Latest Fact Sheet

Season 4, Ep 9 - Pork

·We eat over 63,000 tonnes of pork each year – that’s over 700,000 pigs.

·Based on iron content, which is what makes red meat red, pork can be considered a white meat. It has less iron than beef and lamb and about the same amount as chicken.

·The second ingredient on bacon and ham is usually water. We found bacon that’s up to 71% water. This may seem high but a raw leg of pork is actually around 76% water.

·Salt is used to preserve ham and bacon and is extremely effective in inhibiting microbial growth. Ham contains around 16 times as much and bacon more than 12 times as much as uncured pork.

·Sows, the female breeding pigs, live on farms for around four years. Piglets live for around four months before slaughter.

·59% of New Zealand pig farms raise their pigs indoors, all of which use farrowing crates. These are designed to reduce the number of piglets squashed while the sow is feeding them in the four weeks after their birth. The SPCA wants these banned on the grounds of cruelty as they restrict the sow’s movement for periods of up to five weeks.

·More than 30 percent of sows will be confined in sow stalls for some or all of their four month pregnancy.

·By next year, farmers will only be allowed to use sow stalls for four weeks of the sow’s pregnancy. In 2015, New Zealand will follow the lead of the UK, Sweden and Finland by banning them altogether.

·Only around 1% of New Zealand pork is free range, but around 20% of farms are described as ‘free farms’. These use neither sow stalls nor farrowing crates. Both free range and free farmed pork are SPCA approved – look out for the blue tick on pork products.

·Around 80% of the 30,000 tonnes of pork we import comes from Canada, the United States, Denmark and Australia - all of which allow the use of sow stalls and farrowing crates.

·There is no mandatory requirement to label pork for country of origin. Pork products labeled “Made from local and imported ingredients” could contain imported pork and kiwi salt.

·New Zealand farmers don’t use hormones to promote meat yield in pigs, but farmers in some countries, including Australia, do.

·Some experts fear the current level of antibiotic use in farming is exacerbating the problem of antibiotic resistant superbugs.

·Superbugs can spread from raw meat through contact with surfaces – for instance in supermarkets and kitchens.

·New Zealand and Australia are believed not to have an issue with superbugs in pork and until recently all pork imports had to be either cured or cooked which deactivates them.

·There are some fears that Nitrites in ham and bacon cause stomach cancer, but MAF has set the safe daily limit for a 70 kilo adult at five milligrams per day – the equivalent of 25 kilos of ham.MAF says there is little evidence that nitrites in meat do cause cancer.

Read more about Pork via these links.