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

  More Advance Praise for

  Lesser Beasts

  “Mark Essig tells a fine tale of the unsung exploits of the lowly pig, from the age of the pyramids and the wars of the conquistadors to the awful abattoirs and trendy restaurants of today. With clear prose and careful research, he redeems an animal that has played a seminal role in human history while enduring near universal disdain. This fascinating book provides a marvelous antidote to our unexamined views on the pig.” —Andrew Lawler, author of Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? The Epic Saga of the Bird That Powers Civilization

  “Lesser Beasts is a delightful romp through porcine history from the Neolithic era to the present. Mark Essig offers surprising answers to the question of why humans have had such a love-hate affair with the humble pig, and unveils many other unexpected insights. Well written and well researched, Lesser Beasts is a must for historians, pork lovers, and anyone who just loves a good read.” —Andrew F. Smith, editor-in-chief, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America

  Lesser Beasts

  Lesser

  Beasts

  A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig

  Mark Essig

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  New York

  Copyright © 2015 by Mark Essig

  Published by Basic Books,A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th floor, New York, NY 10107.

  Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  Designed by Pauline Brown

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Essig, Mark, 1969–

  Lesser beasts : a snout-to-tail history of the humble pig / Mark Essig.

  pages cm

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-465-04068-1 (e-book) 1. Swine—History. 2. Pork— History. I. Title.

  SF395.E64 2015

  636.4—dc23

  2014049256

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Melissa, Jack, and Lydia

  “Cattle country” calls up instant visions of distant mountains and wind-swept plains leading off to nowhere and cattle grazing on slopes and tattooed men in wide-brim hats gathered around a fire with their horses standing stalwartly in the background. . . . But who, among the teeming city masses, knows about “hog country”? Who knows where lies that land?

  —William Hedgepeth, The Hog Book

  “Humble?” said Charlotte. “‘Humble’ has two meanings. It means ‘not proud’ and it means ‘near the ground.’ That’s Wilbur all over. He’s not proud and he’s near the ground.”

  —E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web

  Contents

  Prologue:The Magical Animal

  one:Keep It Simple

  two:Out of the Wild

  three:“The Pig Is Impure”

  four:“Of Their Flesh Shall Ye Not Eat”

  five:“Monstrosities of Luxury”

  SIX:The Forest Pig

  SEVEN:“Swine Eat Things Clean and Unclean”

  EIGHT:“The Husbandman’s Best Scavenger”

  NINE:“All the Mountains Swarmed with Them”

  TEN:“A Great Unkindness for Our Swine”

  ELEVEN:“The Benevolent Tyranny of the Pig”

  TWELVE:“Twenty Bushels of Corn on Four Legs”

  THIRTEEN:“The Republic of Porkdom”

  FOURTEEN:“A Swinish Multitude”

  FIFTEEN:“A Growing Prejudice Against Pork”

  SIXTEEN:“The Other White Meat”

  SEVENTEEN:Vices

  EIGHTEEN:“Back to the Start”

  Epilogue:Virtuous Carnivores

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Prologue

  The Magical Animal

  On a trip through the North Carolina mountains in 1878, Virginia newspaper editor James Cowardin found himself surrounded by thousands of pigs. “Hogs were before us and behind us, and both to the right and to the left of us,” Cowardin wrote. “There was whipping and shouting and twisting and turning” as the swineherds yelled, “Suey!” “Suey!” “Get out!” “Suey hogs!” “D—d devil take the swine!” Cowardin too cursed the pigs at first, but once he settled into the rhythm of the road, he began to daydream about following his “grunting friends” to their destination and enjoying a pig slaughter feast: “What luxury in spare ribs, backbone, and sausage we would have,” he fantasized, “not to mention pigs’ tails broiled on hot rocks!”

  The flesh of Cowardin’s traveling companions, though, was destined for other stomachs. He had stumbled upon a seasonal movement of livestock that had been happening each winter for half a century. The swine had been fattened in eastern Tennessee, a fertile farming region with many pigs and few people. A couple of hundred miles away lay the plantations of the South, which didn’t raise much food. Planters preferred to grow cotton, sell it for cash, and buy pork to feed their slaves (or, after the Civil War, their sharecroppers and tenant farmers). The hog supply was in Tennessee, the demand in South Carolina and Georgia, and in between lay the Blue Ridge mountains. No rivers or railroads connected the two, so there was only one way to move the hogs: on foot.

  Hog droving, as the practice was known, formed an essential link in the global economy. In peak years as many as 150,000 hogs made the journey on this single turnpike, and many other mountain routes also carried pigs from upland farms to the Deep South. The pork fed the slaves, who raised the cotton, which supplied textile mills in New England and Great Britain, which made the fabric that clothed the world. And it all depended on a few men herding hogs through a narrow river valley cutting through the mountains of North Carolina.

  Ifirst learned of hog drives in 2007, not long after my family and I settled in those mountains. A historical marker revealed that “livestock drovers” once traversed a road near our home in Asheville, North Carolina. I had thought cattle drives happened on the Great Plains, not in the mountains, so I headed to the library, where I read books on local history, scanned microfilm of nineteenth-century newspapers, and searched Google Books for old runs of defunct farming magazines. And I discovered the strange truth: most of the animals herded through Asheville had been not cows or even sheep but pigs.

  The story of these pigs, I learned, was even etched into the landscape: a local farmer showed me a spot on his land where an old drovers’ road is still visible, a deep trench cut into the clay soil by decades of wagon wheels and sharp little hooves. Think of it: pig drives! Like cattle drives, only stranger! Who knew a pig could walk that far or would travel in the desired direction? Apparently not many people: I read a 2006 article by a prominent archaeologist, a specialist in livestock, who baldly insisted that pigs “cannot be driven.” The historical record suggests that pigs can indeed be driven. In fact, if you gave them a few lessons and a specially designed steering wheel, I wouldn’t be surprised if pigs could drive.

  At about this time I st
arted teaching journalism at Warren Wilson College, a liberal arts school that also operates a farm. The animals live on pasture, and nutrients cycle from the soil into crops, from crops into the mouths of animals, and from animal manure back into the soil. I observed this cycle firsthand one day each week when I volunteered on the pig crew. Working alongside students, I scraped manure, topped up feeders, clipped the milk teeth of newborn piglets, and castrated the young males. I spent a lot of time just watching: a dominant sow chasing off her weaker sisters to get first dibs at the trough; enormous boars, rendered bowlegged by their cantaloupe-sized testicles, hoisting themselves atop sows in heat; young pigs scattering across the pasture as I approached, then returning to sniff and prod at my boots with their snouts. A boar known as Gucci—the students made the most of their naming duties—would prop his front legs on the wall of his pen and gaze around the farmyard contentedly, a lord surveying his estate. The pigs were by turns curious, surly, skittish, and playful. They were the most fascinating creatures in the barnyard, brainy and fully alive.

  I headed back to the library and began following the trail of the pig around the world and back into prehistory. I met all kinds of swine: wild boar that lurked around Neolithic villages to scavenge garbage and gradually domesticated themselves; the outcast pigs of ancient Israelites and their neighbors, rejected as unclean; the beloved fat white swine of the Roman Empire, sacrificed to the gods and roasted whole for banquets; the rangy forest hogs of medieval Europe and colonial America, thriving under conditions of utter neglect and helping pioneers tame new land; the low-bellied pigs of the Chinese, kept in tiny sties, growing fat on rice bran and other farm wastes; the urban pigs of England and America, living in backyard sties or roaming city streets, providing the poor with their only source of meat; the hybrid Chinese-European swine of the nineteenth-century Corn Belt, turning corn into meat on a tight ratio and providing protein for an urbanizing nation; and, finally, the pigs of modern agribusiness, raised in windowless metal sheds, dining on a precisely calibrated blend of corn, soy, and antibiotics, producing cheap meat to feed the world.

  The 10,000-year history of the domestic pig is a tale of both love and loathing. A prodigious producer of meat—chubby bulwark against human malnutrition, centerpiece of medieval feasting and southern barbecue, precious mother-source of bacon—the pig has just as often met with contempt. For thousands of years, many people have either refused pork entirely or approached it with extreme caution.

  The problem of the pig seems especially relevant today. At a time when choosing food is more complicated than ever—when buying a pork chop raises thorny questions about the environment, public health, workers’ rights, and animal welfare—it makes sense to take a look back at what has been, for several thousand years, the most controversial of foods. Why do pigs provoke feelings of disgust? Why have so many people rejected pork? The answers to those questions lie deep in the past, tangled up in the biology of people and pigs, in shifting environmental and economic conditions, and in the ways people find meaning in the foods they eat.

  Pigs “were generally recognized as being the cleverest of animals,” George Orwell writes in Animal Farm, where the pigs take charge of the barnyard and declare themselves “more equal than” their fellow beasts. Science justifies that arrogance. Studies show that pigs can figure out how mirrors work and use them to scan the landscape for a meal. A pig that knows where food is cached will delay its gratification until no other pigs are present and then enjoy the meal by itself. It can learn to perform tasks—open a cage, turn a heater on and off, play video games—more quickly than nearly any other animal. Animal scientist Temple Grandin reports that in barns that use electronic collars to dispense individual portions of food, sows who find a stray collar on the ground will carry it to the food dispenser to steal a second helping.

  The ancients recognized pig intelligence. Pliny the Elder claimed that pigs aboard a listing ship would scramble to the higher side to balance the cargo. Sows have been trained to hunt truffles since Babylonian times, though they have a habit of rooting up the prize for their own enjoyment. In early nineteenth-century England, a black sow bearing the unfortunate name Slut—the word also meant “filthy”—worked as a pointer alongside her owner’s hunting dogs. At about the same time, London theaters staged performances by trained pigs who told the time, spelled words, and solved math problems. “Pigs are a race unjustly calumniated,” Samuel Johnson observed. “We do not allow time for his education; we kill him at a year old.”

  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.

  Cleverness 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.