Ukraine city celebrates raw pork fat festival

The provincial seat Poltava, a city set deep in Ukraine's eastern black earth heartland, held its annual pork fat festival on schedule this year. Attendance at the mid-January outdoor event was heavy and visibly enthusiastic.

“There is nothing more important to a Ukrainian than 'salo',” Poltava mayor Andriy Matkovsky told a reporter from the German News Agency dpa, “Salo (raw pork fat) is our national food, it is to us what hamburgers are to Americans or sausage is to Germans.”

An estimated crowd of 10,000 braved temperatures below 20 degrees Celsius to throng Poltava's main pedestrian avenue, and sample and purchase portions of 1.5 tonnes of “salo” raw fat on sale from kiosks and picnic tables pitched on snowy sidewalks.

The selection was, for a pork enthusiast anyway, tantalizing: white slices of salo speckled with sea salt, grey-black slabs dressed in coarse black pepper, smoked bacon, spiced ham, blood sausage and fire-red lard blocks powdered with ground hot paprika.

Two bands at either end of Zhovtnevy Street belted pop and folk tunes, and housewives stood in queues to plop down the equivalent of a week's salary, or more, to load up on pork fat products.

They did so despite a deep crisis gripping Ukraine's economy, high unemployment and repeated Health Ministry warnings that high fat foods are a major contributing factor to widespread heart disease in Ukraine.

“Salo is a unique food, it is healthy, it helps the body digest foods better,” said Viktor Kikot, a Poltava government worker waiting in queue. “Our Ukrainian ancestors always ate salo, and they lived longer than us,” Kikot said, expressing an opinion widely held across Ukraine.

At least some scientific data appear to back up Kikot's claim, notwithstanding the modern European contention that pure animal fats like salo are probably dangerous for human consumption.

“Pork fat in and of itself is perfectly healthy,” said Dr. Andry Getya, director of the Kvasynytsky Institute of Swine Breeding (KISB), a Poltava-based agrarian research centre. “Like anything else the key issue is to use it in moderation, not excess.”

Data published by the KISB found that pork fat contains “practically no cholesterol,” as compared with 64 milligrams in 100 gram pork serving, or 86 and 112 in the same amount of beef or chicken respectively.

1|2|Next Page>>

SharePrintEmail

Write a Comment

Terms

Enter your comments - 3000 characters max

Type in image code

Submit

 Receive China Post promos
 Respond to this email