Plea to farmers: don't dare pig out.

• Author: Saunders, Barry
• Position: Environmental issues confronting North Carolina's hog industry

The News & Observer of Raleigh won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of North Carolina's powerful hog industry, the gist of which: It stinks. To prove the press isn't the single-minded monolith its critics claim it to be, we asked N&O columnist Barry Saunders to sink his teeth into the issue.

I know this might make me the poster boy for political incorrectness - not to mention for a heart attack - but I can think of few things better than a big plate of chitlins or barbecue (pork, of course), topped off by a big, fat cigar. That's why I'm asking - make that begging all you environmentalist do-gooders, health fanatics and legislators to chill out and leave tobacco farmers and hog farmers alone.

I'm rushing to their defense not out of some noble sense of altruism, but out of the basest motive you can imagine: hunger. See, I'm afraid that if the blue-sky, clean-lung, clear-water lobby persists with its incessant whining and criticizing, hog farmers will just throw up their hands and quit farming altogether.

Oh, sure, we might then have sparkling, crystal-clear water to drink and bathe in, but what good is that without pork? I mean, if the hog farmers exact an unspeakably horrible revenge and stop providing us with pork products, what's Sweet Thang going to use for cracklins when she gets ready to make her world-famous cracklin cornbread?

There are lots of things in North Carolina that are essential to our well-being - textiles, tobacco, Dean Smith, among others but few are as indispensable as pork. If pressed, I could give up my after-dinner smoke, but the only way they'll take away my pork products is over my lifeless, clogged arteries.

Hoss, it gives me the DTs just thinking about facing a cold winter's day without a plate of grits with sausage. Me, I like to cut mine up into pieces and swirl them around in the grits so you get some succulent swine with every bite.

Sweet Jesus, you talking 'bout something good then, son. Of course, for a while there, when my blood pressure threatened to go as high as President Clinton's' negative poll ratings, I reluctantly took my doctor's advice and laid off the pork. My conscientious young sawbones, whose own daily breakfast consists of a bagel and some plain yogurt, suggested I substitute my beloved pork sausage with sausage made from turkey.

This might sound like treason in some parts of North Carolina, and it is nothing I'm particularly proud to admit, but the stuff wasn't bad...