What is the best pig in the world?

“The best pig in the world” is a title nobody has ever awarded. No ranking of breeds has ever been published, and the team that gathered the most material on the subject writes plainly that they cannot be compared. What does exist is a set of very precise official texts. They are far more interesting than the league table we were looking for.

Nobody has ever ranked the world’s breeds

Lists of “the ten best breeds” are everywhere. Not one cites a source, for a simple reason: there is none. No jury, no competition and no published work has ever set the world’s pig breeds against each other.

The most serious attempt is European. A research programme gathered everything that existed on twenty-one local breeds of the continent. Its authors write that differences in husbandry and feeding are so large that a result obtained on one breed cannot be carried over to another.

The problem is concrete. Fat measured on one breed was measured in one muscle, at one age, on one farm; the neighbouring breed’s, somewhere else and some other way. Setting the two figures side by side means nothing.

So when someone announces “the best breed”, the only useful question is: compared with what, and measured how?

What Spanish law recognises, and what it ignores

Royal Decree 4/2014 governs everything sold in Spain under the name Iberian. Across dozens of pages it names only two breeds: Iberian and Duroc. No other appears.

Duroc has no designation of its own. It enters only through crossing, and always as the father. A Duroc sow does not exist in that text. Three levels are provided for: 100 %, 75 % and 50 % Iberian blood. Below that, the word is not allowed on the label.

An addition made in 2016 extends this equivalence to the Portuguese Alentejano pig and its crosses with Duroc. A ham sold as 100 % Iberian in Spain may therefore come from a pig born in Portugal. Nothing on the label will say so.

The rest of the decree stops talking about breed and talks about feeding instead, and that is what the coloured seals sum up.

The four colours come from Royal Decree 4/2014. The seal is individually numbered and stays on the piece until it is carved. We set out the label in detail in a whole article.

Five varieties, and one that carries the whole production

The official Spanish breed catalogue recognises five varieties within the Iberian breed: Retinto, Entrepelado, Lampiño, Torbiscal, together with Manchado de Jabugo. Four of them are classed as threatened.

The ministry’s figures, closed at the end of 2023, leave no room for doubt. There are 298 388 Retinto animals across 2 253 farms. And 616 Manchado de Jabugo, across 32 farms. A ratio of one to four hundred and eighty.

Put another way: when people say “the Iberian breed”, in practice they mean Retinto. The other four survive through conservation programmes, and one of them rests on 174 breeding females.

A last word on the “Negro de los Pedroches”, often cited among the varieties. It does not appear in the official catalogue. The protected designation of the same name mentions it as recovery work under way, not as a recognised variety.

The breeds that always come up, and what can be said of them

They return in every list: the Noir de Bigorre, the Hungarian Mangalica, the Berkshire, the Cinta Senese. We took their promises one by one and looked for what carried them.

The finest story is the Japanese Kurobuta fed on beer and massaged by hand. It is borrowed from Kobe beef — and it is not even true there. The text that defines that beef lists a bloodline, grading scores and a carcass weight. Beer, massage and music appear nowhere in it.

We have kept only what appears in an official text or in published work. The rest circulates from site to site without ever leading anywhere.

The same pig, from one to six

Here is the figure that settles the question. In the Iberian pig, fat within the muscle ranges from 3 to nearly 20 % from one animal to the next. Across some twenty European local breeds, the averages run from 2 to 10 %.

The spread inside a single breed is therefore wider than the spread across twenty breeds. Two Iberian pigs born on the same day can end up at opposite ends of the scale.

What separates them has nothing to do with genetics: what they ate, how long they lived, how much room they had. Across nearly a thousand Iberian pigs raised outdoors, the recorded average is 4.9 %, with a very wide spread from one animal to another.

Breed is a condition, not a guarantee. It opens the door; the montanera, the months and the drying loft do the rest, and we follow that path in how an acorn-fed ham is made.

Where this information comes from

The rules quoted here come from the Spanish decree, the official breed catalogue and the French, Spanish and Italian protected designations. The livestock figures come from the Spanish agriculture ministry’s database, closed at the end of 2023. It is all listed at the foot of the page. When we found no source, we say so rather than venture a figure. And we sell Iberian ham: you should know that before reading the above.