Shortly after Christmas, trying to describe our feast in a telephone call to my parents, I used some throwaway line like ‘we ate like pigs… if only pigs ate their own kind…’

There was a brief moment of contemplative silence as the comment sunk in, both on their end and mine, then I revised it to ‘well, actually, we ate exactly like pigs that happened to have access to oysters and ducks…’

This got me thinking about the significant amount of pork in the French diet, which in turn reminded me of an article I read last year about pork soup in French homeless shelters.

Does anyone else remember this story? Apparently the group SDF (Solidarité des Français or Solidarity of the French), who is associated with the far-right Bloc Identitaire, has been handing out the soupe au cochon dubbed “Identity soup” to homeless people (or Sans Domicile Fixe - also SDF) since 2004. The issue only received extensive media coverage after it was banned in Strasbourg in January 2006. A year later, however, a Paris judge ruled that the organisation could not be accused of discrimination as there wasn’t any evidence that they had refused to serve Jews and Muslims (despite both not being able to eat pork for religious reasons).

Here is an excerpt from The Guardian article of January 3, 2007:

…However, the SDF website leaves no doubt about the group’s intentions. As well as the recipe for pork soup it advises how it should be served - with bread and wine - in a “Gallic atmosphere” with no queues. “The only condition to eat with us: to eat pig,” it reads, concluding: “Attention, cheese, dessert, coffee, clothes, snacks go with the pig soup: no pig soup, no dessert - the only rule of our action: our own before the others”…

They’re still at it, I see, meeting at Montparnasse on a weekly basis during the winter. Reading about it again makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable as it seems that pork soup is the essential ingredient for some sort of deluded Gallic pastoral myth of creation. Of course they can’t write about exclusion, but instead they write about inclusion in such epic nationalistic terms. Such a load of tripe… although according to this blog, it marks a return to medieval rhetoric correlating pork with Christianity.

Who says that history doesn’t repeat itself?

On a happier note – a Chinese stamp that celebrates the Year of the Pig with a sweet-and-sour pork flavoured stamp. Scratch the front or lick the back for a taste!