Howard Hanna tastes pork like a sommelier tastes wine.

Hanna, chef and owner of The Rieger Hotel Grill & Exchange, first drapes his tongue with a paper-thin slice of ham — his favorite is cured by artisan meats company La Quercia in Norwalk, Iowa. As the meat warms, it blooms with flavors: Earthy. Sweet. Slightly salty. Hanna savors every single one as it swirls with others to create culinary magic. Then he sinks his teeth in.

To say Hanna loves pork would be an understatement.

“I’m crazy about it,” he says.

Hanna is among a growing number of chefs who buy local, naturally raised heirloom pork, butcher it in-house and use every part to make a surprising variety of menu items.

To put it bluntly, the pig is big.

Want evidence? Just look at The Rieger’s menu. There are pork chops, pork meatballs and pork tasting plates. Hanna and his staff grind sausage and cure bacon. Pork is in the soup and sandwiches. Pork stock even goes in the savory smoked Bloody Mary mix, which, like nearly everything at The Rieger, is made from scratch.

Another local chef who prizes pork above other ingredients is Michael Beard, who opened 715 in Lawrence two years ago “with pork in mind.” Every week, Beard butchers a pig from a farm 20 miles north of Manhattan, Kan., and makes ham, sausage, bacon and pork chops. He uses the pig’s head and feet to make head cheese, a cold cut he serves atop Soppressata Pizza, 715’s most popular pie.

Hanna and Beard say they like working with pork because it’s versatile, cost-effective and delicious. Plus, the meat from Duroc or Berkshire heritage pigs has become more popular and available in the past three or four years.

Heritage breeds are typically raised naturally without antibiotics on small farms. The chefs say heirloom pork is known for having more fat and flavor than pork from hogs raised on factory farms.

The pork trend is also about sustainability. Buying hogs from small, local farms and then using every part of the animal cuts waste and energy usage. Hanna and Beard consider that important, and chefs elsewhere agree.

Locally sourced meat is the top restaurant trend of 2011, according to a survey of 1,500 professional chefs by the National Restaurant Association. The survey produced a numbered list of 20 hot restaurant trends that also included sustainability (No. 3) and the hyper-local movement (No. 5), wherein chefs do as much as possible in-house, from growing herbs to butchering their own meat.

It’s no wonder that some of the country’s trendiest restaurants specialize in nose-to-tail cuisine.

In Chicago’s up-and-coming Fulton Market District, The Publican serves country ribs and ham tasting plates alongside oysters, escargot and a respectable craft beer list. Have trouble digesting all that meat? Order a “Kyle’s After Pork,” a $9 after-dinner digestif.

In New York’s East Village, foodies line up down the block to stuff themselves with pork belly buns and pork shoulder steak at Momofuku Ssam Bar. The cool cafe even serves country ham from Burgers’ Smokehouse in California, Mo., about 20 miles southwest of Columbia.

A pork-centric restaurant called The Pig opens soon in Washington, D.C.’s Logan Circle. And in Los Angeles, celebrity chef Chris Cosentino (from “The Next Iron Chef” and “Iron Chef America”) plans to open Pigg. Cosentino told The Los Angeles Times that Pigg will sell “pork out the wazoo” in the form of pig ear sandwiches and raw pork sashimi. That’s right: raw pork sashimi.

Around Kansas City, you can find inventive pork dishes at The Farmhouse in the River Market, Bluestem in Westport, Julian in Brookside, Room 39 in midtown and Leawood, and Port Fonda, a gourmet Mexican food truck in the Crossroads Arts District.

All those eateries buy heritage pork breeds such as Duroc, Berkshire, Gloucestershire Old Spots or Red Wattle. Those less common varieties of pork weren’t widely available to chefs until three or four years ago, says Dave Crum, a former Bluestem chef who now manages Arrowhead Specialty Meats in North Kansas City.

“As soon as the higher-quality pork became available, fine dining restaurants started using it from New York to L.A.,” Crum says.

Kansas City restaurants soon followed. Crum says that beef still reigns supreme in this steakhouse city but that heritage pork sales have risen dramatically in the past three years.

“The real upsurge in pork has been the secondary cuts,” Crum says. “Pork chops and pork loins have always been popular. We’ve been seeing a lot more sales of shoulders, bellies, tongues, livers, casings used to make sausages.” Sales of pig feet and heads are up, too, he says.

Crum says people are starved for fattier, more flavorful meat because the pork industry has tried to “breed the fat out of pork” for the past 20 years.

In the late 1980s, consumers caught on to the low-fat craze and started swapping bacon and steak for turkey bacon and boneless, skinless chicken breast. To compete with poultry, pork producers bred leaner pigs that yielded leaner chops and loins. And in 1987, the National Pork Board trotted out the slogan “Pork: The Other White Meat.”

Never mind that the United States Department of Agriculture classifies pork as a red meat. The slogan and this new, slimmer version of pork caught on.

“That’s good in a lot of respects,” says Craig Good, who raises Duroc and Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs with his wife, Amy. “But a lot of people did not consider the meat quality.”

Good farms in Olsburg, Kan., about 20 miles north of Manhattan. He says high-quality pork is dark pink, with a decent amount of fat marbling. It also holds water well, which helps retain juiciness during the cooking process.

People used to be afraid of eating any fat. Not anymore. Just look at bacon — it’s in everything from ice cream at Westside Local to Bloody Marys at Beer Kitchen.

Consumers today are more about moderation, Good says: “I think they say, ‘I don’t have to eat (something unhealthy) every day. But when I do eat it, I want a really good piece of meat. And it might have some fat on it.’ ”

Consumers also seem to care more about animal welfare. Movies such as “Food Inc.” and books such as “Eating Animals” warn that cheap meat from factory farms can carry a big ethical price tag.

Before Michael Beard began buying pigs from Good, he visited the farm to see how the animals were raised and slaughtered.

The pigs on Good’s farm are born inside a climate-controlled building but spend most of their lives outside. They eat corn, sorghum and soybean meal grown on the same farm. Good says he does not feed the pigs growth stimulants or antibiotics.

They take longer to mature, and keeping them healthy takes more work. All that drives up production costs. But it also allows Good to charge higher prices. And he says the market for naturally raised pigs from a family farm is strong.

“People want to know what (the pigs) were fed and how they were handled,” he says. “I think they feel better about buying a product they can put a face with.”

Good sells some of his pork to 715 in Lawrence and 4 Olives Restaurant and Wine Bar in Manhattan, Kan. But he sells the majority to Heritage Foods USA, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based company that supplies specialty meats to a long list of eateries that includes The Spotted Pig and Oceana in Manhattan, N.Y., and Vinegar Hill House and Bark Hot Dogs in Brooklyn.

Good started selling five pigs a week to Heritage Foods USA in 2003. Now the company buys between 800 and 900 a year.

Last year, Heritage invited Good and his wife to several New York City restaurants that serve their product, including three Mario Batali eateries: Otto, Lupa and Del Posto.

“They would bring us meat boards — they called them meat boards — and it was so exciting because they had all different kinds of European cured sausages and head cheese. We felt very appreciated. That’s what Amy and I like about this. We’re not going to get rich. But we’re rich in the relationships we’ve formed with the people who use our product.”

Beard feels the same way.

“It’s about finding people who care about what they’re doing,” he says. “The fruits of their labor show in their products.”