Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (15 page)

Some pork—mainly bellies, whole sides, and shoulders—was not wet-packed in brine but rather dry-salted and smoked. This was called bacon. Though bacon in the United States today is brined pork belly, 150 years ago the word referred to dry-salted smoked pork, regardless of what part of the pig it came from.
A visitor to the Illinois prairie in 1837, for instance, noted that the pioneers “make bacon of hams, shoulders, and middlings.” In Cincinnati and Chicago, salt-rubbed pork was allowed to cure for a few weeks or months, cold-smoked over hickory, beech, and maple, then packed into gigantic boxes known as hogsheads, each containing eight or nine hundred pounds of meat. This bacon had a wide distribution all over the country and in Europe.

There was pork to suit every budget. Hams—dry-cured in salt and sugar or wet-cured in a brine of molasses, saltpeter, and salt—commanded the highest end of the pork market. At the
lower end were feet and tongues, sold soaking in a spicy pickle. Pig heads were cooked down into headcheese, a jellied loaf with bits of meat.
Organs, as well as meat from ribs and necks, were chopped, mixed with fat and spices, and injected into cleaned intestines to make sausage, which “enters largely into the subsistence of the laboring classes of society,” one nineteenth-century observer wrote.

Fat was nearly as valuable as meat. Lard served as the primary cooking fat in the United States until the middle of the twentieth century and was exported in bulk to Latin America and Europe. The highest quality, leaf lard, came from around the organs and was used for baking. Lesser varieties were turned into industrial oils and grease. Some lard was separated into two parts, lard oil and stearin. The oil was used in lamps—it competed with whale oil in the pre-kerosene era—while stearin was turned into candles and soaps. Pork fat and its derivatives also became oleomargarine, carbon paper, roofing pitch, and explosives.

The list of by-products was nearly endless. Bristles became brushes, while finer hairs stuffed mattresses. “Tankage”—the solid bits strained out from rendered fats—was ground into feed for pigs and chickens. The contents of intestines became fertilizer. Bones were stamped into buttons, cooked to make gelatin, or smoldered into charcoal for use in refining sugar. Hooves were boiled down for glue. Prussian blue—a dye used by printers—was derived from blood, as was albumen for the photographic industry. Extracts from glands and organs—pepsin and other enzymes, various hormones, and more—served as raw materials for the pharmaceutical industry.

Pig by-products gave packers an incentive to grow large. Small-scale slaughtering didn’t produce a marketable amount of blood, hair, or bones, but killing thousands of animals a day
changed the equation. A large packinghouse might pay $10 for a live hog and sell its meat for $9.75, but it didn’t lose money. The profit margin came from selling the by-products that small packers threw away.
That meant big packers could pay higher prices for pigs, allowing them to force out smaller competitors. Cincinnati packers in the 1850s paid, on average, 5 percent more than competitors elsewhere. Farmers benefited. So did consumers, whose prodigious pork consumption was subsidized by the sale of by-products.

S
ince the colonial period, Americans had been famous for consuming vast amounts of beef and pork, especially by comparison with the meat-starved peasantry of Europe. Statistics for early America are hard to come by, but we have some good clues. In many wills, husbands specified the amount of meat their widows were to be given.
Widows typically received 120 pounds annually in 1700; a century later, that figure had risen to over 200 pounds.
In the antebellum South, a typical ration for a slave was 3 pounds of pork per week, or about 150 pounds per year.
Laborers in the North ate 170 pounds or more. After 1900, the statistics become more reliable. Between 1900 and 1909, per capita meat consumption in America was about 170 pounds, compared to 120 pounds in Britain, 105 in Germany, and 81 in France.
“There are a great many ill conveniences here, but no empty bellies,” one Irishman in America wrote to his family back home.

The United States in 1900 saw itself as a nation of beef eaters, but that reflected aspiration more than reality: not until the 1950s did per capita beef consumption surpass that of pork. Pork was the meat of rural dwellers and the poor, while urbanites and the more affluent ate beef. This difference had
to do with population density and technology. Beef was best eaten fresh, not salted, and artificial refrigeration at home was uncommon until after World War I. For a butcher to sell fresh meat from a nine-hundred-pound steer, he needed the large customer base that only an urban area could provide—
and even in 1900 only two out of five Americans were city dwellers. Most lived in the country and stored their own meat supplies at room temperature. That meant salt pork.

Americans in the nineteenth century got most of their meat and fat from pigs.
In his 1845 novel
The Chainbearer
, James Fennimore Cooper notes that a family is “in a desperate way when the mother can see the bottom of the pork-barrel.” (This sentiment underlies our expression “scraping the bottom of the barrel.”) Pickled pork lurked in nearly every dish.
In Eliza Leslie’s
Directions for Cookery
, one of the most popular cookbooks of the nineteenth century, the recipe for pork and beans—“a homely dish, but . . . much liked”—called for a quart of beans and two pounds of salt pork, and her chowder contained as much pork as fish.
One man, recalling his midwestern childhood, described a typical rural diet: “For breakfast we had bacon, ham, or sausage; for dinner smoked or pickled pork; for supper ham, sausage, headcheese, or some other kind of pork delicacy.”
As a physician wrote in the magazine
Godey’s Lady’s Book
in 1860, “The United States of America might properly be called the great Hog-eating Confederacy, or the Republic of Porkdom.”

Cheap American pork helped change the menu in Europe as well, as an important part of a growing international food trade that greatly improved the diet of Europe’s peasants and industrial workers. After enjoying a spell of relative prosperity following the Black Death, the European peasantry by 1500 had returned to a scanty grain-based diet, punctuated at frequent
intervals by famine. Hunger and starvation were common through 1800, but by the nineteenth century the situation had improved. European farmers adopted intensive crop rotations and better technology. The belated embrace of potatoes and corn—two high-yielding New World crops—boosted the number of calories available. Thanks to better technology, canned vegetables, meat, and milk became safer, cheaper, and at least tolerably palatable. Most importantly, improved trade allowed the mass importation of grain and meat from the Americas and the Antipodes.

Meat production flourished wherever cheap feed could be had. The United States, with both rangeland and corn, specialized in beef and pork. Argentina’s grasslands made it a leading producer of beef and mutton. Australia and New Zealand, similarly blessed with rangeland, exported primarily mutton. The beef and mutton trade got a boost in the late nineteenth century with the rise of artificial refrigeration, which allowed chilled and frozen meat to move around the world. Pork too was shipped fresh, though more of it was cured.

The British benefited most from this global trade. Whereas most European countries placed high tariffs on meat imports to protect local farmers, Britain kept her ports open and reaped the benefits of cheap meat.
The upper class bought refrigerated beef from Argentina, the middle class bought frozen mutton from Australia, and the poor made do with cheap bacon from the United States—but, one way or another, nearly all Britons had meat on their plates.

As shipping technology improved and global trade expanded, imports brought down the cost of food and improved the nutrition of the working classes of the Western world.
Workers who once had spent 50 to 75 percent of their income on food now spent 25 percent or less. And they were eating better.
In the West, diseases caused by vitamin and mineral deficiencies became less common.
The average height of adults—an indicator of nutrition levels in childhood—increased by several inches, making the Englishman of 1910 seem like a giant compared to his countryman from a century before.

In the midst of this commercialization, however, some people preserved the old ways. The pig had proven itself fit for industrial production and global trade, but it didn’t lose its place as the favored livestock for those who raised their own meat. English cottagers kept pigs in backyard sties. In the American South, the landless poor ran their hogs in the woods. And even in the heart of Victorian cities, pigs scavenged the streets and wound up on the dinner tables of the poor.

FOURTEEN

“A Swinish Multitude”

O
ne April morning in 1825, two hog catchers went to work in New York City’s Eighth Ward, in what is now Greenwich Village. They were accompanied by four city marshals because they were expecting trouble—and they found it.

As they rounded up stray pigs and locked them in their cart, the hog catchers attracted what a newspaper described as “a large mob of disorderly people” who demanded the return of their livestock.
Someone threw a brick that hit one of the marshals in the face, and the crowd rushed the cart and “let loose all of the hogs, who quickly scampered off.”

This was just one skirmish in Manhattan’s hog wars. On one side were poor city dwellers—mostly English, Irish, and African American—who raised pigs for food.
The city’s streets functioned as an urban commons that provided food for “the defenseless poor,” one advocate explained. On the other side
was a rising middle class who saw the animals as a public nuisance—dangerous to children—and upsetting to ladies who might glimpse swine copulating in the street.
The odds of that happening were good: in 1820 some 20,000 hogs lived in Manhattan, about one pig for every five people.
The pigs devoured “all kinds of refuse,” a Norwegian visitor noted. “And then, when these walking sewers are properly filled up they are butchered and provide a real treat for the dinner-table.”

Dining upon a “walking sewer” struck the visitor as foul, but the owners of city pigs could not afford to be fastidious. If they wanted meat, they had to raise their own. This remained true all over the United States and Europe throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Pigs scavenged on the streets of New York and London, wandered free in the piney woods of Georgia and North Carolina, and wallowed in the sties of small farmers from Maine to Lincolnshire. Like the urban poor in Mesopotamia and Egypt, these poor Americans and Englishmen kept pigs as a buffer against hardship but came under increasing threat from more powerful people who, for various reasons, wanted to take their animals away.

T
here have been city pigs as long as there have been cities, and the United States carried on the Old World practice.
Colonial New England towns appointed “hog reeves” to corral unrestrained beasts, and a Massachusetts court in 1658 warned, “Many children are exposed to great dangers of loss of life or limb though the ravenousness of swine.” Though such fears were not without basis—consider the killer pigs of medieval Europe—the laws were generally ignored. As in earlier eras, pigs provided not only food but also the only functioning urban sanitation service.

“Once more in Broadway,” Charles Dickens wrote of his 1842 visit to New York. “Take care of the pigs. Two portly sows are trotting up behind this carriage,” searching out a meal of “cabbage-stalks and offal.” Dickens described the pigs as “ugly brutes” with “scanty, brown” hair and “long, gaunt, legs.”
These were not chubby Corn Belt porkers but rangy scavenger types, fit for doing battle with stray dogs and mean boys, just as forest pigs could fight off the wolves that had hunted them in early America and medieval Europe.

Loose pigs in the streets, according to another English visitor to New York, “would arouse the indignation of any but Americans.” In fact, English cities hosted plenty of pigs, and many people there were indeed indignant about them.
In
The Condition of the Working-Class in England
, Friedrich Engels called attention to “the multitude of pigs walking about in all the alleys, rooting in the offal heaps, or kept imprisoned in small pens” in the working-class districts of Manchester. Living amid filth, though, was the price of having meat on the table.
In the Potteries, a large slum within the wealthy London suburb of North Kensington, an 1851 census turned up three pigs for every one person.

The upper classes conflated the poor with their pigs.
In
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, Edmund Burke wrote that if democracy prevailed, “learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.” The phrase quickly became one of the era’s most popular epithets, a way of vilifying the lower orders by equating them with the most abject of animals. As the wealthy saw it, both the poor and their pigs bred quickly, lived in filth, and threatened the social order.

The authorities could do little about the presence of the swinish multitude, whose members were needed to work the mills
and mines, but they could banish the swine.
In the 1860s and 1870s, public health measures forced most pigs from England’s large cities.

Pigs roamed the streets of many nineteenth-century cities, playing a dual role as sanitation service and food for the poor—while also offending delicate middle-class sensibilities. Health concerns finally forced authorities to banish pigs, as shown here in an 1859 illustration from a New York newspaper.

By that time most pigs had disappeared from New York as well. In 1849 a cholera epidemic prompted New York to take sanitation seriously. Hogs hadn’t caused cholera—a water supply contaminated by human sewage did—but they were swept up in the general cleaning frenzy. City officials, who in earlier decades had backed down from outraged pig keepers, stood their ground this time.
New York’s professional police force, only recently created, led an effort that drove off more than 5,000 swine. Manhattan, at least in its more densely developed southern stretches, became pig-free. The poor had to find other ways to feed themselves.

T
he common folk of the American South, unlike their counterparts in the industrializing North, managed to hold onto their pigs until well after the Civil War. This improved the diets of poor southerners but did not help their reputations. When travelers ventured into the South, they viewed poor country folk just as they viewed poor city folk: with contempt.
Southerners “delight in their present low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish life, and seem not desirous of changing it,” one English visitor wrote. He was not speaking about the owners of plantations, who had grown rich on the labor of enslaved human beings. He was describing, rather, the plain white folk of the South, who lived humbly but ate well.

Like the rest of the country, southern states preserved an open range during the colonial period, granting livestock free run of all unfenced land. Most states in the East and Midwest changed course by 1850 or so, giving deed holders full control over their land. The South, though, preserved its free-range customs until after the Civil War and in some areas until after World War II. Even the politically powerful railroads had to pay damages when their trains killed livestock. When a railroad company argued before the Georgia Supreme Court in 1860 that a plaintiff had been negligent in allowing his horse to wander into the path of an oncoming train, the justices rejected the argument.
If this were true, the court wrote, then a “man could not walk across his neighbor’s unenclosed land; nor allow his horse or his hog or his cow to range in the woods.” The era of the “Private Property: No Trespassing” sign was still far in the future.

In the South the common people’s “rights in the woods”—which allowed them to hunt, fish, and keep livestock on any unfenced land—were held sacred, because without those rights many would have starved. Despite the presence of cotton, rice,
and sugar plantations, less than 15 percent of southern land had been cleared in 1850.
That left millions of acres available for hunting and herding. The 1850 census revealed that, per capita, there were more swine in the South than in the Corn Belt, suggesting that nearly every southerner acquired a few pigs, notched their ears—the equivalent of branding—and turned them loose in the forest. And the census surely undercounted southern pigs, since owners could easily lower their tax bills by underreporting their free-ranging beasts.
“You can keep as many pigs as you wish, and you need not feed them,” a German visitor wrote in a letter home. “We can live here like lords.”
A prosperous farmer in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina described how impoverished men could move to the region and, with the aid of “free mast for their hogs,” build “a nice little happy home.” He concluded, “Truly, it is a paradise for the poor man.”

The open range shaped the cuisine of the South. Pork and corn were staples on the East Coast during colonial times and in the West in the early nineteenth century, but these other regions diversified their diets after the pioneer phase passed. The South did not, instead preserving frontier eating habits into modern times. Large planters imported pork and cornmeal from the Corn Belt, while smaller farmers persisted in their old ways, surviving on the produce of their gardens, their pigs, and wild game. On special occasions, both rich and poor dug a pit, built a fire, and cooked a whole hog, low and slow, over the embers.
Barbecue—both the word and the technique were adopted from the Taino Indians of the Caribbean—became popular in Virginia by the 1750s and spread west with the settlers. The barbecue became the standard southern outdoor celebration for occasions such as political rallies or July Fourth celebrations.
As one English visitor to America explained, “A barbecued hog in the woods, and plenty of whiskey, will buy birthrights and
secure elections.” Cattle and sheep were barbecued on occasion, but pigs proved most popular—they tasted best, and there were plenty of them ranging in the woods.

Southern leaders began to close the range after the Civil War, and their main purpose was to take food out of the mouths of the poor. The abolition of slavery had created a labor shortage in the southern plantation economy. The planters needed field workers, and most freed slaves had no desire to work for their former masters. Under prevailing law, freed African Americans might have adopted the habits of plain white folk and earned an independent living through herding, hunting, and fishing. A newspaper editor in Virginia explained the implications of this for the southern economy.
Laborers, he wrote, if “furnished with free food, would neglect agriculture.” That prospect frightened the white elite.

Legislatures in every state closed the range on a county-by-county basis, starting in areas with the largest populations of freed slaves.
A newspaper claimed that this change affected only “lousy negroes and lazy white men” and would be good for both: now they would find work as sharecroppers and tenant farmers.
This was indeed the effect, although few, black or white, would find reason to celebrate it: like the enclosure movement in England, the closing of the range stripped the poor of a means of self-sufficiency and left them vulnerable to exploitation by wealthy planters.

As poor southerners were forced into the Reconstruction economy, pig populations began to dwindle.
Historians who examined six counties in Alabama and Mississippi found that, before the Civil War, residents had owned 2.1 hogs per capita. After the war, it was 0.4. The effect on the common folk was plain to see. If travelers to the South before the Civil War tended to mock southerners for their laziness, those who came after the
war pitied these same people for their poverty, misery, and hunger.
In the 1880s, one writer described the closing of the range as “another step in the oppression of the poor.”

T
he banning of urban pigs and the closing of the southern range hurt the landless poor, but many people still had access to a little property. They couldn’t raise cattle or sheep, which required pasture, but they could keep a pig in a sty.
In nineteenth-century England, perhaps a quarter to half of rural workers did so.
“Life without a pig was almost unthinkable,” a Buckinghamshire man observed. “To have a sty in the garden . . . was held to be as essential to the happiness of a newly married couple as a living room or a bedroom.” Living so close to the home, the pig became a sort of edible pet, a source of companionship as well as food.
The pig was “one of the best friends of the poor,” according to an English authority in 1806.

Small-scale pig keeping followed age-old rhythms. Cottagers generally bought a spring piglet after it had been weaned, then fed it until early the next winter. Children were sent to gather wild plants in the spring and summer, and in the fall they collected acorns and beechnuts. Kitchen scraps were tossed into a wooden “pig tub” by the back door, and potatoes filled out the provisions. In their final few weeks, the pigs ate barley to harden the fat before slaughter.

When raised close to home, swine sometime became objects of affection.
“The pig was an important member of the family,” an Oxfordshire woman reported, “and its health and condition were regularly reported in letters to children away from home, together with news of their brothers and sisters.” One cottager kept a careful account of his expenditures on a pig he sent to market and, upon selling it, calculated that he had made three
shillings.
“Not much profit there,” he was told. “No,” the man replied. “But there: I had his company fer six months!”

A Virginia farmer and his hogs in 1939. Hog slaughter functioned as a crucial seasonal ritual for centuries in Europe and America. Fattened on the bounty of summer and fall, pigs provided a crucial source of meat and fat during the lean times of winter. (Marion Post Wolcott; courtesy of the Library of Congress)