Hello, Beautiful!

By raising his pigs the natural way, an Indiana farmer has defied the industrial style of animal production and found a high-end market for his gorgeous pork with some of Chicago's top chefs.

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Greg Gunthorp studied agricultural economics at Purdue, but after two years he bailed out and went home with an associate's degree. What he was hearing in college did not jibe with the way he was brought up. "It's the industrial mantra the whole time you're down there: Get big or get out, go in debt, get efficient. I always tell people if I would have listened when I was down there in West Lafayette, I would have come home and built confinement buildings, and I would have gone bankrupt in 1998. Guarantee it, without a doubt."

The pork market has always been cyclical, but Gunthorp believes—and one of his Purdue professors, the agricultural economist Christopher Hurt, agrees—that the cycle swings wider in the CAFO era, because supply is now much less elastic. A small pig farmer can adjust to a glut by trimming his herd or even idling it—cutting back to just enough breeding sows so he can start up again when the market improves. But adjusting is not so easy for the modern pork producer: He has capital expenditures to amortize, buildings and exotic machines bought with borrowed money. Prices may go down, costs may go up, but the farmer's loan payments always seem to stay the same.

Hurt predicts that 2008 may be as bad as 1998 or even worse, largely because the use of corn for ethanol is driving feed prices out of sight. But Gunthorp is not worried about the pork market this year, because in 1998 he decided it was a "race to the bottom" and started looking for a way out. He was reading about new trends in small-scale farming—organics, free-range, specialty markets—and he recognized that beyond the confines of LaGrange County, Indiana, pork raised his grandfather's way might look desirable rather than weird. Gunthorp was raising Duroc pigs and other old breeds whose meat is better marbled than the lean hybrids bred to make "the other white meat." He was making their feed himself, without antibiotics, from corn and soybeans grown mostly on his own farm. Although "pastured pork" had not yet become a trendy term, free-range was all the rage. So Gunthorp took up a new implement—the telephone—and began a second career in niche marketing.

At least he tried. "I don't know how many phone calls I made trying to get my foot in the door somewhere. I called every grocery store, I called every restaurant, I called every small meat processor—anybody I could think of I called, and I tried every kind of approach imaginable. And had just about zero success. I couldn't even get anyone on the phone."

His luck changed at a sustainable agriculture conference in Missouri, where he gave a talk about raising pigs on pasture. Afterward a man from the audience told him he ought to call this restaurant in Chicago: The man had a friend out West who was raising pigs for this restaurant, but the friend was getting out of the business and the restaurant needed a new farmer. "It happened to be Charlie Trotter's," Gunthorp recalls. "I didn't know anything about nice restaurants or the food industry. I didn't know who Charlie Trotter was. But I thought what the heck, I'll give them a call."

Ten years later, Gunthorp still regards it as a stroke of fate, if not divine intervention, that the phone was answered by Trotter's chef de cuisine, Matthias Merges. "To this day I do not know why he picked up the phone, because normally he doesn't, he's so busy. I must have picked exactly the right time. I probably talked to him for 15 or 20 minutes that day. We talked about how we raised the pigs, how long the family's been raising pigs, what kind of pigs we have, and he said, Why don't you bring me a pig over? So me and my wife, Lei, took our first pig up there. We had a little hatchback at the time, a Suzuki Swift. It barely fit in there. We put a plastic tank in the back, laid the pig in there, covered it up with ice, covered the top with a sheet of plastic, and headed for downtown Chicago. I still remember that day. By the time we got to the restaurant I was white knuckled, 'cause I never drove in anything like that in my life.

"They gave us a tour of the restaurant, and when we got out of there me and my wife go, Man, we're way out of our league here." When they got home they did some research and learned that Wine Spectator had just named Trotter's the "Best Restaurant in the World for Wine & Food."

Merges also remembers that day. "He brought a pig that was slaughtered the day before, and it was beautiful and well taken care of—beautiful fat, great dark red meat. He talked about it like it was a member of his family almost, it was almost that intense. We tasted it, we did comparison side by side, and it turned out to be a superior product. We took the head and made headcheese. We took all the bones and made stock. We used the hams at our Trotter's To Go store, for a special we were doing. We used the shoulders to do a pulled-pork tortellini that we were running, with boudin sauce and caramelized turnips. We also used the tail. If you braise it really slowly, you're able to take the bone out and the tail will remain consistent, and then you roll it back on itself and you're able to cut these beautiful medallions. We used every single part of it. Everything." A few days later Merges called Gunthorp and ordered another, and soon he was buying a whole pig every three weeks.

And though Gunthorp may not have known much about Foodie World, he knew what to do next. He went back to the phone and when he got someone on the line he'd say something like, "I'm going to be delivering a pig to Charlie Trotter's next week. I wonder if I can bring you some samples."

Within a few months he was delivering pork to Va Pensiero, Campagnola, the Ritz-Carlton, and Blackbird, among others. One chef would lead him to the next. And several chefs pointed him toward Rick Bayless and Frontera Grill. When Gunthorp made that connection, his fledgling business went into a new orbit.

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Photograph: Kevin Banna

This article appears in the June 2008 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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