China's appetite for pork unaffected by past disease
(AP)
Updated: 2005-09-07 13:21

BEIJING -- It's dinner time at the Northeast Black Earth Restaurant and pork is the main order of the day _ from sweet-and-sour chops to pork slices with wood ear fungus and the house specialty, braised pig face.

A Chinese cook holds a frozen pig at a restaurant in China's capital Beijing July 29, 2005. Beijing and several other cities set up checkpoints on Friday to block diseased pork linked to the deaths of 31 people in China as authorities ordered a halt to the slaughter of infected pigs in Sichuan province. [Reuters]

Diners sip beer and smoke cigarettes as they tuck into their favorite dishes, unconcerned about a swine-borne disease in Sichuan province, hundreds of kilometers (miles) away, that has killed some 31 since June.

"What should we be worried about?" said one customer as he crunched on a deep fried chunk of pork.

"We've always eaten only properly inspected meat," said the 50-year-old man who would give only his surname, Shi. "Pork is the meat of the Han Chinese."

Pigs have long figured prominently in Chinese culture and daily life: as a livelihood in the vast rural areas, the Year of the Pig in the traditional horoscope and the comic character Zhu Bajie in the classic novel "Journey to the West."

The country is the world's biggest producer of pork and its most voracious consumer, from dumplings in its north to roast whole suckling pig in the south, and all the other steamed, smoked and boiled variations in between.

In China, the word meat automatically refers to pork and the Chinese character for "home" is made up of the symbol for a pig under that for a roof.

In 2004, more than 618 million pigs were raised and 47 million tons of meat were produced, according to the Web site of the China Animal Husbandry Association. Only 383,000 tons were exported, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

So a disease, primarily spread to humans through handling and butchering of sick pigs, could threaten all of that _ especially in Sichuan, China's biggest pork producing area.

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