The reinvention of industrial pig farming in Catalonia

Guillem Rubio-Ramon

This blog explores the reinvention of industrial pig farming in Catalonia, and how pigs have been transformed into animals that symbolically and economically sustain the nation.

One of the most surprising images from the trial of the Catalan political leaders for the 2017 independence referendum was Jordi Cuixart, the then president of the pro-independence cultural organisation Òmnium Cultural, explaining to the prosecutor what a botifarrada is. A botifarrada is, first of all, a community meal with the aim of both cooking and eating botifarres, pig meat sausages. However, in Catalonia, a botifarra also means a common gesture of rejection (in English, giving the middle finger).

Charged with sedition, Cuixart explained to the prosecutor how, for the National Day of Spain, Òmnium had organised hundreds of such gatherings in which one could both praise one nation and reject another through the simple act of consuming pig meat sausages.

Botifarrades, are not the only pig-related event in Catalonia. Multiple pig festivals take place at the end of the year in pig-producing regions like Osona, where I conducted some of my fieldwork for my PhD research on animal agriculture as a nation-building project in Catalonia (and Scotland). These events re-enact the historic annual ritual of communal pig slaughter, whichare nowadays extremely restricted for sanitary reasons. They usually bring together the community to celebrate with drinks and folk music while eating pig-derived products.

Referring to the work of Ichijo and Ranta (2016, 9), all of these “food-related events, traditions and rituals might be, in reference to Hobsbawm, invented or constructed; yet they (…) provide an opportunity (…) ‘for anchoring the imagined national community in daily practice’”. However, in a context where the Catalan pig industry, driven by major corporations, exports around 80% of its total production, how have pigs been transformed into industrial-yet-traditional animals, both symbolically and economically fuelling the nation?

Catalan flag with text “From here, Catalonia”. The flag decorates the pig meat aisle of a supermarket in Mataró, Catalonia, displaying several kinds of botifarres. Source: Author

The association between Catalan gastronomic culture and pig products is usually situated within a pre-industrial subsistence culinary tradition born out of scarcity: the pig was used to the full. The idea that everything from the pig must be used, known as cuina d’aprofitament or zero-waste cooking, is closely connected to rural meals and the countryside “so idealised by early Catalan nationalists” (Johannes 2020, 93–94) as well as by their counterparts in the late 20th century post-dictatorship era (DiGiacomo 1987). However, significant sectors of rural Catalans did not have consistent access to pig meat (Roca i Fabregat 2007), and so, they had to be invited into new ways of producing and consuming it, “and the invitation had to be written in a language they understood” (Nairn 1981, 340).

Aligning with Foucault (1984, 60), one of the objectives for this research is then not to discern the truth from the false in tradition, but to see “historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false”. In other words, my research aims to understand how tradition has been used–smoothing impurities and filling gaps in the chronology–to ensure that an industrial vision of pig farming becomes the only direct continuity of a more authentic collective Catalan past.

From national arcadia to Catalan porkopolis

Today's industry has little to do with the centuries-old tradition that is supposedly consumed with every bite of pig meat in Catalonia. A paradigmatic example of this is a well-known advertisement by a producer of fast-food products, Casa Tarradellas, to promote their brand of fuet: a traditional dry-fermented pig meat sausage. The ad features various generations of the same family engaging with symbols of Catalonia’s food heritage, including rural landscapes and architecture, the typical pa amb tomàquet (bread with tomato), and olive oil. This is an example of the connection made by industrial meat sectors to rural idealism, which has been discussed extensively by multiple scholars (see Jenks 2018 or Blanchette 2020). In contrast to these imaginaries, if there is one animal that has lived the transformations of food systems brought by the industrial revolution in Catalonia, it is the pig.

In mid-20th century Vic (capital city of Osona)—the Catalan Porkopolis—the foundations of what would become the current industrial farming model were established, with the selection of more productive foreign pig breeds leading to the extinction of the native Catalan pig. In the face of a lack of native breeds, the subsequent reinvention of animal agriculture can be understood as a reimagining and recreation of nature (and, therefore, nativeness and authenticity) in nationalistic terms.

When it comes to the animals themselves, companies are now investing in producing more ‘rustic’ breeds like Duroc or the Gascon pig. On their website, dpagès (2021), a Catalan organic pig meat producer, affirms that the Gascon breed “is a rustic breed, actually at risk of extinction (…) which is directly related to the disappeared Catalan pig”. However, what does rusticity mean in a context in which all pigs in Catalonia—including such varieties—have been bred to adhere to mass production standards and economic imperatives?  

Imagined scarcity and more-than-human extractivism

The current situation of the sector in Catalonia seems to contrast with the perceived historical context of economic scarcity and agricultural subsistence from which the zero-waste tradition of the pig emerged. This context, however, returns discursively when the industry and its main protagonists still present themselves today as a crucial economic sector for a nation poor in land but hungry for animal protein. Lacking space to grow food, it is necessary to obtain it from other geographies in order to produce both animal products and opportunities for the rural areas of the country. Those working on the political ecologies of meat (see Schneider 2011; 2014; 2017; Neo and Emel 2017; and Weis 2013; 2016) show that the resulting production model, rather than overcoming any shortage, externalizes it and causes, in Catalonia and elsewhere, serious problems for humans, animals and the environment. For instance, an equivalent of 40% of Catalonia’s area is deforested each year in the Cerrado (Brasil) to fulfil Catalan needs for soy (Peña, Nístor, and Gamboa 2020, 5). “Simplified ecologies implicated in biodiversity loss and species extinctions” (Carney 2021, 1076) are therefore necessary components in the production of a national tradition of pig (industrial) farming.

A seat in the nation’s table

To conclude, a national tradition of the pig in Catalonia has been reinvented and fertilized in excess, by a meat industry that already has little to do, outside of logos and slogans, with rural lifestyles and farmhouses surrounded by wheat fields. However, the fact that the pig tradition in Catalonia is partially invented does not make it any less real, since its effects (present and future) are experienced both by those who receive the communion of the nation in the form of these traditional products, as well as by those humans and nonhumans who suffer the consequences.

Furthermore, if nations are nothing but imagined–not unreal–communities, what new imaginaries do we need in order to rethink the participation of the animals that have always been part of them, yet not as full members (Gillespie and Narayanan 2020)? Drawing parallels with Lloveras and co-authors’ (2021, 8) research on the opposition to fracking in Lancashire, meat industrialism in Catalonia has historically produced “discourses of place-empowerment, identity, and heritage that [link] past and present with visions of  (…) industrial renaissance”. Linking the spatiality of the lives and deaths of farmed animals with these “struggles over the production of a sense of place” (Lloveras et al. 2021, 9) might be a good place to start. For pigs in Catalonia, this might mean acquiring a seat at the nation’s table, rather than being the main course.

Guillem Rubio-Ramon (G.Rubio@ed.ac.uk)

Guillem Rubio-Ramon is a Research Associate in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently involved in the Remaking One Health – Indies project, which explores everyday relations between people and free-living dogs. His PhD research examines how nonhuman animals, particularly those involved in pig farming in Catalonia and salmon aquaculture in Scotland, can be understood as essential actors in the nation-making projects of both nations.

References

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