The city is dotted with innumerable restaurants and food joints offering pork delicacies. People often have to stand in long queues at these joints to buy foodstuff.
About 200 pigs, brought from adjoining districts and Meghalaya, are slaughtered in the city every day. Though a few vendors have complained of a slight decrease in pork sales, they mostly attribute it to the hot weather rather than swine flu. The assurance of health officials that the flu can't spread through pork consumption, has put to rest the fears of many.
"We sell about 60 to 80 kg pork daily and our customers haven't stopped purchasing meat. But the rising heat affects the sale of pork and duck meat to some extent as people avoid having them in the hot weather. Besides, no swine flu cases have been reported here," city meat seller Brishti Ram Boro said.
"Normally, we sell over 50 kg pork each day. But in the summers, some of our customers prefer chicken to red meat. None of them have cited swine flu as the cause behind their change of preference," another city vendor, Subodh Das, said. All these meat sellers insist that they sell good quality pork. "We procure quality meat from villages in Boroma, Goalpara and Nalbari. If we find larva in the raw meat, we immediately throw away the portion. We have not received any complaints from our customers in the last 20 years," Boro added.