The Pork Lovers Tour – UK Edition
Did you know that meat from the white pig is both nutritional and healthy? Low fat cuts like the pork loin or ham is a lean meat that is very versatile. There are so many ways to cook lean pork that is both delicious and affordable. At the press launch of this Love Pork campaign at the Hispania restaurant, we learnt about the health benefits and got to sample some of the product that the chefs transformed into delicious morsels.
The #LovePork initiative is an INTERPORC campaign supported by the EU. Interporc is a nonprofit organisation representing the whole value chain of the Spanish white pig industry. As the second largest producer in the European Union and the third largest in the world of pork, INTERPORC is proud to represent about 86,000 Spanish farms that produce more than 4 million tonnes per year.
5 thing you should know about European Pork
1. The EU as a whole is the second largest producer of pork in the world after China. The industry generates about €5bn a year and employs over 330,000 people, including the UK.
2. European Pork is bred to the highest food security measures and animal welfare standards in the world. The UK had the highest standards and now the rest of the EU are taking the UK standards as the benchmark. In the last decade, they have further improved on their production methods resulting in a reduction of greenhouse gases by 22% and reduced the usage of water by 30%.
3. The use of antibiotics was banned 10 years ago, in comparison to the US where up to 80% of anitbiotics produced is used in animals.
4. Pigs raised in the EU are not fed any hormones nor any other chemicals that will cause them to retain water, thereby artificially inflating their body weight.
5. Tail docking is the next step in animal welfare. They recently visited Finland to research their practice and will be implementing procedures to stop this practice.
Pork Lovers Tour Europe
To educate the consumers about the health benefits of pork, they are taking a tour of several cities in the UK. The bus has been driven over from Spain after it’s many stops in Spanish cities.
The Pink #PorkLoversTour bus is a mobile unit that has been driven from Spain and will be touring the UK. Activities on the bus will include cooking lessons, nutritional talks, ham slicing demos, cooking demos and education about why EU pork is a healthy meat.
The Porky bus will be visiting Southampton, Bristol, Liverpool and Norwich. To see if the Porky Bus is near you, check out the dates for the #PorkLoversTour here.