For many, the Christmas season is about fresh snow and the Christmas atmosphere, Christmas dinner with colleagues and Christmas Eve with the family. Good food, good company, and Merry Christmas! Recently, thousands of pigs have been slaughtered to become your Christmas dinner. Unfortunately, the life of the Christmas pig is not a pleasant story. The vast majority of fattening pigs are kept confined in small pens all their lives, and there are very few who get to live a life under the open sky. It’s a hard life on concrete. Norwegian sows have about three times as many piglets as wild boars, and there can sometimes be so many that there are not enough teats for everyone. As they get older, they start eating solid pig food, and slowly but surely they grow into an “adult fattening pig” after almost six months. Then they are slaughtered, split, the Christmas ribs are vacuum packed and sent to a shop near you. One thing is certain, it is not a life you and I would have chosen to live if given the opportunity. In 2021, according to Norsvin, 1.6 million fattening pigs were produced in Norway. This corresponds to at least 3.2 million Christmas ribs. That should mean that we are theoretically completely self-sufficient when it comes to Christmas ribs. It hasn’t always been that way. Pig keeping and meat production from pigs was not a particularly widespread thing in Norway until the potato became common to grow in the 19th century. The pig, like us, has one stomach. This means that it competes with us humans for food, as it can eat a lot of the same things that we do. When the potato got a proper foothold, it meant that we also had more food left over. How many pigs you could have, if you could have pigs at all, therefore depended on how much food waste you produced. In the past, therefore, hogs became hogs. Just like 300 years ago, we Norwegians still produce food waste all year round, although it has become quite a bit more. In 2019, we actually managed to throw away 417,000 tonnes of edible food in Norway. To put it into perspective, this is approximately 37 times the weight of MS Kong Harald, one of Hurtigruten’s ships. Christmas is no exception. December is the month of the year in which we throw away the most food in this country. When roughly half the population eats ribs for Christmas dinner, it is unfortunately not difficult to imagine that there is a lot of pork that goes to waste. Is this what the little fattening pig must have been striving for all his life, to become trash? All the food we throw away, if we include both industry and households, corresponds to a loss in value of over NOK 20 billion. It’s staggering. If we compare this with the value creation of the pig industry, which according to Norsvin is equivalent to more than NOK 5 billion a year, then we can actually close down the entire pig industry without losing money, if we manage to reduce food waste in this country by 25 per cent. And we must be able to achieve that, because the goal is to halve food waste in Norway by 2030. So here is my suggestion for a Christmas where you do good to yourself, to the animals, and to the planet: Whatever you eat, throw away less food! Whether you are good at cooking less or take better care of the leftovers, reducing food waste is good for the environment, the animals and not least the wallet. Leave the Christmas ribbon behind, and challenge yourself. A simple search on Google with the words “vegetarian Christmas food” gave me almost 30,000 results, so there is a lot of exciting stuff to choose from. Why not try something new? If the Christmas rib is very important, and it wouldn’t be Christmas without it, try to get hold of free-range pigs that are allowed to go outside, which have more space and more environmental enrichment. There are many producers who focus on outdoor pigs. You can also reduce meat consumption at Christmas by replacing certain types of side dishes, toppings or other goodies with vegetable alternatives. The possibilities are endless. Ultimately, the best thing we can do for ourselves is to eat a varied and balanced diet. This means that we Norwegians have to eat a little less meat, and a little more greens. So why not leave the ribs alone this year?
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From pig to pig – Speech
