Pig Feast

Step forward, little piggy: it’s time for your moment in the sun. I mean, on the grill. On Thursday November 21, a host of celebrity chefs and award-winning restaurants will feed Londoners (for free!) using only pork-based dishes made from eight pigs reared at Stepney City Farm. It’s all part of a campaign called The Pig Idea, which aims to overturn a ban on feeding pigswill – aka leftovers – to our porcine pals. Doing this, argue organisers, will not only reduce food waste but will improve the sustainability of pig-rearing. Spearheaded by Wahaca founder and ‘Masterchef’ winner Thomasina Miers and ‘Feeding the 5,000’ food waste expert Tristram Stuart, The Pig Idea is also supported by chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, John Torode, Giorgio Locatelli and Fergus Henderson. Top restaurants have created dishes including Bistrot Bruno Loubet (cassoulet with slow-cooked pork and meatballs), Cabana (pulled pork sliders), The Delaunay (roast pork and sauerkraut in a rye roll), Le Pont de la Tour (braised pig cheeks with creamed potatoes), Paternoster Chop House (baked belly pork buns with apple sauce) and Wahaca (slow-cooked pork pibil tacos, and pork-free winter veg tacos). The crew at The Pig Idea have treated their eight city farm pigs to a healthy menu of food that would otherwise have gone to waste, including unsold veg from a catering supplier, spent grains from a local microbrewery, whey from a Peckham dairy and okara (a tofu by-product) from an organic producer in Brick Lane. If we’re going to eat meat, we owe it to the planet, and to the pigs, to do it with the minimum of pointless waste. And that’s no porky pie.