Book review: Lesser Beasts - A Snout-to-Tail history of the Humble Pig
The pig should be man's best friend, author Mark Essig argues. After all, he notes, the pig won the West for American settlers, and helped China feed its massive population. But our relationship with this beast is a troubled one.
As a meat-eater, what is my desert island animal? Easy: the pig. Sausage, bacon, pork chops, chorizo, ham, barbecue, suckling pig and black pudding all come from what Homer Simpson calls "a wonderful, magical animal".
The pig should be man's best friend, but our relationship with this beast is a troubled one: to call someone a swineherd is an insult.
The pig domesticated itself. In the distant past, wild pigs came into early human settlements and stayed. But the pig never evolved far from its wild cousin. As Mark Essig writes: "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."
Pre-Christian European societies loved the pig. A surviving Roman cookbook has more pork recipes than for any other meat. But further east, the pig was shunned. They were associated with filth and, worse, the lower classes. Nomadic pastoralists kept sheep and goats. A snobbish disdain for pork arose, which was codified in two of the three great monotheistic religions. This distaste has a long history; in the 5th century BC Herodotus writes of how an Egyptian noble had to cleanse himself in the Nile after accidentally brushing against a pig.
Yet the pig, Essig argues, has been integral to Europe's success. The conquistadors introduced them to South America, spreading disease among the Indians but providing food for the Spanish. More than the cow, it was the pig that won the West for American settlers.