ON AN ACREAGE OUTSIDE THE VILLAGE OF SOOKE, A PIG named Red flops down lazily in her sun-dappled pen. She flicks her curly tail and grunts peacefully, barely bothering to raise her snout when a scruffy grey duck perches on her spotted flank. "I love them," Edward Tuson says with a grin. "They’re hilarious."

Tuson may be fond of his pigs Red, Spot, Rugger and Blackie, but he’s not sentimental about them. After all, in a few months he’ll be transforming them into prosciutto and sausage.

But before they face the day of the long knives, the Berkshire-cross pigs will frolic in their indoor-outdoor pen, dine on organic greens and enjoy treats of apples and milk. Their days may be numbered, but they’re as happy as pigs in, well, paradise.

Tuson, the chef at the locavoracious Sooke Harbour House on Vancouver Island, is just one of countless foodies across Western Canada to have fallen back in love with the pig in recent years. From Victoria’s Café Brio to Vancouver’s Salt Tasting Room, from Calgary’s the Tribune to Winnipeg’s Mirlycourtois, chefs and producers and diners are revelling in a rediscovered passion for pork.

This hunger is not for fancy roasts and chops, but for the full, fatty flavour of humble hams, earthy terrines and spicy sausages-what Tuson calls "not the perfect cut of meat, but the better cut of meat." It is a passion for the new-old art of charcuterie, the alchemy of curing meat with salt or spices or fat or smoke (or, sometimes, deliciously, all of the above).

Almost any meat can be transformed into charcuterie, but as our ancestors knew, nearly every part of the pig is delectably edible, lending itself to many different flavours and textures. Bernard Mirlycourtois, from behind the stove at Mirlycourtois restaurant in Winnipeg, summarizes: "Excuse the expression, but chefs say we eat everything on the pig except the shit."

Mirlycourtois, who cooked in Michelin-starred restaurants in his native France before moving to Winnipeg 20 years ago, learned the essential charcuterie-making skills as a young cook in Burgundy. For centuries it was an economic necessity, a way to use of lesser cuts of meat and, in the days before refrigeration, to preserve it. With the advent of walk-in coolers and a seemingly endless supply of cheap chops, many cooks stopped bothering with the complex, time-consuming process.

Then a few years ago, just as consumers started to worry about where their food came from, chefs found new satisfaction in authentic charcuterie. It’s an Old World tradition that satisfied a New World hunger for good food-both tasty and virtuous. And then, quite suddenly, charcuterie was trendy.

"We’ve been doing this forever, but it wasn’t taking off because the new generation just didn’t understand," says Claudio Urbani, who runs Moccia Urbani Salumeria in East Vancouver with his twentysomething sons Stefan and Jordan. "Now it’s coming full circle. It’s a joy for me to see that, to see that people appreciate it."

Charcuterie may be newly fashionable, but Western Canada has actually had a long tradition of what we mostly knew as cold cuts or deli meats. It was the first fast food: portable, nutritious and long-lasting. Just as Roman legionnaires carried sausages to war and Renaissance explorers packed salt pork on their ships, European immigrants on their way to the New World packed ham or salami or sausage-and the recipes, too.

The Germans brought their remarkable smokehouse skills to Western Canada. The Eastern Europeans brought countless links, from garlicky Ukrainian kielbasa to spicy Hungarian debrecener to tart pickled Polish sausage. Making ham, bacon and sausage was a quintessential part of early farm life in the West. Farm-cured meats found their way to butcher shops and delicatessens like the Stawnichy family store in Mundare, Alberta; the Hungarian Delicatessen or Polcan in Calgary; the Ukrainian Co-op in Regina; or Winnipeg’s Central Products & Foods.

Central Products, easily identifiable from afar by the plastic cows cavorting on the roof, was started in 1958 by a Ukrainian immigrant named Stefan Yankowski. "He was an old country sausage-maker in that he didn’t weigh anything, he had everything in his head," recalls owner Jerry Derzko.

Much has changed. A few farms are returning to an old-fashioned (in today’s terms, organic or free-range) method of raising heritage breeds but you’re more likely to see (and smell) gigantic hog barns housing thousands of unhappy swine-so many that the federal government recently announced a $50-million pig cull to help raise unsustainably low prices.

Processing, too, has changed. Abattoirs across the West have vanished like hailstones in July. Winnipeg once had so many slaughterhouses Derzko says it was like the "Chicago of the North." Now it has one. Small niche producers must ship their animals greater distances, which not only costs more time and money, but places stress on the animals.

At the same time, consumers’ tastes have moved away from the fatty sausages and chops, the bland bologna and wieners of the 20th century. We want lean organic meats, exotic flavours and less fat, MSG and salt (historically as important an ingredient in charcuterie as pork). Ironically, though, as customers drift away from what Derzko calls "a baseline of traditional flavours," some charcutiers are finding that it’s the truly traditional products that are these days the most exotic of all.

At Vancouver’s Salt Tasting Room, customers perch at long communal tables and order salty-sweet Iberico prosciutto or anise-flavoured finocchiona from a blackboard menu. Salt raised the charcuterie plate from foodie fad to high fashion when it opened in 2006. Owner Sean Heather says, "There are a lot of people who remember their parents and grandparents eating like this. It resonates with them." Like the small-plates trend of recent years, charcuterie is a social eating experience, where diners can share platters of savoury treats like chef Andrew Keen’s rich rillettes and signature corned beef at the Tribune in Calgary.

Salt relies on local artisanal producers like Moccia Urbani. Claudio Urbani’s father-in-law, Pietro Moccia, opened his butcher shop in 1972 with a few specialty meat products for his Italian clientele. When Urbani married his family’s recipes with Moccia’s, something delectably new was born: artisan cured meats like culatello (the tenderest, sweetest part of the prosciutto ham), tangy friulano and popular fig toscano salamis. Son Stefan says, "People really care about their ingredients now. Customers want something better tasting, and they want to know where it came from."

That same hunger for quality feeds the constant Granville Island lineups at John and Christine van der Lieck’s Oyama Sausage. John inherited his skills from generations of sausage- makers and today produces 300 types of charcuterie, including a dozen styles of prosciutto, mostly made from his custom-raised Berkshire pigs. This month, for instance, they have special Holstein-schinken and Okanagan red wine prosciuttos.

Not all chefs rely on suppliers like the excellent Valbella Gourmet Foods in Canmore, Alberta, or Trochu Meats, which supplies Alberta’s Sunterra gourmet grocers. Some chefs, like Grant Perry at Banff’s Bison Mountain Bistro, have turned their hands to curing their own meat. Other chefs are taking their charcuterie beyond the dining room: this fall Robert Belcham and Tom Doughty, proprietors of Fuel restaurant, will open the Cure, their own wholesale charcuterie operation, in Vancouver.

Few, however are going to the extra effort of raising their own animals, the way Edward Tuson is, to make their own prosciutto, salami, bacon and a roast pig jowl that is "like pork butter." A decade ago, he recalls thinking: "There’s more to this animal than cutting it up and putting it on a plate." Soon after that, he bought his first pig. And then another. Now, with his four pigs rooting about in their sunny pen outside Sooke, he says fondly: "These guys, they think they’re in the Bahamas. I’ve never had pigs this spoiled."

The pigs aren’t the only ones who are spoiled. So are we, the lucky diners who get to savour peppery Pyrenees ham, chorizo hot with chilies, wine-scented salami and terrines rich with truffles and cognac, just part of the endless array of gourmet gifts that come from that most generous feast-on-trotters.