“I don’t know how you got this job,” my mother remarked to me last week when I got back from a trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The trip was sponsored by the National Pork Board, and my mom was recalling an incident when I was a child about learning what part of the hog our Easter ham came from. When I saw “pig butt” on the grocery store receipt, I pretty much stopped eating ham. So, you see, my mom thought it was quite a turnaround for me to not only go on a trip where we would eat nothing but pork but also that I’d come back telling her about the wonderful pigs’ feet stew I had eaten.
My mom’s sentiment is not singular. Pat Cobe, of FSD’s sister publication Restaurant Business, also brought up an event she and I attended when I had just started at the magazine. As Pat likes to recall, “You wouldn’t eat anything.”
That’s not entirely true, but I was pretty cautious about the meats, in particular, that I ate. I was never a vegetarian, but my protein intake was pretty much relegated to chicken, cheeseburgers and peanut butter.
Now that I’m far more adventurous in the things I’ll eat, I dug right into the culinary adventure on this year’s Pork Crawl. Instead of writing about the food, I thought I’d show you so you can see just how much I’ve grown in my culinary journey.
