Pig Damage -- Nothing too new on a big farm

We had the great pleasure a few months back of accessing and archiving a bunch of family movies. The below shot is from an actual real preparation of a pig to go go into the pit for a luau, this picture is from abut 1962-1963. These relatives were on this actual Island and are related to Ric who is on this farm today. They were not so much coffee farmers as fishermen, although most everyone back then picked coffee and some had their hands into coffee farming from time to time. (We hear stories of such things as pulping the coffee by stepping on it like you would think of Lucy stepping on the grapes in her old I Love Lucy episodes.)

Yes this is “the real thing” authentic local people actually preparing a pig that the family and friends really ate, probably at a luau.

These days we think a luau is like you go to a hotel, get your picture taken (so they can peddle to sell it back to you later for $25 a pop), go thru a waiting line and then arrive at tables and tables of people. Sit thru a show that has various incarnations of dancers performing. And during most of this you are going back and forth to a smorgasbord of food.

That’s not exactly how it was at the homes of local people. They did eat much of the same thing, except these days they substitute and omit (the last “luau” we went to they did not have rice for example!). Also, you are not very likely to get pig right out of the ground at a hotel like in the old days -- they pretend they dig it up but those big platters with aluminum foil give it away if you think to notice (but all the same it is good theatre).

A luau in “the good old days” was more likely a gathering of relatives and friends who all sat around and sang playing their local instruments. I doubt there was much spear throwing or fire eating, but nevertheless lots of good music and songs everyone knew by heart.



We have pigs up here on the farm, but we have not yet caught and ate one. There are hunters that do come up and kill pigs and take them back home to slaughter and eat them.

We do have pigs that visit and make some mess in the fields...
Here are a couple of shots of what that looks like, maybe from a distance it would look like brown patches in a yard but we have acres of land with many different terrains so these are harder to detect. Sometimes you can see taller grass where it has a section pressed down where we assume the pigs stayed for the night!




And when I asked Ric to go out and take pictures, he took a self portrait -- look at those nice big juicy oranges we had to eat. They make really yummy fresh squeezed orange juice!