My former colleague and sometime dining companion Mike Sula is a finalist for a James Beard award, for the Whole Hog Project — a yearlong chronicle of the care, feeding, and, yes, eating of a mulefoot pig. The multimedia project was a collaborative effort, with culminating in a terrific two-part video by Sky Full of Bacon‘s Mike Gebert and a reportedly delicious five-course, snout-to-tail dinner at Blackbird cooked by Paul Kahan and an all-star squad local chefs.

This is a huge honor, and well deserved. The WHP landed Mike on the hit list of more than a few vocal vegetarians, but I think it’s one of the best contemporary  examples of how a close read of one story — in this case, that of  a pig named Dee Dee — can illuminate the dim corners of the bigger picture, ie: the murky but ultrabuzzy concept of “sustainability.” It’s the kind finegrained narrative storytelling that doesn’t get done so much anymore, being rather hard to fit into a tweet.

PS: I picked up a copy of the RAFT book, Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods, this weekend in Madison and was stoked to see a familiar little snout illustrating the entry for “Mulefoot Hog” on page 128 (the same photo that’s on the Reader’s blog post today). Mike, I hope they asked for permission!