You, too, can be O.K. without pork.
That’s the message of Michael J. Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College in Dallas. Well, part of the message at least – after all, Sorrell didn’t ban pork from his campus dining facilities arbitrarily. No – the decision to stop offering any pork products was based in a much broader institutional philosophy, the president says.
“When you come to college, you come to be educated,” Sorrell said. “We thought we could do more in the area of promoting healthy lifestyle choices and healthy eating habits.”
In a brief statement announcing the decision Tuesday, Sorrell put it like this: “Eating pork can lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cancer, sodium retention and heart problems, not to mention weight gain and obesity. Therefore, as a part of our continued effort to improve the lives and health of our students, Paul Quinn College and its food service partner Perkins Management have collaborated to create a pork-free cafeteria.”
Why can’t these officious do-gooders try to get at least a minuscule portion of brain matter? In itself, pork is not bad for anybody’s health. You can make it unhealthy by cooking it a certain way. Just like you can render beef, chicken, fish, potatoes and even zucchini extremely unhealthy by rolling them in oversalted bread crumbs, deep frying them, and chugging down an enormous portion of them in one sitting. Eating pork doesn’t lead to weight gain if you cook it in a healthy way and eat moderate portions.
I don’t even eat pork because I don’t enjoy the taste (unless a Spanish person made it because they really know how to do it) but it annoys me to see people trying to pass their weird food foibles for “institutional philosophy”.
Leaving the nutritional value of pork aside, for the moment, let’s look at the following egregious quote from the same unintelligent college president:
“We told our students that we’re going to promote healthy living. We told them that we wanted them to have long, productive and healthy lives,” Sorrell said. “Now, if one or two people don’t like that…. then they aren’t being true to the institutional ethos.”
It’s really sad to see that such a responsible position is occupied by a person who doesn’t realize that it’s not his place to want anything in other people’s lives. All this blabber about institutional this and institutional that only demonstrates that Mr. Sorrell is incapable of respecting his students and seeing them as valid human beings.
Clarissa's Blog 
The only place an anti-pork philosophy has at a university is within the bureaucracy and university politics. 🙂
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We are looking for a new strategic plan for our department and I think we should choose some inoffensive foodstuff and revolve our existence around hating it. Like partridges. Who has even seen them? And the word is so fancy and snobbish. 🙂
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Me! I’ve seen quite a few of them and they are very plain brown, timid, unassuming birds. Associations are fun – partridge to me means homely, dull and not remotely posh. 😀
Pork does seem a funny thing to stop supplying really – I can understand say, deciding to not sell absinthe but as substances go, pork seems relatively harmless.
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Actually, I love partridges, I was just trying to show how these weird folks think. 🙂
And I like the word “posh.” 🙂
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Wow! How surprising, usually beef is the demonized meat. Did they consult a nutritionist? This is not only wrong in principle but also factually incorrect.
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I’ll consider all this while cooking the pork chops I bought for today’s meal.
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I admire anybody who knows how to cook it so that it doesn’t taste like soap. Mine always come out like a cake of soap. 😦
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Try them in chile verde.
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Try to get the best quality pork. Brown chops first on both sides and then cook them for 15 minutes in a 350 degree oven.
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I thought industrialized chicken was the least clean, and most unhealthy meat. Lean pork is actually supposed to be quite good for you, and I am told pork is raised more responsibly than some meats (although perhaps this is false).
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If anything this tells me something about the way they prepare food at that campus.
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Exactly. So what are the chances that they cook chicken or beef any better?
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When I was in Zimbabwe, and the Marxist government had been in power for a few years, many of the colonial whites adopted apocalyptic ideologies. Fairly irreligious, nominal Christians began joined Pentecostal churches and praying in tongues. I remember being on the tennis court, during one afternoon sports session, and I mentioned my family were considering migrating to Australia.
“Don’t go to the Western side, Jenny, because Nostradamus said that will be under water in the next ten years.”
The notion that pork may be the source of everybody’s ills reminds me of this.
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My people also got quite obsessed with Nostradamus in the recent years. I find the whole thing mind -numbingly boring, to be honest.
But I love your story.
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Perhaps you would like a lot of Dambudzo Marechera’s writing that subtly criticizes the Marxist regime. Here is a snide criticism, from one of his children’s stories. {read: “My cat likes Zimbabwe a lot.”)
My Cat looked at Great Zimbabwe.
“It’s huge! It’s very old.
“It’s made of great big stones!” my Cat
exclaimed.
“It’s ours. I am proud of Zimbabwe!”
said my Cat on the way home. ( p 224)
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I suggest he cut the crap and get radical. Remove sodas from campus, and alcohol, and chicken nuggets and hot dogs and cakes, biscuits, sweets and all the other stuff that’s bad for you in volume (and see how many people stay!).
If he’s not following through on his healthy student line by banning all ‘bad’ foods, he’s just being a hypocrite. You can’t pick and choose. Either you go for broke or you let adults decide how healthy they want to be.
Personal responsibility at that age is an essential part of being a young adult. What they don’t need is to be mothered now they’ve left home.
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I agree with every word of this comment.
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Nobody has noticed, apparently, that this is just an anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim action. These religions’ prohibitions of pork are the only reason to demonize it.
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Why is it anti-Jewish to ban a food Jews don’t eat? (or anti-Muslim / food they don’t eat)
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Jonathan, I suppose my reasoning was so convoluted as to be suspect. I was thinking that by attempting to enforce these groups’ dietary restrictions, it would be an annoyance to those of us who love pork, and the annoyance would spread to an anti group bias in general. Much like people who like alcohol were upset at the Xtians for pushing prohibition about a century ago. But my analysis was so tenuous that I realize it does not hold up to scrutiny.
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\Off topic
Clarissa, did you change your RSS feed? I am subscribed to your blog but haven’t gotten any post in my reader for the last couple of days. I thought you were taking a break but then came here to see all these new posts.
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No, I didn’t change anything. Are you subscribed in the Google Reader or by email?
I haven’t even touched the Settings for months.
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Mozilla Thunderbird. Let me do a little investigating, then.
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I will be very grateful because I’ve been staring at the Settings page for 20 minutes without understanding anything on it.
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So, until now, I had been using https://clarissasblog.com/feed/ as the feed url to subscribe to the blog. Suddenly it says this is not a valid url anymore.
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I have absolutely no idea why this happened. I didn’t mess with anything on my end. Maybe WordPress is changing things around.
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http://en.support.wordpress.com/feeds/
“Every WordPress.com blog has multiple feeds. The main content feed can be accessed by adding /feed/ to your blog’s URL.”
That’s what I was doing. Except now, it doesn’t work.
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