Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (21 page)

Once upon a time, snout-to-tail eating was a matter of survival: meat was too precious to waste even the tiniest scrap. For small farmers today, using the whole animal has some of the same urgency. Only by allying themselves with chefs and adventurous eaters can they make enough money to stay in business.

That was the point of the curing workshop. Deihl was teaching people how to make a profit from animal parts that often go to waste. If a chef boils up the head for headcheese, cures fatback into lardo, and gathers up every scrap of meat and fat to be ground into bratwurst or andouille, the restaurant makes more money and can afford to pay farmers to raise pigs in ways that are good for the land, the animal, and the soul.

This new pork economy depends upon willing customers.
“You may end up paying twice as much, or even more, for pork,” Fearnley-Whittingstall writes in his
River Cottage Meat Book
. “But given that the end product will be infinitely better eating, I would call that a bargain.” A bargain, though, is in the eye, and the wallet, of the beholder.
The farmers’ markets and upscale grocers that typically sell well-raised pork attract people from all walks of life, but those who shop there tend to be wealthier than the general population. A 2007 survey conducted at Oklahoma State University found that only about 30 percent
of American consumers were willing to pay more for humanely raised meat.
The majority of people, the study concluded, “truly value low meat prices more than animal happiness.”

Snout-to-tail dining, once a necessity for hungry peasants, has reemerged in the realm of high-end dining, as restaurants plate up tongues and tails and turn every stray scrap into sausages—such as these made by Craig Deihl of Charleston, South Carolina. This style of cooking and curing helps farmers cover the higher cost of raising pigs on a small scale. (Courtesy Cypress Restaurant)

Nonetheless 30 percent represents a large market, and it’s growing. If it’s to overtake the portion of the market that still prioritizes price, however, some things will have to change.

Modern consumers have become accustomed to factory-farmed pork, and for good reason.
In historical terms, Americans now spend a tiny portion of their income on food—about 14 percent, compared to 32 percent in 1950 and 43 percent in 1900. We’ve gotten used to low food prices, which have also freed up funds for the consumer spending that drives Western economies. And we’ve even gotten used to the taste: cookbook authors might scoff at the flavor of supermarket pork, but most of us don’t object. The bacon is still salty and fatty and crisps up beautifully. The pork shoulder and ribs, after spending eight hours in a smoker at the local barbecue stand, are still tender and delicious. The loin, chunked and seared and doused in sweet-and-sour sauce at a stir-fry restaurant, provides the satisfying chew and stomach-filling properties that we desire in meat.

For those of us who don’t make our living hosting cooking shows or writing cookbooks, commercial pork tastes good enough. Before upgrading our meat, we will have to develop more discerning palates, or decide to seek prestige in pricier pork, or grow disgusted by factory-farmed meat, or become convinced that the environmental, safety, and animal welfare benefits of humanely raised pork are worth the extra money.

If consumers make these changes, the pork industry will change with them. It’s certainly shown the ability to change before.
According to John McGlone, an agriculture professor at Texas A&M University, a hog farmer surveying the last fifty years might have this to say about American consumers: “They wanted inexpensive meat. We gave it to them. Then they wanted meat with less fat. We gave it to them. Then they wanted it to taste good, not pollute the environment, be safe to eat, and be good for the animal’s welfare.” That statement is presented in the voice of a farmer exasperated with the shifting views of a fickle public. But is it really too much to ask?

Twenty-first-century consumers, who have bent so many other industries to their collective will, should be able to change this one too. On a trip to a grocery store or a restaurant, we should be able to buy meat that tastes good, doesn’t pollute, doesn’t make us sick, and comes from an animal that was treated well—from a pig that lived like a pig. And to support those goals, all we have to do is abandon the idea—the millennia-old idea—that pork should be cheap.

Acknowledgments

T
he tribe of academic historians, of which I am an apostate member, would describe this book as a work of synthesis, which means I didn’t root about in the archives myself but rather let others—historians, archaeologists, geographers, theologians, and literary critics—do the real work and then swooped in to reap the fruits of their labor. That characterization is not unfair. The least I can do is express my immense gratitude to those scholars, whose work I cite in the endnotes; I pray I have not excessively distorted their arguments in the interest of concision.

Matthew Baldwin, Tom Hatley, Patricia Rucidlo, and C. A. Carlson read the manuscript and offered advice, some of which, perhaps unwisely, I have ignored. For tolerating my fumbling attempts at animal husbandry during early-morning pig-chore shifts at Warren Wilson College, I offer my apologies to the pigs and my thanks to farm manager Chase Hubbard, assistant manager Jed Brown, and precocious undergraduate farmhands too numerous to mention. Casey McKissick, farmer, butcher, and former director of a state-sponsored program called NC Choices, guided me through the world of local meat. Jamie Ager, who with his wife, Amy Ager, owns Hickory Nut Gap Farm, talked to me about livestock and showed me through the house where he grew up, a nineteenth-century inn that once hosted hog drovers.
Professor William Flowers shared his deep porcine knowledge and gave me a detailed tour of the swine research facility at North Carolina State University.

I test-drove some of the ideas in this book before audiences at Zingerman’s Camp Bacon in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and at the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) Symposium in Oxford, Mississippi; my thanks to Zingerman’s cofounder Ari Weinzweig and SFA director John T. Edge for feeding me well and introducing me to many talented farmers, chefs, writers, and eaters. Jane Adkisson of Buncombe County Public Library served up the speediest interlibrary loan service known to humankind, a godsend for a researcher sans research library. Howard Yoon, friend and agent, and his partner, Gail Ross, led me through the thickets of writing and selling a book proposal. Alex Littlefield, my editor at Basic Books, inspired me with early enthusiasm and deftly poked and prodded the book into its final form. Elizabeth Dana skillfully performed the thankless tasks attendant upon her role as editorial assistant; I thank her, just as I thank many others at Basic, unknown to me as I write this, who will do their work after mine is done.

Dorothy F. Essig, World’s Greatest Mom, shared some not entirely fond childhood memories of hog butchering in her hometown of Rich Fountain, Missouri, where—as tends to be true wherever people kill pigs—cleaning intestines was women’s work. Though she eats no pork, Melissa Cole Essig loved this project from the get-go and loved me all the way to—and far beyond, I profoundly hope—its completion. Our children, Jack and Lydia, issued forth a steady gush of joy and displayed alarmingly large appetites for the pork shoulders I smoked and the city hams I cured (all from well-raised pigs, of course). With full mouths and greasy chins they repeatedly asked me, “If you like pigs so much, why do you eat them?” and were not much impressed with my answers.

Notes

Prologue

1
Cowardin too cursed the pigs at first
:
James Cowardin, “Letter,”
Asheville Citizen
, December 5, 1878.

3
Apparently not many people
:
Caroline Grigson, “Culture, Ecology, and Pigs from the 5th to the 3rd Millennium
bc
Around the Fertile Crescent,” in
Pigs and Humans
, ed. Umberto Albarella
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 100.

5
Pigs “were generally recognized”
:
George Orwell,
Animal Farm
(Boston: Mariner, 2009), 32, 191.

5
A pig that knows where food is cached
:
Suzanne Held et al., “Social Tactics of Pigs in a Competitive Foraging Task,”
Animal Behaviour
59 (2000): 569–576.

5
Animal scientist Temple Grandin reports
:
Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson,
Animals in Translation
(New York: Scribner, 2005), 99–100.

5
Pliny the Elder claimed that pigs
:
Pliny the Elder,
Natural History
, trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: George Bell & Sons, 1890), 2:343.

5
Sows have been trained to hunt truffles
:
Lyall Watson,
The Whole Hog
(London: Profile Books, 2004), 57, 173.

5
In early nineteenth-century England, a black sow
:
William Youatt and William Martin,
The Hog
(New York: A. O. Moore, 1858), 35–36.

5
“Pigs are a race unjustly calumniated”
:
James Boswell,
The Life of Samuel Johnson
, ed. Alexander Napier (London: George Bell, 1889), 4:284.

6
The trainer, dressed as a butcher
:
Ricky Jay,
Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women
(New York: Villard, 1986), 27.

6
The first pig to play Arnold Ziffel
:
William Hedgepeth,
The Hog Book
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 111.

6
In one convenient package, it provides
:
H. L. Abrams, “The Preference for Animal Protein and Fat: A Cross-Cultural Survey,” in
Food and Evolution
, ed. Marvin Harris and Eric Ross (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 207–223.

7
“Those who could, gorged themselves”
:
Eugen Weber,
A Modern History of Europe
(New York: Norton, 1971), 202.

8
Efforts to control them—including shooting
:
Mark Essig, “High Above the Hog,”
New York Times,
August 31, 2011.

8
In 1699 a French scholar estimated
:
Jean-Jacques Hémardinquer, “The Family Pig of the Ancien Régime,” in
Food and Drink in History
, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 59n1.

8
The two-line poem “Bacon & Eggs”
:
The poem is widely attributed to Howard Nemerov (see, for instance, Kevin Young,
The Hungry Ear
[New York: Bloomsbury, 2012], 151), but his authorship could not be established with certainty. Author’s e-mail correspondence with Alexander Nemerov, October and November 2014.

8
The pig’s certain doom has launched
:
Chris Noonan, dir.,
Babe
(Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 1995); Dick King-Smith,
The Sheep-Pig
(New York: Puffin, 1983); E. B. White,
Charlotte’s Web
(New York: Harper, 1952).

9
Homer asks her, “Are you saying”
:
Mark Kirkland, dir., “Lisa the Vegetarian,”
The Simpsons
, Fox, aired October 15, 1995.

9
“There is no animal that affords a greater variety”
:
Pliny the Elder,
Natural History
, 2:344.

9
“Pigs! Pigs! Pork! Pork! Pork!”
:
Sam Bowers Hilliard,
Hog Meat and Hoecake
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 92–93.

10
Pigs stood at the center of cultural life
:
The Importance of the Pig in Pacific Island Culture: An Annotated Bibliography
(New Caledonia: Secretariat of the Pacific Community, 2007); Roy Rappaport,
Pigs for the Ancestors
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968).

10
The Chinese character for “home”
:
C. A. S. Williams,
Outlines of Chinese Symbolism
(Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1941), 326.

10
In a classic work of American agricultural history
:
Allen G. Bogue,
From Prairie to Corn Belt
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 103.

11
we use food to stigmatize foreigners
:
Stephen Mennell,
All Manners of Food
(New York: B. Blackwell, 1985), 17; Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney,
Rice as Self
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 116–118.

11
In 2012 an Oregon farmer went to feed his sows
:
Jack Moran, “Death of Farmer Eaten by Hogs Investigated,”
Register-Guard
(Eugene, Oregon), October 2, 2012.

11
an age-old expression found in many languages
:
Fernand Braudel,
Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800
(New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 66.

13
“There’s always a certain tension about a bunch of pigs”
:
Hedgepeth,
Hog Book
, 53.

13
Alice, during her adventures in Wonderland
:
Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(Boston: Lothrop, 1898), 52.

13
In
The Odyssey
the enchantress Circe transforms sailors
:
Homer’s Odyssey
, trans. Alexander Pope (Edinburgh: John Ross, 1870), 157.

13
Renaissance physicians claimed that human flesh tasted
:
Gananath Obeyesekere,
Cannibal Talk
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 28.

14
Scientists are developing genetically modified pigs
:
Julie Steenhuysen, “Genome Scientist Craig Venter in Deal to Make Humanized Pig Organs,” Reuters, May 6, 2014.

14
Pigs get ulcers
:
Alison Abbott, “Pig Geneticists Go the Whole Hog,”
Nature
491 (2012): 315–316.

14
“Dogs look up to you”
:
James C. Humes, ed.,
The Wit and Wisdom of
Winston Churchill
(New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 6.

Chapter 1

15
The tooth, Cook told Osborn
:
Stephen Jay Gould, “An Essay on a Pig Roast,” in
Bully for Brontosaurus
(New York: Penguin, 1992), 434.

16
The
New York Times
explained that the tooth provided
:
“Nebraska’s ‘Ape Man of the Western World,’”
New York Times
, September 17, 1922.

16
Osborn did not let the irony pass unnoted
:
Gould, “An Essay,” 436.

17
When the dinosaurs died, mammals rose
:
T. S. Kemp,
The Origin and Evolution of Mammals
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

19
chewith the cud
:
Leviticus 11:3, King James Version (hereafter “KJV”).

20
Since good hearing was an advantage
:
Donald Broom and Andrew Fraser,
Domestic Animal Behaviour and Welfare
(Wallingford, UK: CABI, 2007), 98.

21
Other muscles clamp the nostrils shut
:
Lyall Watson,
The Whole Hog
(London: Profile Books, 2004), 40–41.

21
Despite constant rough use, the snout
:
William Hedgepeth,
The Hog Book
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 133.

21
art-gum eraser tender
:
Tom Hatley and John Kappelman, “Bears, Pigs, and Plio-Pleistocene Hominids,”
Human Ecology
8 (1980): 371–387.

22
One scientist who studies pig cognition complained
:
Natalie Angier, “Pigs Prove to Be Smart, if Not Vain,”
New York Times
, November 9, 2009.

23
We might think of the pig
:
Watson,
Whole Hog
, 32–33; Michael Pollan,
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
(New York: Penguin, 2006), 3–5.

23
By cooking their meats and roots
:
Richard Wrangham,
Catching Fire
(New York: Basic Books, 2009), 109–120.

24
Pigs, with simple guts and calorie-intensive diets
:
Leslie C. Aiello, Peter Wheeler, and David Chivers, “The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis,”
Current Anthropology
36 (1995): 199–221.

25
The Eurasian wild boar
:
Martien a. M. Groenen et al., “Analyses of Pig Genomes Provide Insight into Porcine Demography and Evolution,”
Nature
491 (2012): 393–398.

Chapter 2

28
The fact that they did not
:
Michael Rosenberg et al., “Hallan Cemi Tepesi,”
Anatolica
21 (1995): 3–12; Michael Rosenberg et al., “Hallan Cemi, Pig Husbandry, and Post-Pleistocene Adaptations along the Taurus-Zagros Arc (Turkey),”
Paléorient
24 (1998): 25–41; R. W. Redding, “Ancestral Pigs,” in
Ancestors for the Pigs
, ed. Sarah Nelson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 65–76.

31
The people became farmers
:
Graeme Barker,
The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Peter Bellwood,
The First Farmers
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

32
That’s why one scholar has labeled agriculture
:
Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,”
Discover Magazine
, May 1987, 64–66.

33
Throughout history people have tamed
:
James Serpell,
In the Company of Animals
(New York: Blackwell, 1986), 61.

34
Perhaps most importantly, they live in groups
:
Jared Diamond,
Guns, Germs, and Steel
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 157–175; E. O. Price, “Behavioral Aspects of Animal Domestication,”
Quarterly Review of Biology
59 (1984): 1–32; Nerissa Russell, “The Wild Side of Animal Domestication,”
Society and Animals
10 (2002): 285–302.

34
After that time, very few male goats lived
:
M. A. Zeder, “A Critical Assessment of Markers of Initial Domestication in Goats,” in
Documenting Domestication
, ed. M. A. Zeder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 202–205.

34
It’s also likely that pigs were domesticated
:
U. Albarella et al., “The Domestication of the Pig,” in Zeder,
Documenting Domestication
, 209–227.

36
Dogs were the first domestic animals
:
Robert K. Wayne and Elaine A. Ostrander, “Lessons Learned from the Dog Genome,”
Trends in Genetics
23 (2007): 557–567; Z.-L. Ding et al., “Origins of Domestic Dog in Southern East Asia Is Supported by Analysis of Y-Chromosome DNA,”
Heredity
108 (2011): 507–514.

36
Modern experiments show that wolves hand-raised
:
Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger,
Dogs
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 39–50.

37
A genetic mutation that allowed wolves
:
E. Axelsson et al., “The Genomic Signature of Dog Domestication Reveals Adaptation to a Starch-Rich Diet,”
Nature
495 (2013): 360–364.

37
Some of the waste would have been cooked
:
Richard Wrangham,
Catching Fire
(New York: Basic Books, 2009), 55–81.

37
The wild animals began to separate
:
Carlos Driscoll et al., “From Wild Animals to Domestic Pets,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
106 (2009): 9971–9978.

38
The boars and wolves most adept
:
Coppinger and Coppinger,
Dogs
, 50–67; Albarella et al., “Domestication of the Pig.”

38
And over that span, the pig bones change
:
Anton Ervynck et al., “Born Free? New Evidence for the Status of
Sus scrofa
at Neolithic Cayonu Tepesi,”
Paléorient
27 (2001): 47–73; Hitomi Hongo and Richard H. Meadow, “Pig Exploitation at Neolithic Cayonu Tepesi,” in Nelson,
Ancestors for the Pigs
, 77–98; J. Conolly et al., “Meta-Analysis of Zooarchaeological Data from SW Asia and SE Europe Provides Insight into the Origins and Spread of Animal Husbandry,”
Journal of Archaeological Science
38 (2011): 538–545.

Chapter 3

43
Whatever the technical method, building the pyramids
:
Barry Kemp,
Ancient Egypt
(New York: Routledge, 1989).

44
This proved that Giza was a provisioned site
:
Richard Redding, “Status and Diet at the Workers’ Town, Giza, Egypt,” in
Anthropological Approaches to Zooarchaeology
, ed. D. Campana et al. (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010); Mark Lehner, “Villages and the Old Kingdom,” in
Egyptian Archaeology
, ed. Willeke Wendrich (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 85–101.

44
Villagers at Kom el-Hisn raised cattle
:
Richard Redding, “Egyptian Old Kingdom Patterns of Animal Use and the Value of Faunal Data in Modeling Socioeconomic Systems,”
Paléorient
18 (1992): 99–107; Richard Redding, “The Role of the Pig in the Subsistence System of Ancient Egypt,” in
Ancestors for the Pigs
, ed. Sarah Nelson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 20–30.