Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (16 page)

The same fondness for swine could be found among wealthy landowners who raised enormously fat pigs for competition at agricultural fairs. No one enjoyed a pig’s company more than Lord Emsworth, hero of a series of comic novels by P. G. Wodehouse and owner of a prize-winning Berkshire sow named the Empress of Blandings.
“Watching her now as she tucked into a sort of hash of bran, acorns, potatoes, linseed, and swill,” Wodehouse writes, “the ninth Earl of Emsworth felt his heart leap up in much the same way as that of the poet Wordsworth used to do when he beheld a rainbow in the sky.”

E. B. White, who lived on a small farm in Maine, captured this affection in a more heartfelt way in an essay titled “The
Death of a Pig.” Buying a spring pig, feeding it through the summer and fall, and slaughtering it in early winter “is a tragedy enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script,” White writes. “The murder, being premeditated, is in the first degree but is quick and skillful, and the smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned.” One year, however, White’s pig fell sick. He sought veterinary advice and administered castor oil and later an enema—“Once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life’s more stereotyped roles”—all to no avail. The pig died, White grieved, and his neighbors shared his sorrow. “The premature expiration of a pig is, I soon discovered, a departure which the community marks solemnly on its calendar, a sorrow in which it feels fully involved,” he wrote. “The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig. He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.”

White, a man of means, had no need to worry about the loss of ham. For poorer men, the death of a pig was a financial as well as an emotional blow.
According to an English observer, “A man had virtually one chance only of ever adding to his cash income, and that was by raising more than one pig.”
A study of Oxfordshire suggested that raising pigs constituted 12 to 15 percent of a laborer’s income.
“Pig clubs,” a sort of mutual insurance program, collected dues from members and paid out if a pig died of illness.
In
Middlemarch
, George Eliot defines a happy village as one where “nobody’s pig had died.”

Those pigs that survived illness were slaughtered right where they had been raised, a process that unnerved people more often as pigs became ever rarer in domestic life. In England most cottagers hired skilled pig killers, who would bring along
knives and a scalding tub. The pig was lashed to a bench or held tight with a noose around its snout. Although sometimes stunned with a hammer, more often it was simply stuck in the neck and allowed to bleed out, with the blood caught in a pan and cooked into black pudding.

Memoirs of rural life in England and America often describe such events.
“The killing of the pig was the great event in the domestic life of the year,” one man remembered. Neighbors helped neighbors and shared in the bounty and fun. In
Little House in the Big Woods
,
Pa removes the bladder from a freshly slaughtered pig, blows it up like a balloon, and hands it to his daughters, who joyfully bat it back and forth before returning to the labor of rendering lard and making sausage.
*

Pig killing was a communal ritual, a break in the rhythms of daily life, a sign of the passing seasons. It was a solemn occasion—the pig was a friend and did not want to die—and a time of celebration. This drama was peculiar to pigs because cattle and sheep were rarely kept around the house. Only pigs were coddled and then killed, their horrifying, humanlike shrieks piercing the neighborhood.
One girl recalled that, during the slaughter, she would “creep back into bed and cry,” remembering how she had fed cabbage stalks to her beloved swine. The next day, however, she happily dipped her bread into pork gravy made from that same pig’s flesh. She was just a girl, she said, “learning to live in this world of compromises.”

Thomas Hardy devotes an entire chapter of
Jude the Obscure
to the killing of a pig. Jude and his ill-matched wife, Arabella, have hired a pig killer who fails to appear, so they undertake the task themselves, lashing the pig to a stool with its legs in the air.

“Upon my soul I would sooner have gone without the pig than have had this to do!” said Jude. “A creature I have fed with my own hands.”

“Don’t be such a tender-hearted fool! There’s the sticking-knife—the one with the point. Now whatever you do, don’t stick un too deep.”

“I’ll stick un effectually, so as to make short work of it. . . .”

“You must not!” she cried. “The meat must be well bled, and to do that he must die slow. We shall lose a shilling a score if the meat is red and bloody! Just touch the vein, that’s all. I was brought up to it, and I know. Every good butcher keeps un bleeding long. He ought to be eight or ten minutes dying, at least.”

“He shall not be half a minute if I can help it, however the meat may look,” said Jude, determinedly. Scraping the bristles from the pig’s upturned throat, as he had seen the butchers do, he slit the fat; then plunged in the knife with all his might.

“’Od damn it all!” she cried, “that ever I should say it! You’ve over-stuck un! And I telling you all the time—”

“Do be quiet, Arabella, and have a little pity on the creature!”

 . . .

The dying animal’s cry assumed its third and final tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends.

“It’s a hateful business,” Jude says, but Arabella replies, “Pigs must be killed. . . . Poor folks must live.”

In 1895, when
Jude the Obscure
was published, few would have disputed Arabella’s view. For all but a tiny fringe of the population, the slaughter of livestock counted not as cruelty but as necessity. Jude’s horror was a distinctly modern reaction, one that soon would grow more common. As people moved to cities and bought their meat at stores, home slaughter became rare and upsetting. Rather than forming part of the rhythm of home life, the act of killing animals now took place far away, in slaughterhouses. That distance, though, carried a cost. The walls of slaughterhouses hid not only the act of killing but also a multitude of other sins.

*
Inflated swine bladders were used as balls in many sports, which explains how the American football earned the slightly inaccurate name “pigskin.”

FIFTEEN

“A Growing Prejudice Against Pork”

“T
he ear was assailed by a most terrifying shriek: the visitors started in alarm, the women turned pale and shrank back.” So begins a famous passage in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel
The Jungle
. The visitors have chosen to take a tour of a slaughterhouse. They watch as a worker hooks chains to the legs of pigs and an overhead rail lifts them into the air: “Another was swung up, and then another, and another, until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy.” The narrator is impressed by the efficiency, but also appalled. “It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics,” he explains, then continues: “And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests—and so perfectly within their
rights! . . . One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe.”

Most Americans, in fact, could hear such squeals without becoming philosophical.
A newspaper described Sinclair’s concern for pig suffering as “nauseous hogwash,” and the author himself later disavowed any such empathy, claiming he had intended the passage as “hilarious farce.”

Sinclair often struggled to convey his intended messages. A failed author of romantic novels and a recent convert to socialism, he had traveled to Chicago to examine working conditions at slaughterhouses. He hoped that his novel, serialized in a socialist journal in 1905 and published as a book a year later, would expose the plight of exploited workers and prompt a revolution. He failed in that goal.
“I aimed at the public’s heart,” he explained, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

The American people, Sinclair was not the first or last to learn, had a large capacity for ignoring the sufferings of the less fortunate. The food on their plate, however, was a different matter, especially after
The Jungle
offered this description of sausage making:

There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of
rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.

From the hoppers emerged sausage that was “sent out to the public’s breakfast.”

Though
The Jungle
spelled trouble for the meat industry in general, it was especially bad news for pork. Long regarded as the food of poor people and country folk, it was now increasingly rejected by a nation growing wealthier and more urban. A newer concern was trichinosis, the recently identified parasite, transmitted through undercooked pork, that encysted its larvae in human muscles. That seemed like a big risk for the sake of a pork chop.

The meat industry fought hard to counteract such prejudices: it cleaned up its plants, the government helped craft new rules to combat trichinosis, created new ways to cure and market ham and bacon, and even enlisted the wives of farmers to promote pork in newspaper columns and at grocery stores. Such efforts had mixed results at best.

E
ven before
The Jungle
, the public had grown suspicious of the Chicago meatpackers, who had consolidated into a cartel that fixed prices, set production levels, and divided territory, controlling most of the industry from slaughter to retail. After a rise in retail meat prices—partly beyond the meatpackers’ control—infuriated the public, the federal government in 1902
successfully sued the meat trust under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
The victory proved only nominal: the big companies absorbed the costs, skirted the restrictions, and continued to operate as before.
The Jungle
altered the debate. Previously, consumers had worried about being ripped off. Now they feared being poisoned.

After the scandals triggered by
The Jungle
, meatpackers tried to convince the public that their products were sanitary and wholesome—as in this 1912 advertisement showing a fresh-faced blonde girl in white clothes, with ham and bacon carefully wrapped in white paper and proudly displaying the government inspection seal.

Newspapers and magazines jumped on the muckraking bandwagon and found more evidence of tainted food.
Meatpackers had been using borax—a mineral most often found in
detergents—to preserve meats, which explained how one firm could advertise an additive that would maintain the freshness of “pork and liver sausage, when exposed on your counter, and in the hottest weather, for at least one week.” Newspaper reports of such practices fueled public outrage. President Theodore Roosevelt, ill-disposed to trusts in general and the meat industry in particular, commissioned an investigation that confirmed most of
The Jungle
’s allegations. Within four months of the book’s publication, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.
The federal government took over inspection of all packing plants, promising that sanitation standards would be enforced and that no “unsound, unwholesome” meat would reach the American public.

As it turned out, less meat of any sort found its way onto Americans’ plates.
In the decade after
The Jungle
’s publication, per capita meat consumption plunged from 170 to 140 pounds a year, and it would remain relatively low for decades. Two world wars and the Great Depression played a role in that decline, as did the growing number of urbanites who rejected breakfast meats in favor of cereals like Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.
Meatpackers, though, blamed
The Jungle
and what one industry official called “systematic anti-meat propaganda.”

Beef eventually rebounded from this dip in popularity, but pork continued to struggle. Its associations were largely negative and had deep cultural roots.
According to Edward Hitchcock, a chemist and president of Amherst College, bacon “is so extremely undigestible and heavy” that it should be eaten only by the “laboring classes” and shunned by “the sedentary and the literary.”
“Fat bacon and pork are peculiarly appropriate for negroes,” a physician explained in 1860. The medical theories of the sixteenth century—that only manual laborers could properly digest pork—were alive and well in the nineteenth.
This was thanks in no small part to Sylvester Graham,
popular health reformer and father of the eponymous cracker, who embraced Renaissance medical writers in his campaign to persuade Americans to eat less meat.

Simple dislike buttressed these medical theories.
America had inherited from England a hierarchy of meats that placed beef and veal at the top, lamb and mutton next, and pork at the bottom.
One cookbook writer dismissed barreled pork as “sea junk”—a reference to its use as a maritime provision—and rejected its taste as “villainous,” while
another described pork as “dangerously unwholesome.”
An 1893 guide to household management claimed, “A growing prejudice against pork in all its varieties . . . pervades our best classes.”

Statistics bear out these observations. A 1909 study of 8,000 families in US cities found that wealth shaped the type of meat people ate. The highest income group ate three times as much poultry and 50 percent more beef, compared to the lowest income group. The poor ate the most pork. African Americans ate more pork than whites, and as their income rose, they spent the extra money not on more pork but on beef and chicken.
For southern whites, the same was true: as they began to earn more money, their pork consumption stayed flat as their consumption of chicken and beef climbed.

Pork packers, well aware of these trends, responded with new marketing tactics. Rather than selling anonymous barrels of pickled pork, they followed the cultural trend toward national brands marketed directly to consumers. This was one area where pork had an advantage. Beef, because it cured poorly and had to be sold fresh in the butcher case, could not easily embrace this model. Pork products—salted, smoked, and wrapped in branded packaging—could. Customers at butcher shops requested porterhouse steaks or hamburger—company of origin
unknown—but they learned to ask by name for Armour’s Star Bacon and Swift’s Premium Ham.

In their efforts to improve the reputation of pork, meat packers emphasized ham and bacon. The focus on ham was not surprising because it had always been the most prestigious cut.
American hams—especially Virginia’s Smithfield variety, from peanut-fed hogs—earned so much praise that Queen Victoria had a standing order for six Smithfield hams a week. Those were dry-cured or country hams, and packers had once produced them in quantity even though the cure took months. In the twentieth century, however, they switched most production to the city ham, wet cured in a brine solution much like barreled pork. To speed the process—lengthy cures tied up a lot of capital—packers started injecting brine into the ham with needles.
Later they invented “vein-pumping,” which involved blasting brine from a high-pressure hose into a large vein in the ham and allowing the animal’s circulatory system to spread it through the meat. Such methods cut a three-month cure down to a week, then later to just a few hours. Efficiency triumphed, but flavor suffered. Dry-cured hams achieve greatness over a period of months as enzymes break down proteins into dozens of intense flavor compounds. Wet-cured hams tend to be soggy and insipid.

Bacon received an even more thorough reinvention. In 1850 the term “bacon” applied to any dry-cured cut of pork; fifty years later, as packers standardized their terminology, “bacon” referred only to belly meat—and nearly all of it was wet cured. The earlier practice of salt-packing pork bellies for more than a month, then smoking them, required too much time for packers operating on an industrial scale. A sweet pickle delivered better results: bellies were dumped into 1,000-gallon vats holding a sugary brine, then drained and moved to the
smokehouse.
The method could not deliver the intense flavor of dry-cured bacon, but it did reduce labor costs, produce a more consistent product, and give Americans the sweetness they craved even in meat.

Before World War I, this new type of bacon was cut into slabs of at least four pounds, wrapped in waxed paper, and branded with the company label. Customers sliced it at home. But in 1915 some producers began to sell wet-cured bacon presliced in one-pound packages. By the 1950s, packers had automated their lines so that bellies were pressed to uniform thickness, needle-injected with brine, automatically sliced, shuffled into the familiar shingle-like display, and packed in clear plastic that let customers view the streaks of lean and fat. The automated processes invented to produce modern bacon required heavy capital investment, but they paid off.
By 1960 bacon had shed its reputation as a country meat and been reborn as a beloved breakfast staple for all classes.

F
resh pork experienced no similar resurgence. It didn’t help that consumers were instructed to cook it until well-done—which generally meant bone-dry—in order to kill disease-causing worms. The lifecycle of
Trichinella spiralis
starts when a host—a person or pig, for instance—eats meat that contains the worm’s encysted larvae. The host’s gut digests the cyst walls, releasing the larvae, which grow into sexually mature adults, mate, and produce more larvae, which enter the bloodstream and then the muscles, where they encyst themselves and wait for another creature to eat them. Cooking meat to 137 degrees Fahrenheit kills the larvae, but not every cook followed that rule,
leading to headlines such as “Missouri Town Reports 47 Cases of Trichinosis.”

Pigs generally got the worms the same way humans did: by eating undercooked pork. Up through the 1950s and 1960s, feeding garbage to pigs on a commercial scale was common. (
When in-sink garbage grinders such as the DisposAll became popular in the 1960s, they earned the nickname “mechanical pigs” because they got rid of food waste, a job recently held by genuine pigs.) Garbage-feeding swine clustered around the highest concentrations of garbage, in cities on the East and West Coasts.
The American City
, a policy journal, surveyed garbage-collection methods in 1920 and found that nearly a third of cities with populations over 100,000 used swine feeding as their primary garbage-disposal method; an even higher percentage of smaller cities did so. The article pointed to the economic benefits: “A ration of 1 pound of marketable pork to 50 pounds of garbage has been established, and with pork at 20 cents a pound on the hoof . . . garbage as feed is worth $8 a ton.” The article cited, as an example, Worcester, Massachusetts, which had a population of 185,000 and kept a herd of 2,000 pigs to process its waste.
In a period of just over two years, the city made a profit of $59,000 selling garbage-fed pork.