Saturday, August 28, 2010   This is an edited verion of an
article that appears in the current issue of Tin House.  Once a
week, as I was growing up in the north of England, I watched my
Irish grandfather eat a boiled pig’s trotter. I watched with
fascination rather than envy, since my parents had assured me,
with the certainty parents so often have, that I wouldn’t enjoy
the taste of a pig’s trotter. Later in my life I learned this
wasn’t true, but at the time I didn’t argue. There were, for
sure, other, much bigger battles to be fought against my
parents, but when I look back on it I wonder quite why they were
so insistent that pigs’ trotters weren’t for me, and I think the
answer is because they’d decided pig’s trotters weren’t for
them. My parents were making a long, arduous journey from the
working class to the middle class, and instinctively they’d
decided that eating pig’s trotters would slow their social
ascendancy. Trotters were peasant food, and my parents were no
longer prepared to be peasants.  To