Pigs drain along the killing floor / disassembly line at a COFCO pork processing facility in Dongtai, Jiangsu Province, China. One of COFCO’s three major pork slaughterhouses, the plant butchers 650,000 pigs a year, all sold under the Joycome brand. Meat consumption has risen steadily in China over the last three decades and it is now the world’s largest consumer, cooking up nearly 100 million tons of meat annually—27 percent of the world total. More than half of the meat consumed in China is pork, the traditional Chinese favorite. China was one of the two birthplaces of domesticated pigs some ten thousand years ago and is now home to half the world’s pigs. Pork is so important that the government maintains a strategic pork reserve to release when pork prices get too high, and recently imported nearly 5 million tons during a major African Swine Fever outbreak in 2018 and 2019, which killed or forced culling of an estimated 30 percent of China’s herd.
