What is the best pig in the world?

The best pig in the world, and with it the best pork in the world, is a title nobody has ever awarded. No ranking of breeds has been published, and the team that gathered the most material on the subject writes that the breeds are hard to compare at all. What we found instead is a set of very precise official texts. They turned out to be far more interesting than the league table we went looking for.

Where this information comes from

The rules quoted here come from the Spanish decree, the official catalogue of breeds and the protected designations of France, Spain and Italy. The livestock figures come from the Spanish agriculture ministry's database, closed at the end of 2023. Everything is listed at the foot of the page. Where we found no source, we say so and leave the figure out. We also sell Iberico ham, so keep that in mind as you read.

Nobody has ever ranked the world's breeds

Lists of the ten best pork breeds are everywhere. Not one of them cites a source, for a simple reason. There isn't one. No jury or competition has ever set the world's pig breeds against each other, and no published study has done it either.

The most serious attempt is European. A research programme gathered everything that existed on some twenty local breeds of the continent. Its authors write that husbandry and feeding differ so much from one breed to the next that a result obtained on one cannot simply 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 was measured somewhere else, another way. Put the two figures side by side and they tell you nothing.

So when someone announces the best breed, the only useful question is what it was compared with, and how it was measured.

What Spanish law recognises, and what it ignores

Royal Decree 4/2014 governs the meat, ham, shoulder and loin sold in Spain under the name Iberico. Over dozens of pages it names only two breeds, Iberico and Duroc. No other appeared in the original text.

Duroc has no designation of its own. It enters only through a cross, and always as the father, so a Duroc sow has no place in that text. The decree provides for three levels of Iberico blood, 100%, 75% and 50%, and below that the word is not allowed on the label. How each percentage is built, generation by generation, is set out in our article on serrano vs Iberico ham.

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

After that, the decree stops talking about breed and turns to feeding. The coloured seals sum it up.

The four colours come from Royal Decree 4/2014. In our shop, the Pata Negra ham carries the black seal, and our cebo de campo ham the green one, at 50% Iberico.

Spanish pig breeds and the five Iberico varieties

The official catalogue of Spanish breeds recognises five varieties within the Iberico breed. They are Retinto, Entrepelado, Lampiño and Torbiscal, along with Manchado de Jabugo. Four of the five are classed as threatened.

The ministry's figures, closed at the end of 2023, leave little room for doubt. There are 298,388 Retinto animals on 2,253 farms, and 616 Manchado de Jabugo on 32. That is roughly four hundred and eighty to one.

In practice, then, "the Iberico breed" means 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", which often turns up among the varieties. It is not in the official catalogue. The protected designation of the same name mentions it as a recovery effort that is still under way. It does not list it as a recognised variety.

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

Noir de Bigorre, Mangalica, Berkshire and Cinta Senese turn up in every list. We took the claims made for them one at a time and looked for what backs them up. Other names appear in some lists too, such as the Meishan, the Bayeux or the Złotnicka. We have left them out of the table, and Mangalica gets a section of its own after it.

The best story belongs to the Japanese Kurobuta, fed on beer and massaged by hand. It is borrowed from Kobe beef, and even there it is not part of the rules. The text that defines Kobe beef lists a bloodline, grading scores and a carcass weight. Beer and massage appear nowhere in it, and neither does music.

We kept only what appears in an official text or in published work. The rest goes from site to site without ever leading back to a source.

Mangalica, the woolly pig from Hungary

Mangalica is a fat-type breed from Hungary, often called the woolly pig because of its curly coat. It came close to disappearing. The line you meet most often is that it is the fattest pig in the world. Nothing of the kind has been measured.

It also has no way into an Iberico ham. The decree allows one outside breed, Duroc, so a pig crossed with Mangalica could never be sold as Iberico. How a Mangalica ham stands next to the great hams of Europe is a question for our guide to the best ham in the world.

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The same pig, from one to six

In the Iberico pig, fat inside the muscle runs from 3 to almost 20%, depending on the study. Across some twenty European local breeds, the averages run from 2 to 10%.

So the spread inside one breed is wider than the spread between the averages of twenty. The caution from the start of this article applies here too, since these figures were not all measured the same way. They still point to something simple. Two Iberico pigs can end up a long way apart.

What separates them is not only genetics. What they ate counts, and so does how long they lived and how much room they had. Across nearly a thousand Iberico pigs raised outdoors, the recorded average is 4.9%, with a very wide spread from one animal to the next.

Breed is a condition, not a guarantee. It opens the door, and the montanera and the years in the drying cellar do the rest. We follow that path in our article on how Iberico ham is made. If you came here for the best-tasting pork breed, the name of the breed will only take you part of the way.

Conclusion

There is no best pig in the world

What does exist are old breeds protected by texts, and herds that anyone can count. Inside each breed, the variation is huge. The league table, on the other hand, has never been drawn up by anyone. It is a seller's line, including when we are the ones writing it.

1. Look at the seal before the breed. It tells you the diet and the degree of purity, and both weigh more than the name.
2. Ask what was compared. A superlative with no comparison behind it is an argument, not information.
3. Keep the one figure that counts in mind. Two pigs of the same breed can differ in almost everything.