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Christien Meindertsma: How pig parts make the world turn
Poziom:
Temat: Społeczeństwo i nauki społeczne
Hello. I would like to start my talk
with actually two questions, and the first one is:
How many people here actually eat pig meat?
Please raise your hand.
Oh, that's a lot.
And how many people have actually seen
a live pig producing this meat?
In the last year?
In the Netherlands, where I come from,
you actually never see a pig, which is really strange,
because, on a population of 16 million people,
we have 12 million pigs.
And well, of course, the Dutch can't eat all these pigs.
They eat about one-third, and the rest is exported
to all kinds of countries in Europe and the rest of the world.
A lot goes to the U.K., Germany.
And what I was curious about --
because historically, the whole pig would be used up until the last bit
so nothing would be wasted ...
and I was curious to find out
if this was actually still the case.
And I spent about three years researching.
And I followed this one pig
with number "05049"
all the way up until the end
and to what products it's made of.
And in these years, I met all kinds people,
like, for instance, farmers and butchers, which seems logical.
But I also met aluminum mold makers,
ammunition producers
and all kinds of people.
And what was striking to me
is that the farmers actually had no clue
what was made of their pigs,
but the consumers -- as in us --
had also no idea
of the pigs being in all these products.
So what I did is,
I took all this research,
and I made it into a -- well, basically it's a product catalog of this one pig,
and it carries a duplicate of his ear tag
on the back.
And it consists of seven chapters.
The chapters are skin, bones, meat, internal organs,
blood, fat and miscellaneous.
(Laughter)
In total,
they weigh 103.7 kilograms.
And to show you how often you actually
meet part of this pig in a regular day,
I want to show you some images of the book.
You probably start the day with a shower.
So, in soap, fatty acids
made from boiling pork bone fat
are used as a hardening agent,
but also for giving it a pearl-like effect.
Then if you look around you in the bathroom,
you see lots more products
like shampoo, conditioner,
anti-wrinkle cream, body lotion,
but also toothpaste.
Then, so, before breakfast,
you've already met the pig so many times.
Then, at breakfast, the pig that followed,
the hairs off the pig, or proteins from the hairs off the pig,
were used as an improver of dough.
(Laughter)
Well, that's what the producer says: it's "improving."
You know, of course.
In low-fat butter, or actually in many low-fat products,
when you take the fat out, you actually take the taste and the texture out.
So what they do is they put gelatin back in
in order to retain the texture.
Well, when you're off to work, under the road or under the buildings that you see,
there might very well be cellular concrete,
which is a very light kind of concrete
that's actually got proteins from bones inside,
and it's also fully reusable.
In the train brakes, at least in the German train brakes,
there's this part of the brake
that's made of bone ash.
And in cheesecake and all kinds of desserts,
like chocolate mousse, tiramisu, vanilla pudding,
everything that's cooled in the supermarket,
there's gelatin to make it look good.
Fine bone china -- this is a real classic.
Of course, the bone in fine-bone china
gives it its translucency
and also its strength,
in order to make these really fine shapes,
like this deer.
In interior decorating, the pig's actually quite there.
It's used in paint for the texture,
but also for the glossiness.
In sandpaper, bone glue
is actually the glue between the sand and the paper.
And then in paintbrushes,
hairs are used because, apparently, they're very suitable for making paintbrushes
because of their hard-wearing nature.
I was not planning on showing you any meat,
because, of course, half the book's meat,
and you probably all know what meats they are.
But I didn't want you to miss out on this one,
because this, well, it's called "portion-controlled meat cuts."
And this is actually sold
in the frozen area of the supermarket.
And what it is ... it's actually steak.
So, this is sort of cow,
but what happens when you slaughter a cow --
at least in industrial factory farming --
they have all these little bits of steak left
that they can't actually sell as steak,
so what they do is they glue them all together
with fibrin from pig blood
into this really large sausage,
then freeze the sausage, cut it in little slices
and sell those as steak again.
And this also actually happens with tuna and scallops.
So, with the steak, you might drink a beer.
In the brewing process, there's lots of cloudy elements in the beer,
so to get rid of these cloudy elements,
what some companies do
is they pour the beer through a kind of gelatin sieve
in order to get rid of that cloudiness.
This actually also goes for wine as well as fruit juice.
There's actually a company in Greece
that produces these cigarettes
that actually contain hemoglobin from pigs in the filter.
And according to them,
this creates an artificial lung in the filter.
(Laughter)
So, this is actually a healthier cigarette.
(Laughter)
Injectable collagen -- or, since the '70s, collagen from pigs --
has been used for injecting into wrinkles.
And the reason for this is that pigs are actually quite close to human beings,
so the collagen is as well.
Well, this must be the strangest thing I found.
This is a bullet coming from
a very large ammunition company in the United States.
And while I was making the book,
I contacted all the producers of products,
because I wanted them to send me the real samples
and the real specimens.
So I sent this company an email
saying, "Hello. I'm Christien. I'm doing this research.
And can you send me a bullet?"
(Laughter)
And well, I didn't expect them to even answer my email.
But they answered,
and they said, "Why, thank you for your email. What an interesting story.
Are you in anyway related to the Dutch government?"
I thought that was really weird,
as if the Dutch government sends emails to anyone.
(Laughter)
So, the most beautiful thing I found,
at least what I think is the most beautiful, in the book, is this heart valve.
It's actually a very low-tech
and very high-tech product at the same time.
The low-tech bit is that it's literally a pig's heart valve
mounted in the high-tech bit,
which is a memory metal casing.
And what happens is this can be implanted into a human heart
without open heart surgery,
And once it's in the right spot,
they remove the outer shell,
and the heart valve, well, it gets this shape,
and at that moment it starts beating, instantly.
It's really a sort of magical moment.
So this is actually a Dutch company.
So I called them up, and I asked,
"Can I borrow a heart valve from you?"
And the makers of this thing were really enthusiastic.
So they were like, "Okay, we'll put it in a jar for you with formalin,
and you can borrow it."
Great. And then I didn't hear from them for weeks,
so I called,
and I asked, "What's going on with the heart valve?"
And they said, "Well the director of the company
decided not to let you borrow this heart valve,
because want his product
to be associated with pigs."
(Laughter)
Well, the last product from the book that I'm showing you is renewable energy --
actually, to show that my first question,
if pigs are still used up until the last bit, was still true.
Well, it is, because everything that can't be used for anything else
is made into a fuel
that can be used as renewable energy source.
In total, I found 185 products.
And what they showed me
is that, well, firstly,
it's at least to say odd
that we don't treat these pigs
as absolute kings and queens.
And the second, is that we actually don't have a clue
of what all these products that surround us are made of.
And you might think I'm very fond of pigs,
but actually -- well, I am a little bit --
but I'm more fond
of raw materials in general.
And I think that, in order to take better care
of what's behind our products --
so, the livestock, the crops, the plants,
the non-renewable materials,
but also the people that produce these products --
the first step would actually be to know that they are there.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
