Old Spots: Bespoke English-style pork

We love our Mangalitsa pigs, but we understand that their price makes them a special-occasion indulgence for most Revival Meats fans. Happily for your mouth (and your wallet), Revival Meats offers another variety of more traditional pork for everyday eating.

Because we’re all about selling the best-tasting meat, we searched for a heritage breed that produces delicious pork, a product versatile enough for both cost-conscious restaurants and the home cook.

The Gloucestershire Old Spots is generally recognized as the oldest pedigreed pig breed in the world. Currently, the Old Spots is listed as “critical” by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy with fewer than 1,000 breeding stock left in their original United Kingdom home, and less than 200 Stateside . We feel it’s important to help save rare livestock breeds that have contributed so much to the evolution of the pig -- particularly when they’re delicious and well suited to ethical rearing.

Gloucestershire Old Spots are the perfect breed for Revival Farms for multiple reasons. Most importantly, they’re happy and productive in a pastured environment like ours. They’re also extremely efficient foragers that birth large litters in the field without human intervention, a good thing both for us farmers and for the pigs.

We raise our Old Spots pigs in the exact same manner that we do our Mangalitsas, rotating them monthly to new pasture and finishing them around the one-year mark on barley, wheat, and alfalfa to create the fat and muscle structure that sets Revival Pork apart. The resulting meat is extremely well-marbled, tender, and porkaliciously delectable.