Inside the summer-camp-like restaurant at White Oak Pastures, the picnic benches have been pushed together to form one long banquet table. Employees have covered the rough wood tabletops with white linens, flower boxes and candelabras, small touches of elegance for the guests who will sample the first pork produced at this Georgia farm from the offspring of 30 Spanish pigs flown first-class from Europe.
On its face, the dinner is a celebration of a Spanish-American partnership that has invested more than two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in a project to raise the famous black-footed Iberico pig on Georgian grasses and nuts. But it’s also a recognition that two vastly different cultures — the relaxed, drink-till-dawn conviviality of Spaniards and the punctual, bull-spit-and-barbed-wire toughness of rural Georgians — share a love of pork. The pig is their unbreakable link, a gift to the New World from Spanish explorers, and perhaps the only animal that could create such a bond between Southerner and Spaniard.
“Once we got to know each other, they became like our Georgian family,” says Kurt Oriol, the New York-based managing partner of Iberian Pastures, a 50-50 collaboration between White Oak and Cobacha, the Oriol family farm in Alburquerque, Spain.
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