1It’s just past 4:00 on a Thursday afternoon in June at Jesse’s Place, a country juke 17 miles south of the Mississippi line and three miles west of Amite, Louisiana. The air conditioner hacks and spits forth torrents of Arctic air, but the heat of summer can’t be kept at bay. It seeps around the splintered doorjambs and settles in, transforming the squat particleboard-plastered roadhouse into a sauna. Slowly, the dank barroom fills with grease-smeared mechanics from the truck stop up the road and farmers straight from the fields, the soles of their brogans thick with dirt clods. A few weary souls make their way over from the nearby sawmill. I sit alone at the bar, one empty bottle of Bud in front of me, a second in my hand. I drain the beer, order a third, and stare down at the pink juice spreading outward from a crumpled foil pouch and onto the bar.

2I’m not leaving until I eat this thing, I tell myself.

3Half a mile down the road, behind a fence coiled with razor wire, Lionel Dufour, proprietor of Farm Fresh Food Supplier, is loading up the last truck of the day, wheeling case after case of pickled pork offal out of his cinder-block processing plant and into a semi-trailer bound for Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

4His crew packed lips today. Yesterday, it was pickled sausage; the day before that, pig feet. Tomorrow, it’s pickled pig lips again. Lionel has been on the job since 2:45 in the morning, when he came in to light the boilers. Damon Landry, chief cook and maintenance man, came in at 4:30. By 7:30, the production line was at full tilt: six women in white smocks and blue bouffant caps, slicing ragged white fat from the lips, tossing the good parts in glass jars, the bad parts in barrels bound for the rendering plant. Across the aisle, filled jars clatter by on a conveyor belt as a worker tops them off with a Kool-Aid-red slurry of hot sauce, vinegar, salt, and food coloring. Around the corner, the jars are capped, affixed with a label, and stored in pasteboard boxes to await shipping.

5Unlike most offal—euphemistically called “variety meats”—lips belie their provenance. Brains, milky white and globular, look like brains. Feet, the ghosts of their cloven hoofs protruding, look like feet. Testicles look like, well, testicles. But lips are different. Loosed from the snout, trimmed of their fat, and dyed a preternatural pink, they look more like candy than like carrion.

6At Farm Fresh, no swine root in an adjacent feedlot. No viscera-strewn killing floor lurks just out of sight, down a darkened hallway. These pigs died long ago at some Midwestern abattoir. By the time the lips arrive in Amite, they are, in essence, pig Popsicles, 50-pound blocks of offal and ice.

7“Lips are all meat,” Lionel told me earlier in the day. “No gristle, no bone, no nothing. They’re bar food, hot and vinegary, great with a beer. Used to be the lips ended up in sausages, headcheese, those sorts of things. A lot of them still do.”

“Lips are all meat,” Lionel told me earlier in the day. “No gristle, no bone, no nothing. They’re bar food, hot and vinegary, great with a beer.”

8Lionel, a 50-year-old father of three with quick, intelligent eyes set deep in a face the color of cordovan, is a veteran of nearly 40 years in the pickled pig lips business. “I started out with my daddy when I wasn’t much more than 10,” Lionel told me, his shy smile framed by a coarse black mustache flecked with whispers of gray. “The meatpacking business he owned had gone broke back when I was 6, and he was peddling out of the back of his car, selling dried shrimp, napkins, straws, tubes of plastic cups, pig feet, pig lips, whatever the bar owners needed. He sold to black bars, white bars, sweet shops, snowball stands, you name it. We made the rounds together after I got out of school, sometimes staying out till two or three in the morning. I remember bringing my toy cars to this one joint and racing them around the floor with the bar owner’s son while my daddy and his father did business.”

9For years after the demise of that first meatpacking company, the Dufour family sold someone else’s product. “We used to buy lips from Dennis Di Salvo’s company down in Belle Chasse,” recalled Lionel. “As far as I can tell, his mother was the one who came up with the idea to pickle and pack lips back in the ’50s, back when she was working for a company called Three Little Pigs over in Houma. But pretty soon, we were selling so many lips that we had to almost beg Di Salvo’s for product. That’s when we started cooking up our own,” he told me, gesturing toward the cast-iron kettle that hangs from the rafters by the front door of the plant. “My daddy started cooking lips in that very pot.”

10Lionel now cooks lips in 11 retrofitted milk tanks, dull stainless-steel cauldrons shaped like oversized cradles. But little else has changed. Though Lionel’s father has passed away, Farm Fresh remains a family-focused company. His wife, Kathy, keeps the books. His daughter, Dana, a button-cute college student who has won numerous beauty titles, takes to the road in the summer, selling lips to convenience stores and wholesalers. Soon, after he graduates from business school, Lionel’s younger son, Matt, will take over operations at the plant. And his older son, a veterinarian, lent his name to one of Farm Fresh’s top sellers, Jason’s Pickled Pig Lips.

11“We do our best to corner the market on lips,” Lionel told me, his voice tinged with bravado. “Sometimes they’re hard to get from the packing houses. You gotta kill a lot of pigs to get enough lips to keep us going. I’ve got new customers calling every day; it’s all I can do to keep up with demand, but I bust my ass to keep up. I do what I can for my family—and for my customers.

12“When my customers tell me something,” he continued, “just like when my daddy told me something, I listen. If my customers wanted me to dye the lips green, I’d ask, ‘What shade?’ As it is, every few years we’ll do some red and some blue for the Fourth of July. This year we did jars full of Mardi Gras lips—half purple, half gold,” Lionel recalled with a chuckle. “I guess we’d had a few beers when we came up with that one.”

13Meanwhile, back at Jesse’s Place, I finish my third Bud, order my fourth. Now, I tell myself, my courage bolstered by booze, I’m ready to eat a lip.

14They may have looked like candy in the plant, but in the barroom they’re carrion once again. I poke and prod the six-inch arc of pink flesh, peering up from my reverie just in time to catch the barkeep’s wife, Audrey, staring straight at me. She fixes me with a look just this side of pity and asks, “You gonna eat that thing or make love to it?”

15Her nephew, Jerry, sidles up to a bar stool on my left. “A lot of people like ’em with chips,” he says with a nod toward the pink juice pooling on the bar in front of me. I offer to buy him a lip, and Audrey fishes one from a jar behind the counter, wraps it in tinfoil, and places the whole affair on a paper towel in front of him.

16I take stock of my own cowardice, and, following Jerry’s lead, reach for a bag of potato chips, tear open the top with my teeth, and toss the quivering hunk of hog flesh into the shiny interior of the bag, slick with grease and dusted with salt. Vinegar vapors tickle my nostrils. I stifle a gag that rolls from the back of my throat, swallow hard, and pray that the urge to vomit passes.

17With a smash of my hand, the potato chips are reduced to a pulp, and I feel the cold lump of the lip beneath my fist. I clasp the bag shut and shake it hard in an effort to ensure chip coverage in all the nooks and crannies of the lip. The technique that Jerry uses—and I mimic—is not unlike that employed by home cooks mixing up a mess of Shake ’n Bake chicken.

18I pull from the bag a coral crescent of meat now crusted with blond bits of potato chips. When I chomp down, the soft flesh dissolves between my teeth. It tastes like a flaccid cracklin’, unmistakably porcine, and not altogether bad. The chips help, providing texture where there was none. Slowly, my brow unfurrows, my stomach ceases its fluttering.

19Sensing my relief, Jerry leans over and peers into my bag. “Kind of look like Frosted Flakes, don’t they?” he says, by way of describing the chips rapidly turning to mush in the pickling juice. I offer the bag to Jerry, order yet another beer, and turn to eye the pig feet floating in a murky jar by the cash register, their blunt tips bobbing up through a pasty white film.