Byron Bay is just north-west of Australia’s most easterly point in New South Wales. A lighthouse marks the promontory where many a holidaymaker has stayed up all night to watch the sun reach its first point in Australia on a new day. And in the hills behind the bustling holiday town is where you’ll find the cutting edge in pork farming, at Bangalow Sweet Pork.
Joe Byrne, a wiry, straight-talking man in his sixties, has invested a significant number of years and ‘just as many wheelbarrow-loads of money’ in creating pork that is tender, rich in flavour and low in saturated fats. He’s passionate about the quality of his product and has worked with agricultural scientist Jim Berting for more than thirty years to create the premium brand.
When Byrne is presenting his product to butchers, ‘The first thing I tell them is that we’re expensive and we’re fat,’ he chuckles. It has taken him years to open people’s minds to the idea that pork is a meat that must carry fat; that there are different kinds of fats in meat – both good and bad for health; and that the fat in pork is where all the flavour is found. ‘Pigs don’t have fur or feathers to keep them warm,’ he says, ‘so they’re bound to have more naturally occurring fat to compensate’.
So far, almost fifty butchers Australia-wide sell pork from Bangalow Sweet Pork and as the word spreads, so does customers’ desire for a tastier product. ‘We don’t go out of our way to make our pigs fat,’ Byrne says, ‘but we don’t restrict them, either’. It is this monumentally different attitude to the production of pork that distinguishes Sweet Pork from the rest of the pork on the market.