Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (17 page)

The large-scale practice of feeding pigs garbage and then selling the meat became more common during World War II, when corn became expensive and growers sought other sources of feed. Secaucus, New Jersey, home to 250,000 hogs, earned the nickname “Pig Capital of the East.” The farmers collected garbage from Manhattan restaurants each night, fed it to their pigs, and sold the pork back to Manhattan restaurants.
The farms survived until 1960, then fell victim to encroachment by the New Jersey Turnpike and neighbors’ complaints about the stench.

It was a model of efficient waste disposal—except that the garbage often contained pork scraps. Pigs, of course, ate meat, and swine cannibalism on a large scale had been common in
America for more than a century because packers sold pork by-products as swine feed. Those by-products, however, had been cooked and dried, rendering them disease-free. Restaurant garbage, by contrast, might contain raw pork, which could transmit not only trichinosis but devastating livestock diseases like hoof-and-mouth and African swine fever.
“Human trichinosis is based almost entirely on porcine trichinosis,” a 1942 New York State commission concluded. “And porcine trichinosis is based almost entirely upon feeding hogs raw garbage containing trichinae-infested pork scraps.” In 1952 a national outbreak of a swine disease called vesicular exanthema was traced back to garbage-fed pigs, and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) took action. A 1952 rule required that all garbage fed to pigs must first be cooked to kill pathogens.

Garbage-fed pigs constituted a tiny portion of the annual pork crop—less than 2 percent—but they caused an outsized portion of the problems.
“Although garbage-fed hogs are daily sold as food universally, there is some aversion to this practice,” one report noted mildly.
Meat quality suffered: because pigs lay down fat in much the same form in which they consume it, the taste of their flesh is closely linked to diet. And because the supplies of garbage- and corn-fed hogs were not differentiated in the market, a bad pork chop reflected on the entire industry. Lingering fears of parasites proved even more damaging.
As one scientific study noted, “The prevalence of trichinosis in the United States has long cast an unfavorable light on the production of American pork.”

D
espite the best efforts of America’s growing pork industry, the dubious practices of some pig farmers and meatpackers prevented the reputation of pork from rebounding.
A 1942 study from the USDA noted
“a shift in the consumption of meats as incomes rose, from pork to beef, veal, and lamb.” In other words, despite the remaking of ham and bacon, pork remained the meat of the poor.
A 1955 study of urban consumers found that with each step up in income level, beef consumption rose while pork consumption fell. Distinctions between city and country dwellers persisted as well.
Urbanites devoted half of their meat consumption to beef and only a quarter to pork, while in the country those percentage were reversed.

These trends did not bode well for the pork industry. World War II factory jobs accelerated the population shift from country to city, and city dwellers made more money than rural Americans. A booming post–World War II economy raised living standards. After the war, three out of four American families had mechanical refrigerators, which meant they could now keep fresh meat in their homes and had less need to store cured meat in the pantry. Beef, most palatable when fresh, could suddenly be enjoyed with much greater convenience, a shift that undermined one of the greatest reasons for pork’s historic appeal.

The year 1953 marked the end of an era for the American pig.
That year, for the first time, Americans ate more beef than pork: 77.6 pounds of beef per capita, compared to 63.5 pounds of pork. The trend would continue in the decades ahead.
By the 1970s, pork consumption had fallen to fifty-one pounds, while beef rose to eighty-six pounds.

The pork industry took note.
The president of the National Pork Producers Council traveled the country to meet with pig farmers and give a talk titled “Improving the Image of Pork and Pork Producers.” In the 1960s the Porkettes, a women’s auxiliary to the Iowa Swine Producers Association, assigned themselves a similar task.
They created a mascot, Lady Loinette, who served as a partner to the primary pork mascot, Sir Hamalot.
The Iowa Pork Queen, crowned each year by a committee of Porkettes, served as an ambassador for the meat.
One queen asked, “Who first but Iowa would envision combining the image of the hog with the enthusiasm of vibrant young women in order to promote the pork industry?”
The Porkettes held contests for baking with lard and created a campaign to promote pig leather with the slogan “Pigskin—Our Prettiest Byproduct” (which may have served as a reminder of how distinctly unpretty the other by-products were).
The group’s magazine,
Ladies Pork Journal
, included a feature titled “You’ll Know She’s a Porkette When . . . ,” with such responses as “She passes out new pork recipes to ‘city’ friends.”

Americans’ pork prejudices persisted nonetheless.
The first president of the Porkettes told a story about a “professional man from the city” who visited her farmhouse and told her he did not eat pork because it was “unwholesome.”
Another Porkette was conducting a grocery store promotion when an “old grandmotherly lady” explained that she always served applesauce as a side dish “to counteract the poison in pork.”

The American pork industry was floundering. It would take all the brainpower and ingenuity of the American government, universities, advertising firms, and pharmaceutical companies to set it right. By the 1960s, those resources were at the ready. Over the next four decades, the pork industry changed what pigs ate, where they lived, and how fat they grew. While they were at it, the experts went ahead and changed the color of pork from red to white.

SIXTEEN

“The Other White Meat”

I
n 1986 leaders of the National Pork Producers Council gathered in a darkened room to hear their advertising agency pitch a new industry tagline: “Pork—the Other White Meat.”
When the lights came on after the two-hour presentation, the pork producers found themselves “in a state of shock,” one executive recalled. Hog farmers, along with everybody else, had always viewed pork as a red meat, in competition with beef. Now they were being asked to spend good money promoting it as an alternative to chicken. According to
National Hog Farmer
,
many thought it was a “dumb idea.”

But these were desperate times, so pork producers took the plunge. Since the 1970s sales of poultry had soared as consumption of beef and pork plunged. Studies linking red meat to heart disease and cancer had taken a toll, and Americans had
become fearful of fat.
In one survey more than a third of Americans agreed with the statement “Pork would be a good meat except for the fat.” The new campaign would convince people that pork was not bloody and fatty like beef but pale and lean like chicken.

With ice-skating star Peggy Fleming as spokeswoman, the pork industry launched the new marketing campaign at a January 1987 New York press event attended by the editor of
Better Homes & Gardens
and national television news reporters. Before the year was out, the advertising bill ran to more than $9 million. Almost immediately, the campaign was deemed a success.
Eight out of ten Americans recognized the phrase “the other white meat,” which lodged itself in that special place in the American mind that holds slogans like “Got Milk?” and “Just Do It.”
In 2011
Adweek
deemed the campaign “among the most successful rebranding moves in the history of the food biz.”

But it was more than a rebranding. The new slogan marked the culmination of a transformation in American farming. In 1945 pigs, bred by small farmers and raised outdoors on corn, grew thick layers of fat under their skin. By 1985, raised indoors on scientifically formulated feed and bred to exacting standards by large corporations, they produced very lean meat. The same qualities that suited pigs to small-scale production—fecundity and rapid growth—also made them perfect for industrial farming. In seeking to rebrand their product, pork producers had not just changed their tagline. They had created a new pig.

T
he Corn Belt was home to the “lard-type” hog, as opposed to the “bacon type” or “meat type.” The leaner meat hogs—which included breeds like the Danish Landrace, Tamworth, and Large Yorkshire—had a thin layer of back fat and were often
cured as bacon for the British market. The primary producers of these bacon-type pigs were Denmark, Canada, and Ireland, where pigs ate protein-rich dairy by-products that promoted lean muscle growth. Pigs that ate mostly corn—higher in carbohydrates than protein—ran to fat, which is why the Corn Belt became the center of global lard production.

Corn Belt farmers historically had depended on the “lard-type” breeds—Poland China, Berkshire, Chester White, and Duroc Jersey—in response to market demands. Bulk purchasers of barreled meat, which was used to feed miners, sailors, and slaves, preferred fatty meat because it preserved better. There was also a big demand for lard as an industrial lubricant and cooking fat. Under some market conditions, a pig’s fat was more valuable than its flesh, and packers dumped whole hogs into the rendering vats, wasting all of the meat in order to extract the precious fat.

Lard, however, became increasingly less valuable, a shift that started in the late nineteenth century and accelerated with each passing decade. After John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company developed the oil fields of Pennsylvania, factory workers began to oil their machines with petroleum products rather than animal fats. Thanks to better technology for both canned food and artificial refrigeration, sailors and laborers could enjoy foods other than fatty pork. More people turned to vegetable oils such as soybean, peanut, and corn, which allowed a simple production cycle—grow plants and extract their oil—rather than the extra step required with animals: grow plants, feed plants to pigs, extract fat from pigs. Health concerns about animal fats arose after World War II, and brands such as Crisco advertised their vegetable shortenings as healthier than animal fat. All of these factors contributed to a single result: demand for lard plummeted, and so did its price.

As consumers turned away from lard and fatty meats in the years after World War II, the government and meatpackers encouraged farmers to raise leaner pigs like the one at left in this diagram from a 1971 USDA pamphlet. Meat-type hogs were the first step on the road to “the other white meat.” (Courtesy US Department of Agriculture)

In response, scientists and farmers worked to breed leaner hogs. Their model was Denmark, the first specialist in intensive hog production and America’s key rival in the global pork market.
In 1907 the Danes had created swine testing stations to carefully monitor feed intake and carcass quality, allowing them to choose breeding stock from those animals that gained the most lean muscle while eating the least feed. American agricultural colleges developed similar testing programs, and the USDA created new genetic lines to distribute to farmers. The meatpacker Hormel awarded prizes to farmers who raised the leanest pigs, and the private breed registries changed their standards as well.
The Hampshire registry, for instance, specified that hogs should have no more than 1.8 inches of back
fat and a pork chop measuring at least four inches square. In the 1950s, a 180-pound hog carcass yielded 35 pounds of lard.
By the 1970s, a pig of the same size produced just 20 pounds of lard.

A
s America’s pigs changed, so did the farms where they were raised. Before World War II American pigs lived almost precisely as they had a century before.
They roamed on pasture in the spring and summer, grazing on crops such as clover or alfalfa. Farmers supplemented their diet with whatever was cheapest—one feed manual mentioned wheat middlings, bran, molasses, beet pulp, brewers’ grains, sorghum, potatoes, cassava, rapeseed, whey, blood meal, and dozens of other foods. In the fall, hogs were fattened on corn. Nearly all farmers practiced mixed farming: they raised dairy cows, beef cattle, and hogs and grew crops to feed to their livestock. Diversification acted as insurance: if hogs were selling low, beef or dairy might be high. This small-scale system was enormously productive.
In 1938 the United States raised 62 million hogs, compared to 39 million for all of western Europe.

Soon those pigs would be eating a different sort of diet, one that paired corn with soybeans—while also adding standard doses of antibiotics. During the meat shortages of World War II, scientists at the University of California researched a fact long known in Asian cultures: soybeans provided a concentrated source of high-quality protein. Paired with carbohydrate-rich corn, soy became an excellent animal feed. But it wasn’t perfect. Researchers found that pigs gained weight most efficiently only if their corn-soy feed was supplemented with an animal-derived protein such as skim milk, fish meal, or slaughterhouse by-products.
Since the 1920s scientists had understood the dietary importance
of vitamins A, D, and E. They hoped to discover a similar nutrient, provisionally named “Animal Protein Factor,” to explain the growth patterns of pigs. In 1948, researchers at pharmaceutical firm Merck and Company announced that they had isolated the mysterious agent: it was a new vitamin, B12. By 1949 feed companies and agricultural colleges were promoting B12 as a feed additive that could replace animal protein supplements.

Pharmaceutical companies needed a cheap source of B12, and they found one close at hand. The microorganisms used to grow streptomycin and other antibiotics also generated B12, which remained as a by-product in production vats after the desired antibiotic agents had been skimmed off. This B12 became a supplement in hog feed. Farmers soon developed a strong preference for this particular B12 supplement. Animals fed B12 that had originated as an antibiotic by-product gained weight much faster than those given B12 from other sources. Tests soon revealed why: B12 sold as pure had in fact contained antibiotics. The big boost in growth rate came not from B12 but from the drugs.

Soon antibiotics became the supplement of choice for American farmers. Further research showed that pigs given low doses of antibiotics gained as much as 13 percent more weight than pigs given the same amount of feed without the drugs.
Pfizer claimed that pigs dosed with Terramycin reached market weight seventeen days faster and with far less feed, saving farmers a lot of money. With little examination, the Food and Drug Administration in the 1950s approved the use of several antibiotics as a feed supplement.
By the 1960s, livestock consumed 1.2 million pounds of the drugs each year. By the late 1990s, that figure had risen to 25 million pounds.

Using antibiotics to promote growth had a side effect popular with farmers: the drugs helped ward off illness. This fact
became more significant as the next major shift in hog farming took place. At about the same time that antibiotics emerged as a feed supplement, farmers started pulling their hogs off pasture and crowding them together in barns. Land prices began to rise quickly in the mid-1950s, which made pasture too precious for pigs.
With farmland so expensive, one farmer asked, “How can you afford to let pigs run around on it?” It made more sense to plow under the hog pasture, plant corn and soy, and feed those crops to pigs, now confined to barns.

The disadvantage of this plan was disease, since hogs kept in close quarters passed around illness more easily. That’s where the antibiotic supplements came in. “The situation is sort of like kids at school,” a pharmaceutical representative explained. “You know, one kid gets sick with the sniffles, and then all of ’em get it.”
Antibiotics, the drug salesman said, help pigs “start healthy, stay healthy, and gain as much weight as they can.”
In 1972 an agricultural magazine predicted, “The modern hog business would collapse without antibiotics.”

Antibiotics helped address the problem of illness in confined pigs, but another trouble remained: labor costs. Pigs on pasture harvested their own food and deposited their manure broadly across the ground. Once pigs were confined to a barn, workers had to deliver food and remove waste.
Farmhands, though, were scarce in the 1950s and 1960s, when a humming national economy attracted rural labor to the city. Farmers, who were smart businessmen, knew what to do. When labor is scarce, substitute capital. If you can’t hire men to scrape stalls and haul feed, then buy machines to do it. Turn your farm into a factory.

In the shift to mechanized production, pigs followed the lead of poultry. As a seasonal, highly perishable crop raised outdoors on a small scale, chickens had historically been expensive. Birds raised indoors suffered from “leg weakness,” later
identified as rickets. Scientists learned, however, that adding vitamin D to feed solved this problem, and by the 1930s chickens were being raised indoors year-round. As electrical lines stretched into rural areas, farmers bought electric brooders, automatic feeders, and other labor-saving devices. Like pigs, chickens ate a corn-soy blend laced with antibiotics to speed growth. Scientists at agricultural colleges got to work on breeding, producing varieties that tolerated indoor life and quickly gained weight.
Compared to its ancestor in the 1930s, a broiler chicken in the 1990s grew to twice the size in less than half the time. Once reserved for special occasions, chicken became affordable enough for everyday eating.
Thanks to low prices and a healthy image, poultry consumption tripled between the 1940s and the 1990s, then kept growing.

Pigs and chickens have much in common: they eat similar diets (chickens, like pigs, are omnivorous) and grow to slaughter weight quickly—in less than two months for chickens and less than six months for pigs. Unlike cattle, which require many leisurely months on pasture, chickens and pigs can be stuffed with feed and turned into meat in short order. Unsurprisingly, then, the agricultural methods developed for one also worked well for the other.

In the 1950s and 1960s, American farmers started raising hogs like chickens. Feed, augered into the hog barns from nearby silos, was deposited in automatic feeders. Heaters and fans controlled the temperature, eliminating the need to open and close windows or haul straw for bedding. The most important innovation was low-tech: slatted floors. Used first in Norway in 1951 and adopted in the United States a decade later, the floors had long, narrow gaps that allowed urine and manure to fall into gutters below, where it could be flushed out with water.
“The use of slotted floors has probably accelerated the trend
toward confinement more than any other single development,” an expert wrote in 1972.

Slatted floors started a cascade of other changes in pig husbandry. Straw bedding, formerly needed to absorb urine and provide warmth, could be eliminated in favor of bare floors. There was no need for a separate dunging area, so more pigs could be packed into pens where they slept, ate, and relieved themselves.
For each pig weighing 150 to 250 pounds, industry guidelines in the 1980s called for allotting eight square feet of pen space, a dramatic reduction for animals that had historically been given free range of the woods or, at least, a pasture or sty.
In such close quarters, pigs kept each other warm, requiring less artificial heat, and gained weight more quickly because they didn’t burn calories exercising.
Crowded together, they shuffled around more, trampling manure through the slots and keeping the pen cleaner.