Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

New York

Toby was one of many “learned pigs” who spelled words and solved math problems onstage in England and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such performances functioned as burlesque—the lowly swine displaying higher mental powers—but also betrayed an anxiety that the beasts we eat might be nearly as smart as we are.

The pig’s intelligence, however, generally failed to alter its fate. In one twentieth-century vaudeville act, the pigs at a certain point would refuse to do tricks.
The trainer, dressed as a butcher, began sharpening a large knife, whereupon the pigs did a double-take and sprang back into action. The joke cut close to home: nearly all such performers made their final appearance on the dinner table.
The first pig to play Arnold Ziffel, star of the television series
Green Acres
, ended up as pork chops in his trainer’s freezer.

C
leverness has never been the pig’s primary value to human beings. Nearly every society has placed a high value on meat.
In one convenient package, it provides high-quality protein, fat, vitamins, and trace minerals, all necessary for survival.
Our bodies crave meat, and our minds scheme to acquire it. Although humans can satisfy all their nutritional needs by eating plants, most of us prefer not to. Instead, we feed plants to animals and then eat the animals, and we do not seem to mind that this process is costly and complicated. People have fought wars, conquered lands, destroyed landscapes, and exchanged great wealth to satisfy their deep hunger for meat. When it is scarce—and in large societies meat has been scarce until recent times—only the wealthiest eat it. When poor people begin to earn a bit more money, they spend it on meat. “
Those who could, gorged themselves,” one historian has written of early modern Europe. “Those who couldn’t, aimed to.”

More often than not, the most readily available meat was pork. That was due partly to the pig’s versatile diet. Whereas cows and sheep must live on pasture, eating grass, pigs, like people, are omnivores. They will eat corn in the field, garbage on city streets, kitchen slop in backyard sties, whey in dairy barns, acorns in forests, and mollusks on tropical beaches.

Self-sufficiency added to the pig’s appeal. Give pigs plenty of food and they’ll loll about the sty and grow fat. Take the food away and they’ll slip into the woods and fend for themselves. When explorers in the sixteenth century encountered uninhabited islands, they would drop a boar and a few sows on shore—sort of like tossing a handful of seeds into a jungle and expecting a vegetable garden to grow. Except that it worked. Left alone, the island pigs survived and multiplied, providing a bountiful food supply for the next passing ship. Swine served the same function closer to home. Well into the twentieth century, many American farmers turned their pigs loose in the woods, where the animals fed themselves until they were rounded up for slaughter. Those that escaped the roundup began to live
and breed in the woods like wild animals, creating a thriving population of feral pigs. The United States is now home to an estimated 5 million feral swine that ravage crops, undermine levees, devour rare salamanders, and root up the turf on golf courses.
Efforts to control them—including shooting them from helicopters—have proved futile because pigs breed so quickly.

The same quality that makes feral pigs a problem—prodigious fecundity—has delighted farmers. Cows, goats, and sheep provide milk, a bountiful and consistent source of protein. Oxen pull plows and carts, and sheep are shorn for wool. Pigs do not pull plows; they give no milk and grow no wool. Pigs produce only one thing: more pigs. Many, many more pigs. Cows gestate for nine months and produce one calf; sheep and goats require five months and give birth to one or two offspring. A sow, on the other hand, gestates for less than four months and produces eight or twelve or even more piglets, all of which grow to slaughter weight far more quickly than a calf or a lamb. Born at 3 pounds, today’s piglet balloons to 280 pounds by six months of age, at which point it is also ready to breed.
In 1699 a French scholar estimated that in one decade—even making allowances for illness and predation by wolves—a single sow could become grandmother to 6 million pigs. The calculation was perhaps optimistic, but it carried its point.

All of those pigs were good for only one thing: meat.
The two-line poem “Bacon & Eggs,” attributed to Howard Nemerov, captures this uncomfortable fact:

The chicken contributes,

But the pig gives his all.

The pig’s certain doom has launched the plot of many a children’s tale: a cow earns its keep giving milk, but a pig saves itself
only by developing an oddball talent such as herding sheep or inspiring a spider to write words in her web.

In the unsentimental realm of real-world farms, pigs eat, grow fat, and get killed. This process happens quickly and efficiently, and the result is meat that tastes delicious either fresh or preserved with salt and smoke. Cured beef or mutton often tastes like shoe leather, but pork—as bacon and ham lovers know—only gets better. In the time before artificial refrigeration, which has existed for less than 1 percent of recorded history, it provided a year-round source of protein.

Pork also offers variety. In one episode of
The Simpsons
, Lisa becomes a vegetarian.
Homer asks her, “Are you saying you’re never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?”

“No.”

“Ham?”

“No.”

“Pork chops?”

“Dad! Those all come from the same animal!”

“Oh, yeah, right, Lisa,” Homer says with heavy sarcasm, waggling his fingers in the air. “A wonderful, magical animal!”

Homer here echoes an opinion first recorded by Pliny the Elder about a century before Christ. “
There is no animal that affords a greater variety to the palate,” Pliny wrote in his
Natural History
. “All the others have their own peculiar flavor, but the flesh of the hog has nearly fifty different flavors.” Given the abundance, variety, and toothsomeness of this meat, it’s easy to understand the enthusiasm of an American farmer who in 1849 greeted the arrival of the year’s first litter with this entry in his diary: “
Pigs! Pigs! Pork! Pork! Pork!”

W
ith meat the most valued of foods and pigs a prolific producer of meat, one might assume that pigs have been universally embraced. In Asia and the Pacific Island region, that assumption would be largely correct.
Pigs stood at the center of cultural life in much of Polynesia and Micronesia, serving as victims in ritual sacrifice and as the key source of protein; women sometimes suckled orphaned piglets alongside their own children. China’s traditional agriculture revolved around pigs as producers of manure, and its cooks prized pork above all other meats.
The Chinese character for “home” is formed by placing the symbol for “pig” under the symbol for “roof”: home is where the pig is.

In the Western world—which, for reasons of brevity, is the focus of this book—the relationship between pigs and people has been fraught. Judaism placed a complete ban on pork in the first century
bc
, and Islam followed suit more than 1,000 years later. Christians gave their blessing to pork but still found it difficult to shake off Old Testament prejudice, condemning pigs as lazy, filthy, and gluttonous. Englishmen ranked pork as the least desirable of meats. Americans, from colonial days until after World War II, ate far more pork than beef but nonetheless disparaged pork and insulted the pig. The cow—that great, dumb, placid beast with a thousand-yard stare and only a faint glimmer of intelligence—stole all the glory, with steaks and cowboys central to the mythology of America.
In a classic work of American agricultural history, cows get a chapter to themselves, while hogs are consigned to a catch-all chapter titled “The Lesser Beasts.”

Greater in dietary significance than the cow, the pig certainly has been lesser in prestige. Foods, like the societies that consume them, are arranged into hierarchies. For those linked by blood, religion, class, or nation, sharing a meal forges bonds
but also draws boundaries:
we use food to stigmatize foreigners, exclude nonbelievers, climb the social ladder, and kick others down a few rungs. No food has played a bigger role than pork in shaping cultural identities, and examining why this is so might help untangle some of our current dilemmas surrounding food.

Historically, the question of which people eat which foods has been a matter of tradition, price, status, and availability: the rich eat what is rare and expensive, and the poor eat whatever they can afford. Today, the calculations have shifted. Consumers with the means ask themselves if pesticides lurk in the folds of their lettuce, if their chips were made from genetically modified corn, and if the workers who picked their tomatoes were paid a fair wage. The meat counter poses a separate set of dilemmas: Does the chicken harbor antibiotic residues or dangerous bacteria? Did the steak come from a cow fed slaughterhouse by-products? Did the ham require undue suffering on the part of a pig?

People, in other words, are pausing to think about the animals that become meat: What did they eat, where did they live, and how did they die? Similar questions have been asked about pigs for thousands of years.

The anxiety about pigs starts with their omnivorous appetite. In addition to acorns and rice hulls, pigs happily devour that which most disgusts us—rotting garbage, feces, carrion, even human corpses. Of all the animals commonly eaten by humans, the pig is the only one that will return the favor. Many texts, from scripture to Shakespeare, have noted the pig’s willingness to scavenge human bodies, and such incidents happen even today.
In 2012 an Oregon farmer went to feed his sows and never returned; authorities later searched the sty and recovered his dentures and a few scattered body parts. If you are what you eat—
an age-old expression found in many languages—then what’s eaten by the animals you eat becomes cause for concern.

Pigs became pariahs in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine as early as 1000
bc
, but even there they didn’t disappear. Instead, they took up residence among society’s human outcasts, living as scavengers among the homes of the poor. For most of history, the vast majority of people lived in danger of starvation, and only a fortunate few could afford to be picky about the food they ate. The elites who wrote dietary laws and set culinary fashions may have turned up their noses at pigs, but people on the margins embraced them as a nearly free source of food. In the tail-chasing realm of social status, this further damaged the reputation of pigs, who became contemptible not only for their own dirty habits but also because they kept company with the poor.

T
he scavenging ways of pigs created a strange intimacy. Cattle and sheep, throughout history, have generally ranged on the fringes of settlements. Pigs, by contrast, often spent their days quite near people’s homes. They became members of the family, consuming the leftovers of meals before becoming dinner themselves. Eating pigs sometimes seemed to border on cannibalism and required emotional distancing. An old joke tells of a visitor to a farm who spots a pig with a wooden leg. The pig, he learns, has saved the farmer from drowning, scared away a bear, and rescued all the other farm animals from a barn fire. “What an amazing animal,” the visitor asks. “But how did he lose his leg?” The farmer responds, “Well, a pig like that, you don’t eat him all at once.”

Or perhaps you don’t eat him at all. In E. B. White’s
Charlotte’s Web
, Charlotte the spider saves Wilbur the pig from slaughter by weaving a few words in silk. One of those words is “humble,” which Charlotte says suits Wilbur because it means
“not proud” and “near the ground.” She doesn’t mention a third meaning: “inferior” or “low class.” Are pigs humble? The word shares a root with “humus,” or soil, where pigs spend a lot of time rooting. And for much of history they have been considered inferior—filthy animals eaten by low-class people. But “not proud” misses the mark. Wilbur notwithstanding, pigs are fractious, independent minded, and difficult to herd. Given the chance, they’ll happily turn the tables and make a meal of a person. There’s nothing humble about that.

Compared to cows and sheep, pigs are arrogant bastards.
“There’s always a certain tension about a bunch of pigs walking around,” a twentieth-century hog farmer said. “You never know when they’re gonna flare up—start bitin’ off another one’s ear or something. You just don’t get the calm, peaceful feeling like when you see a herd of sheep.” His statement reveals frustration but also admiration. It’s the voice of a father who loves best his worst-behaved child, who knows that docility is close kin to stupidity, who sees in his hogs a bit of himself.

The line between people and pigs can be fluid.
Alice, during her adventures in Wonderland, carries a baby that gradually turns into a piglet, so she sets it down and, with some relief, watches it trot into the woods: “‘If it had grown up,’ she said to herself, ‘it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.’”
In
The Odyssey
the enchantress Circe transforms sailors into swine but leaves them “cursed with sense”—Odysseus’s men, that is, retain human minds within animal bodies. The story gives voice to the suspicion that when we eat a pig, we eat our close kin.
Renaissance physicians claimed that human flesh tasted like pork, and reports from cannibals have supported that claim.