Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (9 page)

The owners of killer pigs were held blameless. When a young pig was hanged for killing a five-year-old boy near Chartres in 1499, the pig’s owners were fined—not for failing to control their pig but for failing to protect the child, who had been left in their care. The guilt for the murder itself lay entirely with the animal.

To modern minds, the rationale for such trials seems bewildering.
One European court explained that a pig would be hanged so that “an example may be made and justice maintained,” as if other pigs might heed the lesson.
In another case the court noted that the pig had killed an infant and eaten its flesh “although it was Friday”: the animal, in other words, had violated not only the commandment against murder but also the church’s prohibition against eating meat on that day of the week.

A particularly unusual execution took place in France in 1386, after a sow killed a three-year-old boy. The animal was dressed in a jacket and trousers, with white gloves on its front hooves and a mask resembling a human face over its snout, and hanged not by the neck but by the rear feet. Local laws mandated the upside-down position, if not the costuming: “If an ox or horse commit one or more homicides,” the law noted, the beast should be forfeited to the local lord but not killed.
“But if another animal or a Jew do it,
they should be hung by their rear legs.” Pigs and Jews suffered the same sort of humiliating execution.

Pigs loom large in the appalling history of European anti-Semitism. People are often defined by their foods: Englishman are roast beefs; Sicilians are macaronis; the French are frogs. Jews, in an odd reversal, became most closely identified with the animal they refused to eat.
English illustrations of the crucifixion often depicted Christ’s tormentors as humans with pig snouts, just one expression of the familiar charge that the Jewish people were “Christ killers.” In Germany a common anti-Semitic image was the
Judensau
, or “Jew’s sow,” which portrays Jews suckling at the teats of a giant sow and eating her excrement—a vicious echo of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf.
Martin Luther, in a religious tract, addressed Jews directly: “You are not worthy of looking at the outside of the Bible, much less of reading it. You should read only the bible that is found under the sow’s tail, and eat and drink the letters that drop there.”

Given the pig’s diet, Jewish abstention from pork seems wise: pigs, after all, killed children, scavenged corpses, and ate feces. The great rabbi Maimonides, writing in the twelfth century, linked the biblical pork prohibition to the animal’s habits. Jews rejected the pig because of “its being very dirty and feeding on dirty things,” he explained.
“If swine were used for food, marketplaces and even houses would have been dirtier than latrines.” Christians, who cooked and ate these nasty beasts, might reasonably be considered more piglike than Jews.

Medieval Europeans tried and executed dozens of pigs for the crime of killing children. The sow depicted in this illustration was hanged by her rear legs, a humiliating measure reserved for pigs and Jews. The vicious anti-Semitism of medieval Europe often paired Jews with swine, perversely equating Jews with the animal they refused to eat.

But there was no problem of logic that could not be solved by fancy theorizing. Medical practice at the time derived from the Greek physician Galen’s theory that good health required a balance among the body’s four “humors”: blood, phlegm,
choler, and melancholy. Food could be used to adjust a disordered system, but not in any simple way: for instance, chicken, being delicate, improved the humors of those with weak constitutions but might incinerate completely within the bodies of the strong, leading to “burnt” humors. Digestion, physicians believed, was a complex
process that transformed foreign matter into human flesh, and the foods easiest to digest were those most
similar to the human body. This led to the troubling conclusion that cannibalism was a wise dietary choice.
According to one authority, no other food “is more agreeable to man’s nourishment than human flesh.”

Human flesh being forbidden, pork offered the best substitute. Galen had first suggested the similarity between the two. The idea emerged, perhaps, from the similar diets of people and pigs or from their similar anatomy. At a time when the church forbade human dissection, pigs served as substitutes.
The twelfth-century text
Anatomia porci
advised dissecting pigs because the body of no other animal “appears to be more like ours than is that of the pig.” The similarities, some said, were culinary as well as anatomical.
One medical book reported, “Many have eaten man’s flesh instead of pork, and could perceive neither by the savour nor the taste but that it had been pork.”
A butcher reportedly passed off human flesh as pork until one unlucky diner found a finger in his meat.

Because of its similarity to human flesh, pork was considered the most healthful meat—but only for Christians. According to the theory of humors, when people ate an animal, they could absorb its behavior along with its flesh. One might assume that this would render the eaters of pigs more piglike, but it wasn’t that simple. As Christians saw it, both Jews and pigs were prone to lust and gluttony. Jews would grow even more sinful if they ate an animal afflicted with those same qualities; God, the wise physician, had therefore forbidden them to eat it. Christians saw themselves as in better control of their sinful natures and therefore capable of enjoying the benefits of pork without its drawbacks.
Christians, one authority explained, can transform even dangerous food into virtuous nourishment, “just as honey changes the bitterness of the orange’s peel into sweetness.”

It gets worse: some Christians asserted that Jews, denied the meat of the pig, lusted after its closest equivalent: human flesh.
An English rhyme told the tale of Hugh of Lincoln, an eight-year-old Christian boy supposedly killed by a Jewish woman.

She’d laid him on the dressing table,

And stickit him like a swine.

And first came out the thick, thick blood,

And syne came out the thin.

European Christians learned hatred of Jews in the cradle, through nursery rhymes and legends, and nothing was more frightening than tales of children killed by Jews, their flesh salted and eaten, their blood collected and used to make matzo or to concoct magical potions.
These invented tales had brutally real effects: Jews were tried and executed—often hanged upside down, like child-killing swine—for allegedly committing these crimes. Such “blood libel” accusations, fantastical as they may seem, were taken seriously down through the Nazi era and persist even today.

Perhaps these theories involving pigs and Jews were just elaborate post hoc justifications for popular prejudice. The connection might have been as simple as this: pigs were the most despised animals, and Jews were the most despised people.
A London town ordinance of 1419 referred to “Jews, Lepers, and Swine that are to be removed from the City.” All threatened Christians with filth and contagion.

E
quating pigs with Jews didn’t stop some Christians from embracing pork as a symbol of their faith. This was especially true in Spain. The Visigoth rulers, who adopted Christianity in
589
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, passed laws promoting the raising of pigs. Monasteries kept large herds of swine, and in many towns the central religious festivals involved Saint Anthony and Saint Martin of Tours, both closely associated with pigs. Unlike much of the rest of Europe, Spanish farmers continued to raise pigs on acorns in the forests and thereby preserved the pig’s reputation as a noble creature of the woods rather than a dirty scavenger of the streets.

Muslim forces invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 711 and ruled over it for nearly eight hundred years.
According to the Quran, “Forbidden to you is that which dies of itself, and blood, and the flesh of swine.” All of those substances were also prohibited to Jews, and the Islamic law clearly owed a debt to its fellow Abrahamic religion.
Environmental and political reasons—the unsuitability of swine for arid conditions and the desire to prevent the poor from raising their own food—likely also played a role in the Islamic pork ban. As Islam spread rapidly across the globe, it arrived in regions like Spain, where pigs were central to agriculture and cuisine. During the centuries of Muslim rule, Catholic monasteries protected Spain’s legacy of swine.

After the Reconquista—the retaking of Spain by Christian forces, completed about 1500—pigs emerged from their sanctuary among the monks and assumed a prominent role. The Christian authorities carried out a policy of forced conversion of Muslims and Jews, with an emphasis on questions of diet. Christians assumed that their new coreligionists would rejoice at being freed from the burdens of the dietary laws—after all, Christians had long assumed that Jews secretly craved pork.
One Christian text depicts Jews lamenting the culinary pleasures they had denied themselves and crying out, “How much ham we could have had!”

This coerced conversion made Christians fear—not without reason—that erstwhile Muslims and Jews were secretly
maintaining their former ways.
Many converts tried to combat such suspicions by displaying in their homes a slice of pork, called a
medalla
or medallion, as a fleshy talisman to ward off the Inquisition.
In a work by the great playwright Lope de Vega, a character explains that he hung a side of bacon on his wall “so that the King will know that I am neither a Moor nor a Jew.”

Inquisitors became obsessed with pork consumption.
A convert named Gonzolo Perez Jarada appeared before the Inquisition in Toledo in 1489 to answer charges that he “did not eat bacon.” In a similar case, a woman named Elvira del Campo was tried in Toledo in 1567 on charges of “not eating pork.” The official record states that she was stripped, put on the rack, and interrogated. “I did not eat pork for it made me sick,” she said at first.
Then, after cords were twisted tightly around her wrists—“They hurt me! Oh my arms, my arms!”—she confessed that she abstained from pork because she remained an observant Jew. The Inquisitors confiscated her property and sentenced her to three years in prison.

Following the Reconquista, eating pork—even more than partaking of the Eucharist at a Catholic Mass—became the key marker dividing Christian from Jew. At about the same time, pork consumption emerged as a different type of boundary marker as well, one that delineated not just religious groups but also social classes. The demographic swings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—a human population boom, followed by a fearsome die-off due to famine and disease—brought surprising changes to the way pigs lived and the way people thought about pork.

eight

“The Husbandman’s Best Scavenger”

I
n Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe
, a jester asks a swineherd what he calls the animals under his care. “Swine, fool, swine,” the herdsman replies. The jester then asks what the animal is called after it is butchered. “Pork,” comes the reply. The jester, after playing dumb, then makes an astute point about power, language, and food: The word “swine” is Saxon in origin, while “pork” is French. When living and under the care of “a Saxon slave,” the animal goes by its Saxon name, the jester explains.
When cooked and served at a “feast among the nobles,” the swine magically becomes
pork, because French is the language of the ruling class.

The scene dramatizes a great moment in linguistic history.
Ivanhoe
, published in 1820, is set in the twelfth century, immediately following William the Conqueror’s conquest of England
in 1066. When French nobles took over, their language took on a higher status, while the words of the defeated Saxons became vulgar.
Thus “swineflesh” became pork (from the French
porc
), “cowflesh” became beef (
boeuf
), and “sheepflesh” became mutton (
mouton
). The scene in
Ivanhoe
points to a corresponding distinction in who ate what: “slaves” cared for livestock, but “nobles” ate them.

Such distinctions grew more significant over time. Tribal cultures, such as the very first farming villages of the Near East, had produced little wealth and therefore had simple social hierarchies consisting of food producers and rulers. Their cuisines had remained undifferentiated: kings and farmers ate the same foods. But as economies grew richer, societies were minutely carved into many classes—soldiers and laborers, priests and merchants, peasants and nobles. Diet helped define status. This had been true in ancient Mesopotamia, where the priests dined on lamb and the laborers ate pork, as well as in Rome, where senators banqueted on suckling pig and slaves made do with bread and tripe.

In medieval and Renaissance Europe, pork came to define status, but in complicated ways. At first a ubiquitous food for all, pork later became a luxury enjoyed only by the rich, then, later still, a dangerous food fit only for peasants. Pigs, meanwhile, continued to lose habitat and food sources: forests fell to the axe, commons were enclosed, and more cities banished free-ranging animals. By 1600, the European pig was in serious decline—until it found a new niche within modern commerce and received an infusion of fresh blood from China.

B
etween 1000 and 1400
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, Europe’s population and food supply experienced wild swings. Before 1000, when Europe’s
forests were deep, pigs ran wild and nearly everyone ate pork—the only key distinction being that the rich ate more of it than the poor. Such widespread meat eating was possible only when the human population remained small and rangeland for livestock was plentiful. When the Medieval Warm Period started about 950
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, higher temperatures lengthened the growing season.
This prompted farmers to clear forests and plant more crops, and
the human population grew in tandem with the supply of grain: between 1000 and 1350, the number of people in Europe exploded from about 25 million to about 60 million. More food meant more people, and more people meant more demand for food. As the great economist Thomas Malthus would later explain, this was bound to end badly.

The population boom changed the types of food people ate because eating plants is more efficient than eating animals: on a given plot of land, growing grain can produce twenty times as many calories as raising livestock. As the number of humans rose in Europe, the number of farm animals plummeted.
Nobles continued to eat large amounts of flesh—as much as three pounds of meat and fish per day—but the peasant diet consisted almost entirely of cereals, which lacked protein and essential nutrients. As this trend continued, the ecological and health effects became more severe. By 1250, intensive cropping had drained the soil of nutrients, and there were fewer farm animals producing manure for fertilizer. Already malnourished, European peasants began to starve. Soon environmental change would make the situation even worse.

Around the turn of the fourteenth century, the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age, and the colder weather hurt harvests. By 1300, Europe had seen the first of a series of crop failures and famines that would devastate the region over the next half century. When the Black Death—most
likely bubonic plague carried by fleas on rats—arrived in southern Italy in 1347, it found a continent weakened by famine and unable to fight off disease. Over the next four years, about a third of the people in Europe died.

The Black Death produced one positive side effect: peasant diets improved. Demand for food fell, which caused prices to decline.
In France and Germany the price of grain plunged by as much as 70 percent. With workers scarce, wages rose and peasants could afford to buy meat.
In 1397 the average resident of Berlin ate more than three pounds of meat a day, far more than today.
On one manor in Norfolk, England, harvest workers in the pre-plague era had received just one ounce of meat with every two pounds of bread; after the plague, a full pound of meat accompanied those two pounds of bread. Europeans may have suffered the horror of watching a third of their neighbors die, but they at least could console themselves with a good meal.

T
he Black Death democratized meat, and democracy is always troubling to the elite. When the meals served in castles began to resemble those cooked in cottages, Europe’s nobility made a dietary pivot, and pigs were one of the animals most affected. During the prior few hundred years, when peasants had supped on gruel, eating pork offered nobles sufficient proof of their elite status. Now, as pork became affordable even to the lower orders, the wealthy began to spurn it.

Europe’s elites turned from hoofed livestock to winged beasts. When archaeologists dig up castle sites around England, they find that pig bones begin to dwindle not long after the Black Death and are replaced by those of fowl, especially wild birds, which had become the new marker of wealth.
In 1501 the Duke of Buckingham hosted a meal that omitted pork, beef,
and mutton entirely; instead he served five pheasants, twelve partridges, twenty-four chicks, six capons, twelve rabbits, and thirty-six small birds. Particularly suspect to Europe’s wealthy were the cheapest and most widely available forms of pork: sausage and bacon. Even the finest sausages and other cured meats were fit only for merchants and the more affluent peasants.
Woodcut illustrations of peasant weddings from this era almost invariably showed tables laden with sausages and a dog running off with a purloined strand.

Physicians gave these new prejudices the sheen of medical authority. A couple of thousand years of medical thought had promoted pork as the most healthful meat, but physicians in the sixteenth century revised that tradition. They now argued that pork, rather than being the easiest flesh to digest, was the most difficult: only peasants toiling in the fields produced sufficient heat in the body to break down pork.
One Renaissance doctor advised that the sedentary elite should restrict themselves to lighter fare, while sausages and bacon were fit only for the “rustical stomach.”

For reasons of status, health, or both, the elite avoided pork. “Pork is the habitual food of poor people,” a visitor to Paris observed in 1557.
A century later a Frenchman noted, “With the exception of hams and a few other more delicate portions, today only the lower classes are nourished on pork.”
In Scotland, another writer reported, “pork is generally despised, and left to be consumed by the mean populace.”

The “mean populace,” however, delighted in pork, especially on festival days when they gorged on roast pig and sausages. The sausage played the same role in the Renaissance as the hot dog in twentieth-century America—providing a cheap, filling meal for urban crowds. The elite, then as now, suspected that the common people congregated only to feast, gamble, and
whore. Though the wealthy were prone to these vices as well, they could indulge privately.
The poor, among their many misfortunes, were forced to sin in public, and their sinning and pork eating became intertwined.

The English sometimes referred to a brothel as a “hog house,” and indeed the connection between pork and sex stretches back to the ancient world. The boys who sold sausages at Greek and Roman markets often doubled as prostitutes. And then there is the inescapable fact that chopped meat stuffed into an intestinal casing produces a rather suggestive shape.
The most common Greek word for sausage,
allas
, makes its first written appearance referring not to food but to sex: a line from the Greek poet Hipponax describes an aroused man “drawing from the tip down, as if stroking a sausage.”

The sexual associations of pork carried on into the Renaissance. Bartholomew Fair, a riotous event that took place in London each August, gave its name to the Bartholomew pig, roasted whole and served to fairgoers eager to indulge all of their sensual cravings.
Shakespeare’s Falstaff, a man of large and indelicate appetites, is described as a “whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig.” In Ben Jonson’s comedy
Bartholomew Fair
, the most dissolute characters gather at a pork-selling stand operated by Ursula, an obese, filthy, delightfully foul-mouthed “pig-woman.”
Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, a Puritan intent on remaining holy despite the fair’s corrupt enticements, decides to sample a bit of pork and ends up devouring two entire pigs—proof, as another character suggests, that “the wicked Tempter” does his work through “the carnal provocations” of the pig.

Jonson was satirizing Puritan hypocrisy, but the fear he targeted was real enough. Pork, in the minds of many Renaissance Europeans, was for people who had fallen prey to fleshly
appetites. Those who wished to maintain control—Puritans, nobles, priests, a rising bourgeoisie—had best choose other foods.

A
voiding pork was getting easier. After the Black Death, abandoned fields didn’t return to forest but instead became pasture for sheep and cattle. With grazing more abundant, England’s romance with roast beef came into full flower. The wool industry boomed, producing abundant cheap mutton as a by-product. The enclosure movement, which brought land previously held in common under private control, eliminated the woods and wastes where peasants had formerly kept pigs.
By 1696, England had about 12 million sheep and 4.5 million cows, but only 2 million pigs.

Most farmers kept just one or two pigs to convert waste.
Gervase Markham, in a 1614 book titled
Cheape and Good Husbandry
, judged pigs “the husbandman’s best scavenger, and the huswive’s most wholsome sink,” because they eat everything that would otherwise “rot in the yard [and] make it beastly.”
In
The Wealth of Nations
, Adam Smith praised the pig because it “greedily devours many things rejected by every other useful animal” and as a result can be “reared at little or no expense.” This trait made the pig attractive, but only in small numbers, limited by the amount of available waste.

By the seventeenth century, however, a growing economy had created a new niche for pigs. Activities such as dairying and bread making, once undertaken in every household, became large commercial enterprises. The concentration of by-products rose, and so did the concentration of pigs: they began to devour all sorts of commercial wastes.
One writer noted that pigs could be fed “chandlers’ grains,” the crispy bits of flesh and gristle left over after rendering beef fat into tallow.
In 1621 a London maker of starch—refined wheat used to stiffen clothes—fattened two hundred pigs on his leftover bran.
Alcohol production provided an even larger source of feed: thousands of pigs lived in lots adjacent to distilleries and breweries to consume the spent grains. At dairies, milk cows shared space with pigs.
Daniel Defoe reported that Wiltshire and Gloucestershire produced “the best bacon in England” from hogs fattened on “the vast quantity of whey, and skim’d milk . . . which must otherwise be thrown away.”
Dairymaids churned butter, and the whey flowed through a channel directly to the pig trough. One writer defined a dairy as “a center about which a crowd of pigs was collected.”

By 1700 pigs were far less numerous in England than cattle and sheep, ruminants that provided milk, wool, and more highly prized meat. Most farmers kept only a few pigs to eat agricultural waste, as in this illustration from a 1732 farming guide. Soon, however, pigs would be raised on a larger scale to eat the by-products from commercial dairies, breweries, and distilleries.

These large herds of swine found eager buyers. In the great age of exploration, sailors needed foods that wouldn’t spoil during long voyages. This prompted a vast expansion of the salt-food industry, as pork, beef, and fish were packed into barrels and rolled aboard ships. Pork, because it preserved so well, commanded much of this market.
The British navy required as many as 40,000 pigs annually, and a member of the Victualling Commission explained that he bought mostly “town-fed hogs” fattened in the yards of liquor distillers.

By the later eighteenth century, the navy had found another source of pigs. As part of the so-called agricultural revolution, farmers had started to employ new crop rotations that involved planting peas and beans to fix nitrogen and revive exhausted soil.
Those legumes became hog feed, and farmers sold the pork to the navy.

T
hanks to these abundant new food sources—legumes, dairy waste, distillery grains—farmers could raise pigs on a larger scale, a circumstance that favored changes in the pig’s
constitution. Swine no longer roamed the streets or the woods to find their own food. Now they lived in pens and had their food delivered to them. Farmers suddenly had a strong interest in determining which types of pigs turned feed into meat most efficiently.

Like Rome a couple of thousand years earlier, London had created conditions that favored a fat sty pig. The first step in this direction was the Old English hog, a breed of obscure origin that existed in slightly different varieties all over the country. Unlike the prick-eared medieval pig, the Old English pig had lop ears drooping over its eyes. Rather than black or brown, it tended to be white, mottled, or saddled.
In many cases, these pigs reached slaughter weight at about eighteen months—older than the six months of modern pigs but younger than the two or three years common for woods hogs.

The Old English marked a small improvement over the medieval forest pig, but a bigger change was on the horizon.
An English agricultural writer picked up on this in 1727 when he noted the recent appearance of some odd pigs, “the little black sort with great bellies.” The animal he describes sounds nothing like any European variety—but very much like a pig from China.

Chinese swine began infiltrating Europe about the same time that the industrial and agricultural revolutions picked up steam.
Analysis of mitochondrial DNA shows that European and Chinese pigs first started swapping genes sometime in the eighteenth century. And Chinese hogs were, at this point, far better suited than their European counterparts to the conditions of English agriculture.

Unlike their forest-dwelling European counterparts, Chinese swine had evolved into fat creatures of the sty, used to produce both meat to eat and manure for fertilizer. Imported to Europe after 1700, Asian pigs—such as this one depicted in an 1858 American farming manual—were interbred with European varieties to create the modern pig breeds we know today.

China, over the centuries, had developed a devotion to pigs just as intense as that of ancient Rome or early medieval Europe.
In Neolithic China swine had served as a key source of wealth, and in the second millennium
bc,
they were commonly used in
sacrificial offerings. In the centuries to come, pork remained the daily meat of wealthy Chinese and the key animal protein in a sophisticated cuisine. For China’s poor, as for Europe’s, it was the food of festivals and of survival. Peasants marked the New Year with the slaughter of the family pig, consuming the organs immediately and selling the meat or salting it away for the coming year.
Even in the twentieth century, pork accounted for 70 to 80 percent of the calories from animal products consumed by the Chinese.

Overall, however, pork represented just a tiny part of the Chinese diet: in the twentieth century it accounted for just 2 percent of the total number of calories consumed by the Chinese, compared to 83 percent from grains and 7 percent from
legumes. And this is not a modern development. The ancient works on Chinese agriculture virtually ignore animal husbandry, concentrating instead on rice, millet, wheat, and soy production.

How, then, did the pig come to play such an outsized role within China’s overwhelmingly vegetarian society?
In the words of Chairman Mao, the pig was a “one-man fertilizer factory.” Though a large country, China’s terrain is largely rugged, with limited areas suitable for planting.
It faced the problem of a growing population and dwindling food sources far earlier than Europe—as early as the third century
bc
—and responded with advanced agricultural methods. Pressure on the land was especially strong in the subtropical rice-growing regions of central and southern China, where every scrap of arable land was brought into production and farmers produced two or even three crops a year.
This left no open land for pasturing sheep or cattle, and the intensive growing threatened to strip all nutrients from the soil. But the pig saved the day, ensuring that China’s soil didn’t become depleted the way that Europe’s did.

Chinese swine were penned and fed on agricultural waste—especially the hulls of rice—mixed with wild-growing plants such as water hyacinth. The pig functioned as a composting machine, transforming coarse vegetation into precious fertilizer. More intensive agriculture increased the need for fertilizer, but it also boosted the amount of agricultural by-products to feed pigs and therefore the quantity of manure. Pigpens were constructed with watertight floors to collect not only feces but also urine, an especially rich source of nitrogen.
When modernizers introduced American pig breeds into China in the 1930s, the farmers complained that though the animals grew quickly, they produced too little manure.

From a very early date, pigs in China were confined to small sties, and this created distinct evolutionary pressures.
They became short-legged, swaybacked, and potbellied, with squashed snouts and concave faces. They were adapted to eat, gain weight, and breed.
Some Chinese sows produced litters of twenty piglets.

Merchant ships began plying the ocean routes between Europe and Asia in the sixteenth century, and by 1700 or so, they had carried Chinese pigs to England. The timing was propitious. In the European forests of 900
ad
, the Chinese pig would have been easy prey for wolves and bears, and it would have lost badly to the forest pig in the race to gobble up falling acorns. But it was adapted well to the conditions of eighteenth-century industrial England: living in pens and eating beans, distillery grains, and dairy waste. The subtropical Chinese pigs were a bit delicate for colder British conditions, so breeders crossed them with European types, hoping to produce a hardy pig that would gain weight quickly and produce piglets by the dozen. Eventually, that is exactly what happened: the forest pig was pushed to the margins in Europe, ousted by its fatter rival.

But the forest pig’s moment in history hadn’t quite passed—it had new lands to conquer. The wild boar and domestic pig had spread throughout Eurasia, from Norway to Thailand, but oceans had prevented them from colonizing the Western Hemisphere. That changed after 1492, when ships started sailing west across the Atlantic. The New World, as it turned out, was a perfect place for pigs. Swine thrived in the Americas and played a crucial role in assisting Europeans as they conquered new lands.