Nice pig, dat (2)

I was with a 91-year old man, who has lived in Ka'u his whole life. He still farms coffee on his homestead surrounded by macadamia orchards. He astounded everyone when he ran off to get us a jabong to try. Someone asked him, "What do you eat everyday, that you are so fit at your age?" He said, "I drink five, six cups of coffee every day. I have toast for breakfast and fruit. I eat bento for lunch. I used to go up in the mountains every weekend hunt pig. I would still go but I too deaf already. No can hear the dog bark. I used to make kalua pig, lau-lau, smoke meat, sausage. Those pigs, they only eat natural stuffs, no chemicals! All the food you buy these days, all full of chemicals. No good."



His son was gored by a pig just this last year.



Wild pig meat is an interesting substance to work with as a cook. It tastes like forests, is resilient to the tooth, and it's impossible to get it to brown. It just goes from raw to rubbery. In other words you can't just fry up some pork chops. Oh no! You have to be clever and resourceful. You have to overcome the pig yet another time, as it were, in order to get something good to eat.



The most popular strategy is to cut the wild pork into thin strips, soak the strips in a strong marinade, and then smoke them in your handy smoke-house, constructed just to deal with the problem of having wild pig meat to eat. Fried up, wild pig smoke meat is dense with flavors - redolent of ginger, soy sauce, sugar, garlic with just a hint of wild fern shoot in the background. It is the star of any pupu table, the visible proof of a man's he-man-ness, and the gift of the forest to this all-too-civilized world.

Glossary

jabong - pomelo (Filipino)

bento - packed lunch, for eating in the field (Japanese)

kalua - pit oven-cooked (Hawaiian)

lau-lau - literally "leaf-leaf", seasoned meats & fish wrapped in two kinds of leaves & kalua-d (Hawaiian)

pupu - tapas (Hawaiian)

Nice pig, dat!

Pig hunting is very big here.


Actually it's the true, living religion of Ka'u. That's where you'll find most of the men on a Sunday morning. They'll be up before dawn, heading into the hills with a pack full of exuberant dogs in the bed of their pickup. And they'll go at it fervently as long as there are pigs to be found.


To say that Ka'u is rural is somewhat wishful. The local culture, despite decades of plantation agriculture, never has given up its allegiance to the wild ways of the hunter's life. "Bucolic" is not something you think of when you think of Ka'u. It's entirely too disorderly and precarious a place.



Pig hunting is very important. It keeps the men in the forest, out of the house, and out of trouble. It's a wonderful reason to keep a lot of dogs and what is life without dogs? It gives the men and the dogs something to do together, so that there will be mutual admiration amongst them. And it keeps the pigs, who are wonderful creature and just as smart as men and dogs, from taking over the world.



It's a dangerous sport, mostly for the dogs. A boar's tusks can rip a dog's throat open in an instant. This happened a lot before the hunters started using cut-collars, thick nylon collars that cover a dog's entire neck. But the dogs still get very serious injuries. The men take an ill-concealed pride in the scars of their dogs. Each scar on a beloved hunting dog is a story much recounted and embellished, with the dogs as stars, the pig as co-star, and the hunter as arbiter of good and evil, and always, eventually, the victor.



In Ka'u pig hunting tournaments a big deal: the teams  are given 24 hours to pound the forests in search of prize pigs - the biggest pig wins the overall prize but there are prizes for sub-categories such as: the biggest boar, the biggest sow, and the boar with the longest tusks. The winners are instant celebrities of the pig-hunting world, especially the winner of the highly esteemed "Jungle Express" hunting tournament. Hunters come from all over the island on the day of the big tournament, and after staying up all night searching the forests, the contestants meet early in the morning at a beach park for the weighing and measuring. The winners are photographed with their prize, their team-mates, and their kids. It's a proud moment.