Raw pork is an approved and celebrated flesh food within the Primal Diet framework. Aajonus was explicit and enthusiastic in his endorsement of raw pork from properly raised pigs, stating flatly: "Yes, eating raw pork was good. It's wonderful. I'll eat pork many times a year, four or five times a year. When I eat it, I eat a lot of it." In other passages he noted eating it "maybe two, three times a week" when he could obtain it from the right source, specifically healthy pigs raised by Amish farmers.

When Aajonus refers to raw meat in the broadest sense, as the cornerstone of cellular regeneration and disease reversal, pork is explicitly included in that category. He stated: "When I speak of raw meat I'm talking about any flesh food. Whether it's fish, shellfish, seafood of any kind, four lake animals, red meat. No matter what it is." And when asked directly, "Pork is okay too?" he answered: "Pork is wonderful. It's how the pig is raised."

Pork is listed alongside beef, sheep, venison, buffalo, fowl, seafood, and wild meat in his recipe book as a category of raw flesh food that the recipes are designed to make more accessible and palatable to people conditioned to cooked meat. It is not a secondary or peripheral food; it is a full member of the raw meat category.

That said, Aajonus's endorsement of pork is conditional. The condition is entirely about the animal's health, which is directly determined by how the pig was raised, what it was fed, and whether it was exposed to disease-producing conditions, particularly the consumption of cooked garbage that domesticated pigs have been exposed to for thousands of years. His recommendation is therefore source-dependent in a more complex way than for many other meats, owing to the long history of pigs being used as urban garbage collectors and being fed cooked waste.

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Aajonus placed raw pork firmly within the category of raw flesh foods that promote cellular reproduction. He explained that without raw meat in combination with raw fats, "most people cannot regenerate cells to either reverse or prevent the aging process of deterioration." Pork, as a raw flesh food, participates in this process identically to any other raw meat, it provides the intact proteins and fats that the body uses as building blocks for new cells.

One of the most detailed aspects of Aajonus's teaching on pork concerns the biological relationship between pigs and humans. He stated: "Our closest cousin digestively is the pig. The pig has a digestive tract almost identical to ours." He elaborated elsewhere: "We have a digestive tract more like the pig than we do the apes and monkeys. Other primates."

He described the stomach structure as being very similar, and even the presence of trichinosis in the pig's intestinal environment as mirroring what exists in human intestines: "Every tribe that I know on the planet has trichinosis in its intestines." He framed this not as a danger but as a normal feature of a healthy animal digestive system.

Aajonus directly addressed the most common fear associated with raw pork: trichinosis. He did not frame trichinosis as a pathogen to be feared. Instead, he explained it as a bacterial form that is latent in tissue and becomes active only during tissue decay: "Cooked or raw, you have trichinosis bacteria in your body. It's just waiting for enough of the decay of that particular tissue to become active."

He went further to say that cooking pork does not eliminate the long-term risk of trichinosis, it merely kills it temporarily. Once cooked meat reabsorbs moisture and fluid, it re-enters a degenerative state and can again create bacterial activity, including trichinosis: "If you cook it, it's pretty well dying of bacteria. If you're cooking at 300 degrees or whatever it is, I would assume by that time bacteria is dead on cooked pork. It's dead for that period of time. But once the meat absorbs moisture and other fluids, it goes into degenerative tissue again and it will create bacteria. Even trichinosis. I've seen this over and over again."

The only temperature that permanently eliminated bacterial regeneration, according to his experimental tests, was between 600 and 700 degrees, at which point the meat would eventually mold but not regenerate bacteria: "If you cook it at 700 degrees and make it leather, it will not. It will mold and degenerate after that. It will not create... That's the highest temperature that I found that I could not get a bacteria to... Between 600 degrees and 700 degrees were the times that I cooked."

Aajonus described wild pig behavior as predominantly carnivorous, not herbivorous, as a way of validating pork's nutritional completeness. He recounted: "I never saw them eat anything other than moles. They loved moles and they loved insects, and they mostly ate animal products. If they came across a dead animal..." He described how, like the pig, humans are omnivores whose digestive tracts are built to handle animal products, and used the pig as a mirror: "The pig, which is an omnivore, if the pig has a choice... I never saw them eat anything other than moles."

He also described pigs kept by Amish farmers as consuming discarded fermented dairy, milk that had fermented beyond what could be used for kefir or yogurt, and that the farmer would also pre-ferment oats in that dairy before feeding it to the pigs: "He would germinate or decompose. He put his oats that he fed the pigs. He would put that in this fermented dairy to break it down so they digest more of it." This resulted in happy, healthy, odorless pigs that Aajonus used as the gold standard of properly raised pork.

One of Aajonus's most vivid personal accounts involves the fat of pork from black pigs in southern China. He described eating three pounds of that fat in a single sitting: "In fact, that's one of the most delicious I've ever eaten was pork in China, southern China, near Yishunbanna. It's right near the Thai and Laos border. And they have these black pigs that they raise that used to be wild. Oh my god. The fat. I just ate 3 pounds in one sitting. And then ate some meat. And the next day I ate half and half. I couldn't stop. I stayed in that town, just eating. I was supposed to leave the next day."

Raw pork fat, as a raw animal fat, participates in all the healing, soothing, and lubricating properties Aajonus attributed to raw meat fats in general. He stated: "The fat in raw meat is the most valuable for healing, soothing and lubricating tissue faster than all other fats."

Aajonus used pork fat (pork rinds) repeatedly as his signature illustration of what heat does to animal fat molecules. He explained that when you cook pork fat, it swells to many times its original size: "When you eat cooked fat, they swell 5 to 50 times their normal size. You've seen pork fat rind. It's very small little pieces. And they boil in the oil and the whole fat swells up to these big things. And you chew and they're crispy."

In other passages he gave an even more extreme figure for fat cooked in boiling oil: "That's more than 2,000 times their normal size if you're cooking them in oil. The average is 10 to 50 times their normal size." He applied this expanded, denatured fat as a model for what happens in the human body when cooked fat is consumed, the fat molecules become oversized, lodge in tissues, bind with toxins, and contribute to cellulite and other fatty deposits, rather than serving as clean cellular fuel and lubricant.

The contrast he drew was sharp: raw pork fat molecules are tiny, easily assimilated, and function properly in the body. Cooked pork fat molecules are grotesquely enlarged and create pathological deposits.

When asked whether any meat is unsafe to eat, Aajonus answered: "No, if you know the pig. As long as it's organic, it'd be fine. If it's plastered with hormones, you're taking some risks." The hormone load in conventionally raised pigs was his primary concern for commercially produced pork, not trichinosis or bacterial contamination of the meat itself.

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Aajonus consumed and recommended pork only in its raw state. Cooking pork, as with all meats, destroys the enzymes, alters the protein and fat structures, and renders the nutrients difficult or impossible to utilize properly. He was consistent throughout all teachings that the nutritional and healing properties of meat exist only in the raw, unheated state.

Aajonus described vacuum-packed raw pork as having a shelf life of up to six months in the refrigerator, based on his personal experience: "I've had meat last, even pork, and I love pork. But I don't eat it often, but I'll eat it maybe two, three times a week. That's not a lot compared to whatever other meats I eat. When I can get them, when I can get it healthy, like from the Amish. But I've had it keep six months, even vacuum pack."

He also described his practice of scraping the surface of vacuum-packed meat when opening it: "Of course, like I say, when I cut it out of the package, I take a straight edge knife and I just scrape every..." This is consistent with his general guidance for high-aged or fermented meats.

Aajonus made a clear hierarchical distinction between wild and domesticated pork. Wild boar, in his view, is always preferable: "If you catch a wild boar, go for it. I would eat it in a second." He explained that wild animals in general are healthier than domesticated ones: "Any wild animal is going to be healthier than a domesticated animal."

However, wild animals may carry pesticide contamination picked up from the environment: "It might have picked up pesticides or pesticides from..." suggesting that wild is still preferred but not immune from environmental contamination.

Domesticated pigs, by contrast, have a long history of disease due to their role as garbage collectors fed cooked waste. This is addressed extensively in the Historical & Political Context section below.

Aajonus was able to obtain unfrozen pork from Amish farmers. His description of advocating for unfrozen meats with suppliers: "All you have to tell him was, I'm one of the odd people, followers, I'm on the primal diet, or do some of the primal diet, and I want unfrozen meats. You'll get them." While frozen meat loses some properties due to crystalline damage to cells, Aajonus acknowledged it as workable, especially when the source quality was otherwise high.

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Aajonus's gold standard for raw pork was pork obtained from Amish farmers. He described visiting an Amish farmer two hours from Washington D.C. while lobbying for raw food rights, personally inspecting the animals, and observing their living conditions: "The group of us went out to his farm and got all the milk, unrefrigerated, gallons of it, got the cheese and got everything else, saw his pigs, saw the chickens running around eating these maggots and this rotten meat all full of feathers and friendly to each other."

He described the pigs on this farm as: "beautiful, happy pigs. They don't stink like other pigs." The distinguishing feature was that they were fed discarded fermented dairy, milk too fermented for kefir or yogurt, and oats that had been pre-soaked and fermented in that dairy to improve digestibility. This is the diet he held up as ideal for producing healthy, edible raw pork.

Based on Aajonus's teachings, the criteria for acceptable raw pork are: 1. Organically raised, no synthetic hormones 2. Fed natural, unprocessed food, ideally fermented dairy scraps and raw grains 3. Not fed cooked garbage or cooked grain 4. Pastured, allowed to roam and exhibit natural behaviors 5. Visibly healthy, calm, not stinking excessively

Aajonus did not specifically enumerate all the problems of commercial pork, but his general critique of commercially raised animals with hormone loads applies directly. His concern about pigs being "plastered with hormones" was his stated risk for non-organic pork.

When discussing raw bacon specifically, Aajonus revealed that commercially prepared bacon, even from ostensibly organic markets, presents a major problem not because of the pork itself but because of the salt content. He described an incident: "I love raw bacon. It's delicious and all that good fat. So I got four strips of bacon and I got two kilos of ground meat. Got home and I had nothing else. Only milk and I needed a meat meal. So I was going to eat the pork first. Salt was tremendous in it. Must have soaked it in brine for a week."

The salt in commercial bacon was so excessive that it caused him physiological symptoms: "I had tinnitus. I still have tinnitus, and that was two days ago. 36 hours ago. But I ate it." He compensated for the sodium overload by eating: "lots of butter and cheese with it. And egg to counterbalance the sodium."

He noted that even this partially addressed the problem, the tinnitus was still present 36 hours later, indicating that the salt damage from commercially brined bacon is not immediately reversible.

Aajonus noted that farmers, particularly in Asia, could produce bacon without the salt problem: "Not in, we have our farmers make it for us. In Asia we have them cut it, they don't put it in salt. Unless you're in a regular market." This suggests that the ideal form of raw bacon is simply raw pork cut in strip form, without brine curing.

He was explicit that "all bacon has salt" in commercial contexts (when a participant confirmed this assumption), but he corrected that assumption by pointing to farmer-direct sourcing where salt is not used.

When asked about raw organic liverwurst or braunschweiger, Aajonus stated: "It is illegal for any prepared meats to be raw; they must be blanched (partially cooked). I do not know anyone willing to cross that regulation for raw meat." This makes raw prepared pork products (sausages, liverwurst, etc.) essentially unavailable commercially.

However, he endorsed making your own raw sausages at home: "You can take any kind of meat... All you have to do is take the dill, the herbs whatever you like and grind them... And mix them with the raw beef or mix them with the turkey or wha...", the principle extending to pork as a flesh food base.

The legal framework surrounding raw prepared meats was a recurring frustration for Aajonus. Commercial sausages, even those marketed as "natural" at stores like Wild Oats, were typically blanched (partially cooked) and therefore not truly raw. He stated: "They blanch it, which means cooking it half way." This eliminates commercial sausages as a valid source of raw pork in processed form.

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Aajonus's general rule for all raw meat consumption was to pair it with raw fat, most commonly raw butter, to ensure that the protein is directed toward cellular building rather than being burned entirely as fuel. He stated: "So with the meat, I always recommend so you don't turn that meat into all peruvade to utilize its energy. You eat butter with it. Always butter."

The general quantity he recommended for one individual was: "a tablespoon for you, two and a half tablespoon" of butter with a meat meal.

When he ate commercially brined bacon and the sodium was excessive, his corrective protocol involved: "lots of butter and cheese with it. And egg to counterbalance the sodium." This illustrates that the fat pairing with raw pork also serves a protective function when sodium or other minerals are imbalanced.

Aajonus recommended butter over cream as the fat pairing: "Cream is very hard to digest. As I said, it takes 60 varieties of cholesterol to completely digest raw cream. Raw butter, it only takes two thirds of that. Butter is always better." This guidance applies to pork as with any raw meat.

When the sodium content of commercial bacon was too high, Aajonus used raw egg in addition to butter and cheese to counterbalance the sodium. This is a specific protocol edge case for raw bacon obtained from commercial sources with excessive salt content.

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Aajonus described his pork consumption in two different contexts with slightly different figures:

1. "I'll eat pork many times a year, four or five times a year. When I eat it, I eat a lot of it.", This appears to describe his baseline consumption pattern when pork was not easily available.

2. "I love pork. But I don't eat it often, but I'll eat it maybe two, three times a week.", This was said in the context of having reliable access to Amish pork. "That's not a lot compared to whatever other meats I eat."

This suggests that his frequency varied entirely with availability and access to properly sourced pork. When he could get healthy pork from the Amish, he ate it multiple times per week. When access was limited, he ate it a few times per year.

Aajonus described eating 3 pounds of raw pork fat in a single sitting in southern China and then returning the next day to eat more. He expressed no concern about quantity limits for raw pork fat from properly raised animals. In fact, his experience of not being able to stop eating, "I couldn't stop. I stayed in that town, just eating", was presented as a positive, instinct-driven response to an extraordinarily nutrient-dense food.

In the context of general dietary protocols, he recommended "about four cups of meat a day, which is about a pound and a third. A pound and a third to a pound and a half." This is his overall meat recommendation, within which pork can be one of the rotating sources.

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Aajonus's primary mode of consuming raw pork was to eat it directly, as is, with raw butter. He described eating raw pork with enjoyment: "I ate pastured pork this morning, enjoyably."

Aajonus described raw bacon specifically in terms of its fat content as the primary draw: "I love raw bacon. It's delicious and all that good fat." He framed raw bacon as a desirable, pleasurable food when obtained without excessive salt from farmer sources.

For people who find raw meat difficult to eat, Aajonus designed recipes to make raw flesh foods more palatable through familiar flavors. He included pork explicitly in this category: "When I refer to raw meat, I mean flesh food, whether it is seafood, fish, fowl, beef, sheep, venison, buffalo, pork or wild meat." The recipe book approach was to create sauces, pâtés, and seasoned preparations that made the raw texture and flavor accessible.

Although Aajonus's pâté discussions in the sources focus primarily on liver (with ginger and fresh horseradish) and beef (with red onion), the general pâté framework can be applied to raw pork. Seasonings he mentioned for raw meat pâtés include red onion, ginger, horseradish, dill, and other herbs ground finely in a food processor. He cautioned against lime and lemon juice with beef because the fruit acids divert protein toward fuel rather than building, this caution would logically extend to pork.

Aajonus described a preparation method for preserving raw meat strips using coconut oil: "I cut the meat in strips, put it in big jars... I coated them with coconut oil, just basted them with coconut oil while they were still cool. I refrigerated them a little bit so they would chill. And then the coconut cream would adhere to them and harden." He noted coconut oil (cream) will cause fermentation, so this method effectively creates a marinated, fermenting meat preparation. Olive oil can be substituted for those who prefer it, though he noted he personally disliked the taste of olive oil.

While Aajonus's high meat instructions in the sources focus generally on red meat, seafood, and fowl in three separate jars, pork as a raw flesh food is not excluded from the high meat preparation method. The general high meat protocol is: place raw meat chopped into bite-sized pieces in a glass quart jar with equal air-to-meat space, cover tightly, refrigerate, and every 3 to 4 days take outside, completely remove the lid, and wave the jar in the air to exchange gases.

Aajonus described a general approach of making a sauce from raw cheese with raw meat for people who find raw meat psychologically difficult: "What you have to do is make a sauce and have it with your meat... they put a little bit of cheese on it." Raw egg could also be added to ground raw pork to improve palatability, just as he described for beef: "Or take a raw egg and mix it in with the ground beef."

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Raw bacon is the processed form of pork that Aajonus directly addressed. It is pork belly (or similar cut) that has been cut into strips. In its ideal form, from farmer sources in Asia or from Amish farms, it contains no salt and is simply the raw fatty pork cut in strips.

In commercial form, it is soaked in brine and therefore contains excessive sodium. Aajonus consumed commercial bacon despite knowing this because he had no alternative on the occasion he described, and he used the incident as a teaching example about the dangers of excess sodium and the need for compensating foods (butter, cheese, egg).

Raw bacon's primary appeal per Aajonus: the fat. He described it as "delicious and all that good fat." The fat content of raw bacon, being raw animal fat in an unadulterated state, participates in all the healing and lubricating functions of raw meat fat.

Raw bacon is not a prepared meat in the commercial sense (liverwurst, sausage) and therefore does not necessarily fall under the legal requirement for blanching, though salted commercial bacon is obviously not raw in the primal sense due to its brine treatment. Unsalted raw pork strips from a farmer are essentially raw bacon in the ideal form.

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Aajonus provided extensive historical context for why pig consumption became taboo and why domesticated pigs became diseased animals. He traced the problem back thousands of years to urban environments in Egypt, Jerusalem, and across the ancient world:

"In Egypt and, um, in Jerusalem, you know, all of that area. And all over the world, pigs ran, roamed the streets to eat garbage that people, they'd cook the food and dump it out the window and the pigs would come around and eat it. Well, pigs have been living on cooked foods for so long they're anemic and they're very diseased and they're unhealthy animals."

He elaborated in another passage: "Back in that time, they were using pigs as garbage trucks. They would throw the cooked food out the windows. The pigs went in the streets and they ate all the cooked food. They were the first animals to get severe diseases, besides humans. So it was illegal to eat them because they were very diseased animals, and they were the garbage collectors."

He added a practical civic dimension: "If you ate the garbage collectors, you had no garbage left. And then the putrefaction stayed in the streets. So there are many reasons that the pig was outlawed in those times." This multi-layered historical explanation, disease in the animals, civic sanitation function, religious codification, was Aajonus's framework for understanding why pork became a taboo food in so many ancient cultures.

He noted that the dietary taboo was not based on the inherent danger of pork but on the danger of eating pork from diseased animals that had been fed cooked waste. The solution is not to avoid pork but to source it from animals that were never exposed to that history.

Aajonus speculated on an additional, somewhat tongue-in-cheek reason for the pig taboo: "Maybe that's why pigs were outlawed. They're too much like humans, eating-wise, in the Bible." This referred to the physiological and digestive similarity between pigs and humans that he documented throughout his teachings.

Aajonus referenced research conducted by a scientist at the University of Iowa who grew up on a farm and studied the gastrointestinal systems of pigs raised in the university's "clean environment" under supposedly ideal conditions. The scientist found that those pigs, fed according to academic standards, were sick. When the pigs were given probiotics (he referenced pigs' intestines as a source of beneficial organisms), "In five days they were well and energetic." This research supported Aajonus's broader point that what pigs are fed, not the species itself, determines their health.

Aajonus noted that regulatory agencies have made it illegal for any prepared meats (which would include pork sausages, liverwurst, braunschweiger) to be sold raw: "It is illegal for any prepared meats to be raw; they must be blanched (partially cooked). I do not know anyone willing to cross that regulation for raw meat." This is presented as a regulatory barrier to accessing one of the most convenient forms of prepared raw pork, forcing Primal Diet adherents to either make their own or obtain whole cuts from farmer sources.

Aajonus connected the excessive salt in commercial bacon to a broader historical and political context around salt as a tool of control and profit: "They got into the salt business. They took it over India for over 200 years. And they knew that it makes people more confused in their thinking, less dedicated, more hyperactive." He used this as the backdrop for his story about purchasing commercially made bacon and discovering it was saturated with brine, an example of how the food system's use of salt creates physiological harm even in foods that are otherwise raw and nutritious.

Aajonus's most enthusiastic personal testimony about raw pork came from southern China, near Yishunbanna (close to the Thai and Laos border), where he encountered a breed of black pigs that "used to be wild." He described eating three pounds of raw fat in a single sitting, followed by more meat, and staying an extra day in the town simply to keep eating. This experience, with pigs closer to their wild genetic heritage and presumably raised on a more natural diet, produced what he described as the most delicious pork he had ever eaten. This stands as his experiential gold standard for raw pork quality and eating enjoyment.

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