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

  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!”

  With 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.

  The 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.

 
Few religious rules govern the consumption of vegetables; taboos and regulations cluster around meat. Such rules may have functioned as public health measures—meat is more likely to harbor parasites and lethal bacteria—but they also acknowledged the significance of taking life. Killing an animal and eating its flesh traditionally has been considered a sacred act, which is why—in ancient Greece, Israel, and many other cultures—the roles of butcher and priest often blended together: holy men killed animals at the altar according to sacred protocols, offered burnt offerings to their God or gods, and then distributed the remaining meat to the crowd. Ritual sanctified the spilling of blood.

  It also offered distraction from an uncomfortable fact: the substance we call meat is virtually identical to the flesh on our own bones. Pork presents this problem in acute form. People and pigs share roughly similar teeth, skin, and internal anatomy. Renaissance doctors dissected pigs as models for humans. Modern surgeons transplant pig heart valves into people. Scientists are developing genetically modified pigs with “humanized” lungs for transplantation into people. Pigs get ulcers, arthritis, and diabetes, just like we do. They’re also smart. They like to watch TV and drink beer, and, given the chance, they tend to grow fat and sedentary.

  Confronted by this uncanny beast, humans have reacted with a blend of attraction and revulsion, hunger and disgust. “Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you,” Winston Churchill once said. “Give me a pig—he just looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.” We look back at the pig and see quite a bit of ourselves. And then, more often than not, we eat him.

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  Keep It Simple

  In late February 1922, Henry Fairfield Osborn, head of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, received a molar in the mail. A fossil hunter named Harold Cook had unearthed the tooth while digging in the 10-million-year-old Snake Creek fossil beds of western Nebraska. The tooth, Cook told Osborn, “very closely approaches the human type.”

  The scientist agreed. “It is the last right upper molar tooth of some higher primate,” Osborn told Cook. “We may cool down tomorrow, but it looks to me as if the first anthropoid ape of America has been found.”

  Osborn did not cool down. A month after first examining the tooth, he published a scientific article proclaiming that, millions of years ago, a human-like primate had walked the plains of North America. The Illustrated London News ran a fanciful drawing depicting a brawny, slope-shouldered, club-wielding ape-man. A worldwide mania for “Nebraska Man” commenced.

  The timing could not have been better for Osborn, who was just then engaged in a public dispute with William Jennings Bryan, the great populist leader. Bryan had launched a campaign against Darwinism that would culminate a few years later with the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, which tested a law that banned the teaching of evolution. The New York Times explained that the tooth provided “further evidence that Mr. Bryan is wrong and Darwin was right.” Even better, the fossil had been discovered in Bryan’s home state. Osborn did not let the irony pass unnoted, suggesting in his journal article that the new ape-man “should be named Bryopithecus after the most distinguished primate which the State of Nebraska has thus far produced.”

  The joke soured quickly. Further expeditions turned up more teeth that undermined Osborn’s claims. A retraction in the journal Science acknowledged that the tooth had come not from a man or an ape but from an extinct piglike creature.

  The story of Nebraska Man is remembered today mostly by Bryan’s intellectual descendants, the creationists, who claim that Darwinists extrapolate wildly from slight evidence. And they seem to have a point: How could a great scientist confuse a pig tooth with a primate tooth?

  As it turns out, the mistake was an easy one to make. The Nebraska fossil came from a peccary, close cousin to the pig. Pigs and peccaries have incisors for cutting, canines for tearing, and premolars and molars for chewing and grinding. The full set closely matches those of people, and that is what got Osborn into trouble. He erred by drawing his conclusion on the basis of an old tooth. Young molars have distinctive cusps that reveal the species of origin. Once those cusps wear away, the molars of pigs and people are nearly identical.

  When Osborn confused those teeth, he may have rushed to scientific judgment, but he also exposed an important truth: pigs and people have much in common. The two species have similar digestive systems, from teeth to stomach to intestines, because they have similar diets. Both are omnivores who thrive on meat, nuts, roots, and seeds. And because pigs and people eat the same foods, they evolved to form a symbiotic connection—a bond so tight that 10,000 years later, it remains unbroken.

  The 1922 discovery of a fossilized molar prompted speculation that “Nebraska Man” once roamed the Midwest. It turned out that the tooth belonged to an extinct relative of swine. Pigs and people have much in common, especially their digestive systems, which explains why the two have formed such an enduring, albeit fraught, relationship.

  Agiant meteor smashed into Earth about 65 million years ago. The meteor kicked up dust, the dust changed the climate, and the new climate killed off the dinosaurs. Onto the freshly cleared playing field stepped the mammals. These warm-blooded, lactating creatures had first emerged about the same time as dinosaurs, but for millions of years they had remained minor players, mouse-sized beasts scurrying about the forest floor. When the dinosaurs died, mammals rose to the occasion, growing larger and filling just about every available niche.

  About 10 million years after the meteor struck, the first hoofed mammals, or ungulates, appeared. One order of ungulates, called Perissodactyla, includes just a handful of living species, such as horses, rhinoceroses, and tapirs. The other order, Artiodactyla, is much larger and includes pigs, cows, goats, sheep, camels, llamas, giraffes, deer, antelopes, camels, hippopotamuses, bison, and water buffalos. Both orders of ungulates might be called tiptoers. Their hooves are actually outsized toenails, and they walk like ballerinas en pointe. The arrangement of those toes divides artiodactyls from perissodactyls. “Perissodactyl” means “odd-toed”: the foot’s axis cuts through the center of the middle digit, and the animals walk either on three toes, like rhinos and tapirs, or just one, like horses, zebras, and donkeys. “Artiodactyl” means “even-toed:” the first digit (the thumb or big toe) is absent, and the feet are symmetrical, with the axis running between the third and fourth digits (the equivalent of the human middle and ring fingers). As they evolved to move more quickly, their outer digits shrank or disappeared, letting the animals run on just the middle two digits. Thus they appear to have a single hoof split down the center, what the King James Bible describes as the “cloven foot.”

  Subtropical forest dominated the Northern Hemisphere when ungulates first evolved, and they dined on tender leaves, seeds, and fruits. About 20 million years ago, the climate became cooler and drier, forests disappeared, and grasses spread over millions of square miles. Deprived of their old forest habitats, some hoofed animals adapted to the new circumstances. In forests, hiding was the key strategy to avoid predators, but grasslands offered little cover, so the bodies of many ungulates evolved: their eyes shifted farther to the back on their heads and became larger, allowing them to see predators more easily. And they became cursorial, or primed for running: free-swinging knee joints and longer, stiffer leg bones gave these animals enough speed to outrun a big cat.

  These graceful savannah creatures ate grass, which is rather like chewing on sandpaper. Grass cells contain minute glassy particles, and the blades often pick up an additional coating of grit from the dirt below. If humans tried to eat grass, they would wear their teeth down to the gums. To deal with the new diet, many ungulates evolved teeth that grow constantly, rather like mechanical pencils, with new material emerging from the gums as the top wears away.

  Those newfangled teeth solved only part of the problem. Grass is heavy on cellulose, which consists of simple sugars bound together so tight
ly that no enzyme produced by mammals can break them apart. That process requires the assistance of bacteria, which live in the gut and break down cellulose through fermentation, making the sugars and other nutrients available to the animals. Cows and sheep—along with giraffes and deer—bite off and swallow large amounts of grass without chewing it, and it passes into the rumen, or first stomach, where bacteria begin to digest the cellulose. Then, when the animal is resting, it regurgitates the food and “cheweth the cud” (as Leviticus tells us) before swallowing it again and allowing the grass to pass all the way through the alimentary canal.

  These developments in many ungulates—rapid running, sharp eyesight, and the ability to eat grass—led to the extraordinary success of hoofed animals. Artiodactyls demonstrate especially beautiful and astonishing specialization: the gazelle bounding across the savannah, the giraffe grazing the tops of trees, the mountain goat scaling a vertical cliff, the powerful bison roaming the grasslands of America.

  And then there are pigs. The pig and its close cousin, the peccary, are the odd men out, artiodactyls that didn’t become ruminants. While their cousins signed up for the evolutionary fast track, moved to a new territory, and accomplished great things, the pig stayed at home in the forest. And that has been the key to its success.

  Being a generalist has advantages. The very earliest mammals ate insects and had teeth like those of reptiles, simple spears for holding bugs until they could be maneuvered into position to be swallowed whole. The mammal jaw then evolved to become stronger and more dexterous. It could move side to side as well as up and down, allowing animals to chew a variety of foods and thereby get the process of digestion started earlier. Eventually, mammals developed a full complement of incisors, canines, premolars, and molars adapted to shearing, slicing, grinding, puncturing, and crushing. The more kinds of teeth you have, the more kinds of food you can eat.