SEWARD, Ill. — Jeff Sindelar used his mother’s electric skillet
to illustrate how far the U.S. pork industry has come in a short
amount of time.  “When I grew up eating pork — there were six
kids in my family — it was a batch process. She would cook a
batch of pork chops, put it off to the side on a plate, cook a
second batch, put it off to the side on a plate, take the first
batch and cook it again and do that. So I ate pork that was half
of its starting size,” he said.  When his mother was double-
cooking the pork chops for Sindelar and his siblings, she — and
millions of other pork-cooking mothers — were doing it with the
primary goal of food safety in mind.  “You cook the heck out of
it, and the reason for that was trichina, Trichina spiralis,” he
said.  Sindelar, who grew up on a grain and livestock farm in
Nebraska, was speaking to an audience at the Meat Trends
interactive pork processing and cooking demonstration at
Eickman’s Processing in Seward. He is a University of Wisconsin
Extension meat speciali