Meal turns into sizzling success

Press, 27 April 1983, Page 6

Meal turns into sizzling success

The Bacons, the Trotters, the Gammons, and the Hoggs accepted an invitation to make pigs of themselves yesterday lunchtime — on pork. The Pork Industry Board put on a pork luncheon at the Christchurch Town Hall to celebrate its third year of marketing Trim Pork, and to commemorate 1983, which the Chinese have named The Year of the Pig. Mr lan Lamb, the board’s marketing consultant, told his guests that he had been the butt of jokes all his life about his name.

“So you can well imagine the difficulties I have had working with the Pork Industry Board,” he said. It was with sympathetic understanding, therefore,

that those people who had been “born into a pig family" and who would have had to put up with similarly silly jibes, about their names were invited to dine on pork as the board’s guests, said Mr Lamb. The board approached most of the Trotters, Hoggs, Frys, Bacons, and Gammons in the telephone directory and invited them along. Most of them were fairly sceptical about the invitation, and several said that they would only believe it when they saw it in writing.

Most of those invited trotted along in the end and were only too happy to hog into the tempting array of hot pork dishes. In less than five minutes the dishes were bare.

One of the few to turn the invitation down was a Mrs Trotter. She said that she could not come because she was allergic to pork. Another Trotter pensioner, said that he had recently had a heart attack and was staying off pork because he had to watch his cholesterol level.

He was persuaded by Pork Industry Board staff that pork had, in fact, little cholesterol — much less than, for example egg yolk. The National Heart Foundation advocated pork fat as a major source or polyunsaturated fatty acids, said Mr Lamb. Guests left with the clear understanding that buying pork was certainly not buying a pig in a poke.