Call me Joe

Pork gets a lot of grief in carnivore circles. It's not beef, which counts against it. It has PUFAs, which sounds damning. And it carries two thousand years of religious taboo, from Leviticus to the Quran, which has a way of embedding itself in cultural intuition long after the theology has left the room. So let's be fair about what pork actually is. Pork is a superfood. Not in the way that word has been debased by bags of goji berries in health food shops. A genuine, nutrient-dense animal food that has sustained entire civilisations. Thiamine: pork is the richest common dietary source of vitamin B1. More than beef. More than lamb. Thiamine is critical for glucose metabolism, nerve function, and cardiac health: and its deficiency, beriberi, was historically catastrophic in populations eating refined rice. The traditional populations eating whole pork alongside their rice didn't get beriberi. The ones eating polished white rice without the pork did. The pork was doing work. Selenium. Zinc. Complete protein. Choline for liver function and brain development. Carnosine. B vitamins across the board. It is an animal food. It does what animal foods do. Now the PUFA question, because it deserves a direct answer rather than a dismissal. Yes, pork fat contains more linoleic acid than ruminant fat. This is real. The pig, unlike the cow, has a simple stomach and cannot biohydrogenate polyunsaturated fat, cannot take the problematic seed fat and convert it into saturated fat the way a rumen can. What goes in largely comes out. Pigs raised on grain and soybean meal will have fattier, more linoleic acid-rich tissue than pigs raised on a more natural diet. Here's the context that changes everything. If you have already removed seed oils, you have already removed the industrial cooking oils. If you have removed legumes, you have removed soybean-derived everything. If you have removed nuts, you have removed the other major linoleic acid sources. You have, in the process of cleaning up the obvious problems, already addressed the bulk of your PUFA load. In that context, pork's linoleic acid content is not the marginal straw that breaks the metabolic camel's back. It is a manageable contribution from a whole food that was never the issue. The issue was always the bottle on the kitchen counter. The bottle is gone. And then consider: pork is the staple meat of Asia. The cooking traditions of China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Thailand: cuisines built on pork belly, slow-braised shoulder, trotters, ears, offal, these are not the cuisines of populations historically defined by metabolic disease. The metabolic disease arrived with the industrial food, the refined carbohydrates, the vegetable oils. Not with the pig. The religious prohibition on pork is ancient, contextual, and pre-refrigeration. The carnivore prohibition on pork is aesthetic, recent, and optional. Eat the belly. Render the lard. Use the lard to cook the rest of the pig. Beef is exceptional. Pork is not beneath it. They're different tools. Both animal. Both complete. Both doing what no bag of seeds ever managed.

43 years ago, at 41,000 feet in the air, a brand new passenger plane carrying 69 people went completely silent. Both engines died at the exact same time. The massive jet had just run out of fuel mid-flight. The reason was a simple math mistake caused by a confusing transition. Canada was right in the middle of switching to the metric system. This specific plane was the very first one in the airline's fleet to use kilograms. The ground crew was still used to the old system. They calculated the fuel weight in pounds. The plane took off with less than half the fuel it needed to make the trip. What happened next should not have been survivable. The captain happened to fly small, unpowered gliders as a hobby. He had to do something no one had ever done with a commercial jet. He flew the heavy, powerless plane like a giant paper airplane toward an old abandoned military runway his co-pilot remembered. Neither of them knew the old base had been turned into a public car track. Neither of them knew there was a family racing event happening right on the asphalt that afternoon. Go-karts, cars, and kids on bicycles were directly in their path. The plane came down completely silently. There was no loud engine noise to warn the people below. The pilot forced the plane to drop out of the sky sideways just to slow it down. He came in fast. The front wheels collapsed when they hit the runway. The nose of the plane scraped across the concrete, throwing sparks everywhere until the huge jet skidded to a halt. The back end was sticking three stories up in the air. Nobody on the ground was hit. Every single one of the 69 people on board walked away. When airlines later put other pilots in simulators to try and copy the landing, every single one of them crashed. The plane was repaired and flew for another 25 years.