Can't eat sow meat? Will eating sow meat make you "sow crazy"? You are not the last person to know

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Expert of this article: Fu Shufang, Master of Food Science and Nutrition Engineering, China Agricultural University, technician of the National Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Diseases

This article was reviewed by Li Lin, PhD in Food Science and Professor at Zhongshan College of University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and food safety expert in Zhongshan City

Recently, a blogger who posted on the self-media said angrily that he bought sow meat and it tasted very fishy.

There are also various terrifying rumors circulating among the people, such as "sow meat cannot be eaten" and "eating sow meat will make you crazy".

What?! We can’t eat sow meat? We also need to consider the gender of the pork when eating it?

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Can sow meat be eaten? What should we pay attention to when buying pork? Let’s talk about it today.

Is it true that sow meat cannot be eaten?

In pig farms, sows are generally used as breeding pigs to reproduce offspring.

But in fact, the State Council's current "Regulations on Swine Slaughter Management" does not have additional regulations for breeding sows. As long as the sow meat passes the inspection and quarantine, it can be sold on the market and eaten.

Sow meat that is circulated in the market can be divided into three types:

● The first type is an incontinent sow. The quality of the pork is no different from that of ordinary pigs, and people cannot taste the difference.

● The second type is sows with fewer pregnancies, which are eliminated due to their breed characteristics or poor physiological conditions. The quality of pork from this type of sow is generally slightly worse and the price will be slightly lower.

● The third type is sows that have given birth many times and are no longer fertile and have been eliminated. This type of sow is generally fed for a long time and has poor physiological conditions. Generally, the skin is thick and the meat is tough. It cannot be fried or boiled. It has no pork aroma and may even have a fishy smell. If this type of pork passes inspection and quarantine, it can be put on the market, but the price is low.

The pork generally sold on the market is fattening pork. If the pigs in the farm are raised as fattening pigs (meat pigs), they usually need to be desexed when they are 2 months old. The professional term is castration.

Both boars and sows can be castrated for meat, but sows are mostly used for reproduction, so boars are generally used for castration. Boar castration is a basic task in the pig farming industry, which can remove mutton smell, improve pork quality, reduce fighting, and promote growth. Castration methods include surgical castration, immune castration, and castration injection. So the pork we usually buy is actually "male pigs".

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Will eating sow meat make you go crazy? "Sow madness" is actually epilepsy, a chronic disease in which brain neurons suddenly discharge abnormally, leading to temporary brain dysfunction. It is also called "epilepsy" or "epilepsy". There are many causes, including congenital heredity, birth trauma, adult closed head trauma, cerebral schistosomiasis infection, etc., but it has nothing to do with eating sow meat.

Sow meat has a longer feeding time and uses more veterinary drugs, so the residual veterinary drugs in the body will be relatively higher than that of pigs, but the meat sold in the regular market has undergone strict testing and quarantine, and will not cause harm to human health. However, sow meat does not taste good, and its nutritional value is not as good as normal fattening pork.

How to choose pork?

In summary, normal fresh fattened pork has thin skin, small and dense pores, bright red and shiny lean meat, and milky white fat. The appearance is slightly dry or moist, not sticky. There is a small amount of fat in the middle of the lean meat, and the cross section looks like marble. The depressions in the muscles recover immediately after finger pressure, and it has the inherent smell of fresh pork without any peculiar smell.

First: Look at the pig skin

The most direct way is to look at the "quarantine stamp" of pork. Regular pork will be stamped with a quarantine stamp after passing the quarantine. Generally, the quarantine stamp is a long strip stamp from beginning to end, including information such as the province and quarantine time, so the stamp should be visible on every piece of meat cut (the meat bought in the supermarket does not have a stamp because the supermarket sells pre-packaged and skinned meat).

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In addition, the skin of high-quality pork should be clean and spotless, white or milky white, and black hair roots can be seen in black pigs. If there are nipples on the skin, the nipples of sows are thin and long, hard and wrinkled, and the milk pool can be clearly seen in the cross section, and the longitudinal section is light pink and spongy. The nipples of fattening pork are short and soft, and the milk pool and mammary gland are not obvious.

Second: Color recognition

Healthy and safe pork should be bright red or pink, with a bright luster, and little or no liquid flowing out. This is because after slaughter, the myoglobin on the surface of the pork reacts with the oxygen in the air, gradually changing from dark red to bright red. If exposed to the air for too long, it will turn dark brown, which means that the quality of the pork has declined and the pork is no longer fresh. If the muscle color is bright red or dark red, it is very likely to be clenbuterol pork, so please purchase with caution. After the pork is injected with water, the muscle color of the injected pork is dull, there are obvious water marks on the surface, there will be small water droplets when touched by hand, and the lean meat tissue is loose and lighter in color. In addition, the fat of fresh pork is relatively hard and appears white or milky white.

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Third: Smell

Apart from a slightly fishy smell, the pork has no other strange or bad smell. Combined with the color, it should smell like fresh pork.

Fourth: Test flexibility

The elasticity of meat is also one of the important criteria for purchasing. Healthy and fresh pork has good elasticity and will bounce back quickly after being pressed. However, the elasticity of pork that has been stored for a long time or is from a sick pig will decrease significantly or may not bounce back when pressed.

How to store the meat you buy?

If you don't eat pork immediately after buying it, you should store it in the freezer.

If the purchase quantity is large, it is recommended to divide it into small portions and then freeze it, because repeated freezing and thawing processes will seriously damage the muscle microstructure and reduce the quality of pork.

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So how should we thaw the pork taken out from the freezer?

Many studies have compared different thawing methods and found that microwave thawing, as a fast thawing method, takes less time and greatly improves the thawing efficiency compared to slow thawing. It can also better maintain the water retention, tenderness and color of pork. After thawing, the degree of pork protein denaturation is lower, and the content of essential and non-essential amino acids in the muscle is higher than that of low-temperature thawing, running water thawing, room temperature thawing and other methods. The freshness is still at the level of first-grade fresh meat. Therefore, microwave thawing can well maintain the quality of meat.

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