the character
of the living animalwhose welfare and material standing
are iconic of the wider processes of ecological well-being,
healthy eating, artisanal craft, and honestly raised good
meatis most plainly expressed in such parts. The totality
of the pig includes all aspects of the animal, not just those
prominently associated with providing meat but those associated with sustaining life. Those parts of the animal
snout to tailthat confirm and contribute to this newly
grasped and reconfigured whole are the parts that are now
highly desirable (see Figure 3). Such parts emphasize the
way that meat is always embedded in a series of connections at once anatomical, agricultural, sociological, and
culinary. The configuration of these parts, then, embodies a contemporary ethics and aesthetics that is simultaneously dependent on a particular materialization. This ethically informed materialism plays on the concrete qualities
of animal forms, at times revealing a profound relationship
with the vitality and welfare of the animal (a relationship revealed by directly confronting the death of the animal), at
times demonstrating the ecological and economizing commitment to eating the totality of the animal, and at times allowing the culinary virtuosity of chefs and foodies attracted
to the challenge of making flavorful meals from what were
once overlooked, or discarded, forms of flesh to flourish.
Each of these material qualities permits the elaboration of
values that derive from the concrete configuration of part
whole relationships. Such connections are both ethical and
aesthetic commitments, whose form is determined by the
quality of these connections, now understood with respect
to food in particular as forms of virtue, of caring, and of desire.

Circulation, exclusion, and revitalization

It is interesting to contrast this current fascination with
the partible pig with Deborah Gewertz and Frederick

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Volume 39 Number 3 August 2012

Figure 3. Anatomical authenticity, snout to tail. A pigs head to render

for stock and headcheese. Photo by B. Weiss.

Erringtons exegesis of cheap meat in the South Pacific.

Here, New Zealanders, prohibited from exporting whole
lamb carcasses to the United Kingdom, have broken down
their ovine offerings into expensive legs and racks for
Euro-American markets and the cheap meatsespecially
fatty lamb flapsfor the Papua New Guinea (PNG) trade
(Gewertz and Errington 2010). Such trade has not been
straightforward and is rife with ambivalence. PNG residents have welcomed a cheap source of succulent, savory,
if fatty, meat and an opportunity to expand their economic
prospects though the resale of cooked flaps, even as they
acknowledge the detrimental effects of this meat on their
health and the insult to their national character and standing in the wider world. As one PNG snack-stand owner put
it, lamb flaps are waste-products being sold to us (Gewertz and Errington 2010:95).
How can we account for this apparent discrepancy between lamb flaps that circulate as an omen of diabetes
and an emblem of second-class citizenship across PNG and
pork bellies and jowls that promise restored well-being for
farmers, diners, and pigs alike across the Carolina Piedmont? New Zealander meat traders working in the Pacific
Islands find that they are severely limited in their ability to
sell even to a fatty-meat-consuming market. Gewertz and
Errington write that traders
would like to be able to work with their clients to
develop their marketto encourage greater sophistication in their customers and expand their sales
from flaps to necks, chops, and legs (if not racks!). In
so doing, traders and clients would develop ongoing
relationshipsmutual commitments that transcend,
at least somewhat, the precise price of a product at a
particular moment. [2010:6869]

622

What such ambivalence indicates is that the partibility of

animals stands in relationship to a wider whole. In the Carolina Piedmont the farm-to-fork and snout-to-tail orientation of local food consumers situates animal parts within
a set of concerns that works to demonstrate how these parts
fit together into a wider patternof well-being, sustainability, vitality, and so on. Yet it is precisely the way lamb
parts fit together in the Pacific Island tradewith flaps for
PNG and legs for Britainthat materializes and confirms
what Papuans and New Zealanders already knew, even
prior to the recent circulation of cheap meat, namely, the
marginal standing of the former relative to the latter and,
indeed, the wider world.10 The disembedding of meat production in the region is reembedded in Papuans experience
in ways that heighten their sense of exclusion. Yet in both
the Pacific and the Piedmont case, it is the character of the
connections that determines the configuration of the totality and the value of its constituent parts.
How, then, might we characterize the connections
that are so central to these contemporary reconfigurations
of totalities in the realm of food? As I asked above, which
connections count? How are proper connections to be
forged? The connections of farm-to-fork and snout-to-tail
practices are clearly multidimensional. These practices
insist that there are linkages at a series of levels that
are, on the one hand, intrinsic to food provisioning and
preparation and that, on the other hand, need to be carefully cultivated through committed social action. Thus,
pigs themselves offer a veritable font of connections:
living, breathing animals whose well-being, growth, even
fat-producing physiologywhat I have elsewhere called
their very pigness (Weiss n.d.)is at once a biological
process (certified by animal welfare guidelines) and an
ecological boon, as pigs rototill the pastures they inhabit,
offering nutrients to the soils and the species who share
their paddocks, the very model of sustainability. At the
same time, the same pig literally embodies connections
in the quirky parts it possesses. These parts permit the
culinary expression of two critical and related forms of
connection: a commitment to creative parsimony, to using
every last bit of the animal as a whole, and a recognition
that this economizing use of distinctive parts is informed
by a taste for the necessary and so pays its respects to
culinary techniques that are being recuperated from less
distinguished cuisines. Indeed, the pigs themselves are
being modified in keeping with this commitment to recovering such tastes and cuisines, as pastured-pork farmers
revitalize older breeds and crosses of animalsBerkshires,
Tamworths, Gloucestershire Old Spotsthat both adapt
better to outdoor living and provide well-marbled,
unashamedly fatty meat reminiscent, as many farmers market customers put it to me, of the way that pork
used to taste (see also Behr 1999). Pigs that are suited to
recapturing ancient techniques of swine husbandry and

Farm-to-fork, snout-to-tail

the forgotten gustatory pleasures they provide are aptly

known as heritage breeds. These heritage breeds not only
permit the restoration of cultural modes of raising and
eating animals but they also make a statement in favor
of genetic diversity in agriculture (American Livestock
Breed Conservancy 2010). According to the American
Livestock Breed Conservancy, Each breed has unique
genetics, offering variety and biodiversity to our food and
biological systems (2010). Connections over space and
across timefrom ecological commitments to sustainable,
well-cared-for animals to culinary commitments to recalling lost foodways and animal breedsare, thus, fixed in
these pigs.

Genuine pigs
This potent combination of connectionsin animal vitality and culinary revitalization, genetic diversity and cultural
heritagecan be summarized as a commitment to authenticity, a term I have used to characterize many of the
sociocultural processes described in this article. This is a
term that is widely and regularly used by farmers, breeders,
chefs, and consumers themselves to describe their preferences for pastured pork. A chef whos cooked 2,000 sheep
should kill at least one, otherwise youre a fake, notes the
celebrated Jamie Oliver on his Channel 4 television series
(Robertson 2005). Real foodthe sort of food our great
grandmothers would recognize as foodstands in need of
defense from the food industry and nutritional science,
writes Michael Pollan (2008:dust jacket). When I asked Eliza
what she thinks most moves her customers to buy the uncar-battery-like pigs she raises, she tells me, Im authentic.
I control the entire process from genetics to slaughter. The
seamless connection among all dimensions of production,
one not generated by an industrial division of specialized,
repetitive tasks but carried out by the direct application of
unmediated, skilled labor, is critical to confirming the authenticity of this process. This tactile labor is extolled, for
example, in the discussions that farmers routinely have with
one another at markets about the kinds of physical tasks
they perform. Livestock farmers, for example, inevitably
discuss the challenges of coordinating all of the tasks they
perform, moving animals, building fences, corralling animals for slaughter, even the grueling work of driving animals to processing facilities.11 What makes such work evidence of authenticity is that it is all (putatively and, often,
actually) carried out by the farmers themselves, whose daily
activities demand the ability to engage in this diverse array
of skilled tasks. Such capacities for real work are seen in
no less trivial ways in the pictures of farmers out in their
fields, among their animals, adorned in overalls and baseball caps, that grace the websites, menus, and entryways
of many Piedmont restaurants. These farmers and chefs
also know their customers well: My recent survey confirmed

American Ethnologist

this. One respondent to my question, What do you like best

about pastured pork? wrote, with perfect economy of language: Authenticity.
Real, living animals are cared for as animals should
be cared for, allowed to express all of the physiological
and anatomical characteristics appropriate to the animals
themselves, and processed into a product whose vital qualities are present in each and every last part of the animal
taken as a whole. Discerning consumers can also partake
of these qualities, confirming the character of these pig
parts through their direct, face-to-face encounters with the
farmers that provide assurance of the virtue of the transaction. In all of these respects, and at multiple levels, esteemed connections are forged, integration is materialized,
and the disruptions of the agriculturalindustrial complex
are reconfigured. The central value of this reconfiguration
is authenticity, whose form is materialized in the modes of
connectivityamong producers and consumers and within
the parts of the animals themselvesthrough which it circulates. Authenticity is a value that serves to motivate both
consumers and producers who aspire, as one Piedmont
farmer put it to me recently, to live an authentic life. This
authenticity is characterized by an unmediated link to animal life as well as a grounding in an imagined historical
connection with recuperated cuisines and tastes. It is enacted in the performance of frugality, subverting distinction through a celebration of the necessary, now revalued
not as a form of restraint but as a mode of thoughtful and innovative culinary and gustatory practice. Heritage breeds
are at once a natural and historical alibi and embodiment
of these authentic ambitions.

Conclusions
In all of these ways, farm-to-fork and snout-to-tail practices
aim to reconfigure a dynamic totalityat once cultural and
natural, social and zoologicalcomposed of iconic parts
whose dense and multiple connections allow participants
in these totalities to experience authenticity, understood at
once as an objective feature of productive life and as a subjectively cultivated taste and appreciation for good things.
I am an eager and hungry advocate of these connections;
and it is not hard to see how a highly mobile community,
migrating into the Piedmont at an accelerated rate, might
imagine a heritage for itself that is embedded in regional
cookery and agriculture and in old-fashioned tastes composed of the rustic pieces of pigs whose names and lineages evoke English yeoman farmers, Spanish galleons, and
Hungarian peasants. Critiques of foodie sensibilities as elitist and hierarchical are legion, especially within the food
activist community itself. But it should come as no surprise to find that many peopleeven consumersinspired
to reclaim and elevate the plebeian tastes of homespun
cooking also hope to expand the appeal and availability of

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Volume 39 Number 3 August 2012

such local foods. Grants have been procured across the

Piedmont, for example, that provide matching funds for
patrons to use Electronic Benefits Transfer creditfood
stampsat farmers markets, as Women and Infants with
Children (WIC) coupon recipients are targeted at a national
level by the Farmers Market Nutrition Program. These efforts aim to reach and incorporate consumerslike the migrants from Central America and Mexico I mention above.
And there have also been projects intended to reach underresourced and minority farmers in the region and to encourage them to produce and market their crops and meats
as local foods.
These efforts have been a mixed success, at best.12
At the same time, the overall demographic and economic
changes in this region leave open the question of the extent
to which the kinds of connections I have been describing as
foundational to these new social wholes can be made fully
available to everyone in any community. Economic inclusion of consumers with sufficient, if subsidized, funds, as
well as programs to promote producers who comply with
consumer expectations of animal welfare and ecological
sustainability can be cultivated. But so much of the work
in this reconfigured economy is done through the revaluation of experience, and bodies, and memoriesin the form
of heritage breeds, of recuperated cuisines, of performed
frugalityin forms and practices that are often not even
legible as such to underresourced communities. We might
ask, what happens when a taste of necessity is not only desired but also felt to be necessary? Or when your family has
struggled to raise and slaughter a few pigs for winter meat
over many generations, without benefit of any recognizable
heritage? As Foster has shown in his exemplary study of
Coca-Cola, a network of perspectives among distributed local social relations is crucial to the way producers and consumers collaborate to generate the value of commodities.
At the same time, it is precisely through such networks that
some participants become aware of the ways in which their
perspectives on themselves are shaped by others misrecognition of themand so come to devalue their own perspectives (Foster 2008:3031). To be sure, cosmopolitan locavores are conscious of and concerned about the barriers to
full inclusion in their activities. Yet the efforts made to expand participation may provide access to this new economy at the cost of satisfying the expectations of those hoping to render authentic value from the lives of others.

Notes
Acknowledgments. Earlier versions of this article were presented
to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago,
the American Anthropological Association meetings in 2010, and
the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. I want to thank
all of the participants in these venues for their instructive comments. I also received invaluable advice on this article from Heather

624

Paxson, Anne Meneley, Alison Leitch, Laura Lewis, and the anonymous reviewers for American Ethnologist. As ever, I owe an enormous thanks to the many farmers, chefs, and customers I have
worked with since early 2009 in North Carolina. In particular, the
farmers and staff of Carrboro Farmers Market have been incredibly generous and welcoming. The manager of the market, Sarah
Blacklin, has taken a good deal of her time to talk about a range
of food issues with me, and I am grateful for her continuing interest in this research. Jennifer Curtis of Farmhand Foods also offered encouragement and support on this project and this article.
Above all, I am immensely thankful to Eliza MacLean, and to her
staff and family at Cane Creek Farm. I chased my first pigs, watered
birds, tagged cattle, and took on innumerable other exhausting
and exhilarating chores on Cane Creekand followed that up with
our weekly collaboration at the Carrboro Farmers Market. Without
Elizas willingness to indulge my interests this research would have
been all but impossible.
1. Virtually every social scientific perspective in the 20th century,
in approaches as varied as Sausseurian linguistics, Durkheimian
sociology, British functional structuralism, and Gestalt psychology,
emphasizes the necessity of holism and totalities for analytical coherence (Durkheim 1950; Levi-Strauss 1966; Radcliffe-Brown 1952;
Saussure 1916).
2. So pervasive is this farm-to-fork model that a Google search
of the phrase produces 2,780,000 results.
3. See also the intrigue that currently surrounds Facebook
founder Mark Zuckerbergs commitment to eat, for one year, only
meat that comes from animals he has slaughtered (International
Business Times 2011).
4. For example, the recruitment of Dell Computers to the Triad
(the Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point region) through the
offer of $260 million in state and county tax breaks (WRAL n.d.).
5. I am grateful to Laura Lewis for helping me to clarify my thinking about these processes.
6. For a widely circulated, pitch-perfect rendering of this ethos
and its anxieties, see Independent Film Channel 2011.
7. See Sula 2009 for a detailed discussion of the unregulated
character of such operations and the intimate knowledge necessary
to maintain them.
8. For a video of this exchange, see https://picasaweb.google.
com/1bradweiss/Headcheese?locked=true#5619190714268066978.
9. The participants in this butchery event were more diverse
than the attendees of the picnic. The group on both nights was
largely, but not exclusively, male. The butchery group was also notably younger than the picnic groupin part a reflection that the
organizers of the event were young men working with local farmers.
A few chefs and farmers attended, hoping to enhance their working
skills as well as offer their wares.
10. I recently found that lamb belly is being cured by U.S. home
curers interested in precisely the snout-to-tail practices I have been
describing (Royer 2011). This counterexample demonstrates the
way that the circulation of lamb flaps confirms Papuans understandings of their marginality relative to a wider whole; this is not
to dismiss the materiality of a fatty cut but, rather, to confirm
that the qualisigns of tastea taste for fatty stews as opposed to
cured, desiccated meatcontributes to the sociocultural and political economic sense of marginalization.
11. This is a particularly common topic of discussion given the
narrow range of options for small-scale animal processing in North
Carolina and, indeed, most of the country.
12. Efforts to expand pastured-pork production in North
Carolina, and specifically to target minority farmers, are ongoing.
They have been funded, primarily, with grants from the Golden
LEAF Foundation, established in 2000 with funds from the national

Farm-to-fork, snout-to-tail

tobacco buyout settlement (Golden LEAF Foundation North Carolina 2009). It is also important to point out, though, that very few
African American livestock producers sell their meat at Triangle
farmers markets. Moreover, Mexican and Central American immigrants have been targeted as consumers by innovative marketing
programs, but very few of them (even though many come from rural, agricultural regions in their home country) work as farmers or
even as farm labor on the small, sustainable farms where pastured animals are raised in the Piedmont. I am grateful, again, to
Laura Lewis for discussions on this point.

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Brad Weiss
Department of Anthropology
College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, VA 23185
blweis@wm.edu