The Whole Hog

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized, so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Time for a tea break?

Time for a Pure Leaf.

Thumbtack presents.

Uncertainty strikes.

I was surrounded.

The aisle and the options were closing in.

There were paint rollers, satin and matte finish, angle brushes, and natural bristles.

There were too many choices.

What if I never got my living room painted?

What if I couldn't figure out what type of paint to use?

What if

I just used thumbtack?

I can hire a top-rated pro in the Bay Area that knows everything about interior paint, easily compare prices, and read reviews.

Thumbtack knows homes.

Download the app today.

It's always been a tricky relationship.

Most other creatures that we eat tend to live out on ranges, in fields outside of town tended by specialist herders.

Whereas pigs, because their typical role throughout history has been converters of household waste.

They live around the house.

and they eat the leavings of our dinner and then they become dinner themselves.

But because they live so close, they tended to form intimate relationships with us.

They became a pet, and then we would eat them.

That's right, edible pets.

Pigs are the star of Mark Essig's absolutely fascinating new book called Lesser Beasts, a Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig.

And in this episode, we get to the long history and the science of that tricky relationship.

I mean, it's always a little awkward when you have your pet for dinner.

You are listening to Gastropod.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And things between humans and pigs have been a little bit different from other animals since the very beginning.

The basic story with cows, sheep, and goats, the theory of archaeologists is that this was a process in which hunting these animals turned into herding them.

These are creatures that live in open territory and hunters could follow them across the fields.

Gradually, over hundreds or thousands of years, the process of hunting animals turned into the herding of animals but that doesn't work with pigs because pigs aren't creatures of open country pigs were domesticated from the eurasian wild boar and these are creatures who live in small groups called sounders and probably they were hunted through a process of ambush you would wait in the woods for one to wander by and then you would selectively kill it there was no way that hunting these creatures could have turned into herding them.

What archaeologists think instead is that these creatures domesticated themselves.

About 10,000 years ago, this was the period when agriculture was first getting started in the Near East.

And people for the first time settled down into permanent villages.

And when people settle down into permanent villages, one of the things they're best at is producing garbage.

And so what we think is that when people gathered, they would be producing things like butchery scraps.

They would be burning food and throwing that out.

They would have stores of almonds and grains that would get moldy.

And so these Eurasian wild boars would slink into town to devour the garbage of these early settlements.

And gradually, certain of these animals were better at it than others.

Some of the wild boar were bold enough.

to slink into town and get these food, and yet they couldn't be too bold because if they seemed dangerous to people, that they would be killed off.

So you had to have a certain balance, a brave animal, but not a threatening animal.

And so what archaeologists think is that over a period of hundreds or thousands of years, the pigs that were best in this new niche that existed in human villages, they separated themselves off into a separate population.

So gradually, these Eurasian wild boars evolved into what we know of as domestic pigs.

So rather than being domesticated by people, the pigs actually domesticated themselves.

And that actually gets into another question, which is sort of about their intelligence.

Because in a way, in a couple of different ways, they're more like us than cows or sheep are.

Why is that?

Well, pigs are often consigned to what's known as a group of primitive mammals.

They belong to a group called Arteriodactyla.

And this is the group that also includes most of what we know of as hoofed mammals.

It doesn't include horses, but it does include cows, sheep, goats, deer, giraffes, antelope, most of the animals running across the African plain.

But those other animals became very highly specialized.

Many of them evolved to be either grazers eating grass or browsers eating leaves.

But pigs, they stayed primitive, whereas these other animals developed these complex stomachs.

They became ruminants, which essentially have multi-chambered stomachs that allow them to break down cellulose in plant material, which is very hard to digest.

Pigs can't do that.

Pigs remained generalist creatures capable of eating just about anything you could think of.

They could eat nuts, they could eat roots, they could eat meat, they could eat fruits.

They're generalists.

And when you look at the gut of these animals, it looks very much like human guts.

When you look at the teeth of pigs, they look very much like human teeth.

That's because both of us evolved to have very similar diets, and that's why we have formed such an enduring partnership.

We eat the same things, we get along rather well, and as it happens,

we also like to eat the flesh of these beasts.

So part of what's so interesting about those anatomical and dietary similarities are that that in part is what is responsible for pigs being so smart, right?

Yeah, there's a theory known as the expensive tissue hypothesis.

The process of rumination, which cows and goats have to do in order to digest the food that they eat, requires a great deal of energy.

That means a lot of metabolic energy.

So of the calories they consume, many of them go into the very process of digesting further food.

But pigs, like people, because they eat very calorie-dense foods, they have more energy available for other processes.

And another expensive tissue, as they say, is the brain.

That's also a bodily process.

Thinking requires a great deal of energy as well.

So that pigs, because they ate these items that were much more dense in calories, could afford to divert some of the energy that would otherwise go to digestion to the process of thinking.

You know, there's another side of this as well.

When you think of a sheep or a cow, they don't have a lot of choices when it comes to what they eat.

They essentially, they're out in a field, they spot something green, they bite it off, and they start chewing it.

But a pig, on the other hand, because it's an omnivore, it has to make decisions about what to eat.

It's a real advantage, evolutionary speaking, to a pig to be able to find a novel source of food, a source of food that other pigs or other creatures haven't found yet.

So that

if you can find a new food, that confers an advantage upon you.

You will reproduce, you will pass along your genes to further generations.

On the other hand, if you try out a new source of food that that ends up being, say, a poison mushroom or seeds that have a heavy dose of cyanide in them, that's not such a selective advantage.

So you could think of pigs as having evolved to be judicious risk takers.

They need to make judgments.

They have to have a sort of a flexible intelligence in order to find foods that they can eat safely.

And it's thought, or at least it's hypothesized, that in this process of choosing new foods to eat, the pig develops a flexible form of thinking that we call intelligence.

Scientists estimate that pigs have the same capacity for thought as a three-year-old, and still we eat them, at least some of us do.

So, eating pork versus not eating pork has emerged as one of the major divisions in society.

And in the book, you trace this back as far as ancient Egypt and the construction of the pyramids.

So, who was eating pork in those days in that society, and why were they the ones eating it?

When the Israelites set down their pork prohibition, it might have been about 700 or 800 BC, by that time almost none of their neighbors in the Near East were eating pork either.

If you look at the traditions of Mesopotamia or the writings from ancient Egypt,

None of the priestly classes, the bureaucrats, the people who were running these societies, none of them ate pork.

They all turned up their noses at pork and considered it an unclean food.

But that doesn't mean that pork disappeared.

You find it in certain areas.

You mentioned ancient Egypt and the temple complex at Giza.

And there's been some fascinating archaeological work done there in which if you look at the areas that were part of the centralized economy, what the workers at the complex were eating, what the bureaucrats were eating, that tends to be mostly beef from cattle that were brought in from different areas of Egypt, that were requisitioned, much of the workers were requisitioned to do this labor.

But there's also, off to the side, there's sort of an unofficial area where support services were thought to have been done.

You could think of this other village as being sort of camp followers.

And there, because people were not being supplied with their food, they were eating pork.

And the reason for that is that Again, pigs are something that you can raise on your own.

You can raise a pig on what's left behind.

You don't need to have a big pasture.

You can feed it on garbage.

You can feed it on dead animals.

There's a long tradition of feeding pigs on the feces of humans and other creatures.

And so these people who had to provide their own food, they were the ones who turned to pigs.

So pigs were rejected not only because in this cultures they tended to eat disgusting things, but they also tended to get linked to the people who raised them.

And those people were tended to be on the margins of society.

Pigs came to be considered not only an unclean food, but also a food of the lower classes.

So it really became a marker of status if you could avoid eating pork.

So you mentioned the Israelites and how pigs were considered unclean in the area.

Now, you know, I grew up going to synagogue and keeping kosher at home, and I always learned that there were kind of health reasons, and I was really fascinated by how you explained how Judaism codified not eating pork and why.

It's really, it's different from what I learned growing up.

Yeah, there's so many theories about why the Israelites established this formal ban on pork.

One of the things I was surprised to learn is that if you ask people about this issue, you'd be surprised how many people bring up trichinosis.

They think that this ban was just a sensible public health measure by which the Jews ensured that the people who were eating pork would not be subjected to this rather rather horrible parasitic disease.

That's a theory that became popular in the 19th century almost as soon as the medical reasons for trichinosis were discovered.

But it's almost certainly not true.

There's no proof that this was a disease that even existed in the ancient Near East.

It has a long incubation period, so if somebody did catch it from tainted pork, they would have a hard time connecting this illness to what it was they ate a week or 10 days ago that caused it.

So that's a very unlikely reason.

There's some other fascinating reasons.

Some people have proposed that it had to do with the fact that this is largely a desert region and for pigs to eat here, they would have been in direct competition with humans for food, i.e.

they would be eating grain that large urban populations need to feed themselves, or they would be trampling through the fields and destroying these same stands of grain.

And that certainly is true.

The problem is that it doesn't take into account how efficient pigs were at converting waste, that they could eat lots of gross things that we wouldn't eat and sustain themselves just fine by living in the streets of these villages.

And so What I propose is that it's really a two-stage process.

On the one hand,

you see a a lot of references to pigs being dirty, as well as references to what it is that they eat.

There are curses like, may dogs and pigs eat your corpse, or may dogs and swine drag your body through the streets.

So there was a lot of uncomfortableness about the fact that pigs would eat dead animals and even dead human bodies.

There was also the fact that

the people who were in charge, the people who did things like write down the dietary rules in the book of Leviticus, they had access to other types of food.

The only people who ended up eating pork were the ones who could not afford to eat anything else.

So pigs were both filthy and they were associated with the poor.

It was sort of two strikes against pigs.

And so in this process,

by the time the Jews banning pork in that way, none of their neighbors would have been terribly surprised by that because the priests in Egypt, the priests in Sumer, none of them were eating pork either.

But at a certain point, Jews come into contact with people who love pork.

And then, you know, you kind of have this division between pork eaters and non-pork eaters that's held until today.

I just, I find it funny because you can find Jews who will eat shellfish and other forms of food that's not kosher, but they still won't eat pork.

So when did this division between pork eaters and non-pork eaters become a form of identity?

What happened?

It really started as soon as first the Greeks and later the Romans, essentially they conquered Palestine.

And so they became the rulers of the Jews.

And there are stories recorded in the books of the Maccabees about

Jews being tortured horribly trying to be forced to eat pork.

And really it seemed to be a punishment for the Jews trying to remain different.

They did not want this people, particularly the Greek rulers, they didn't want this people standing apart.

They did not want these people who considered themselves to be different than the rest of the people in the empire.

And this is really the first instance in which avoidance of pork became central to the Jewish identity.

And it really carried through even to the present day.

When Jews considered what sets them apart, how do they maintain their identity, even when they do not have a state, they do so by following certain rules, and one of the most prominent among these was the avoidance of pork.

Avoiding pork was an especially big deal because, by contrast, the Romans were pork mad.

They made today's bacon graves seem totally low-key by comparison.

They even had a pork dole, like a certain amount of pork each citizen was given by the state to make sure they stayed happy.

And in other places in Europe, pigs were even worshipped because of their strength and fertility.

So, not eating pigs or loving to eat pigs, that became a major split between Jews and non-Jews.

With the Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you can earn a limited 2% cash back on every purchase.

And you get big purchasing power, so your business can spend more and earn more.

Stephen Brandon and Bruno, the business owners of SandCloud, reinvested their 2% cash back to help build their retail presence.

Now, that's serious business.

What could the Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One do for your business?

Capital One, what's in your wallet?

Find out more at capital1.com/slash sparkcash plus.

Terms apply.

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

You know, that point in the afternoon when you just hit a wall?

You don't have time for self-care rituals or getting some fresh air, so maybe maybe you grab a beverage to bring you back.

But somehow it doesn't do the trick, or it leaves you feeling even worse.

What you need is a quality break, a tea break.

And you can do that with pure leaf iced tea, real brewed tea made in a variety of bold and refreshing flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

With a pure leaf iced tea in hand, you'll be left feeling refreshed and revitalized with a new motivation to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a pure leaf iced tea.

Time for a tea break, time for a pure leaf.

So skipping ahead in history a little, we were completely astonished to read about

the pivotal role the pigs played in colonization, particularly in the Americas.

And there are really two parts of that.

So first of all, I wonder if you could talk us through the role they played as food for the explorers.

The The important thing to remember here is that pigs, being descended from Eurasian wild boars, never lived in the New World, never lived in the Americas.

And so it took the age of conquest, the age of exploration.

to carry these animals around the world.

One of the most interesting things I found is that explorers would often drop a boar and a couple of sows on an uninhabited island just on the off chance that they would end up at the same island at a future date.

And they could count on those pigs having survived, reproduced, and then there would be a generous supply of pork waiting for them.

You can find instructions from one explorer to the other, say, drop off a boar and a couple of sows.

And if you find more, then take what you need, but be sure to leave a breeding population.

So it's an indication of the self-sufficiency of pigs.

They can take care of themselves nearly anywhere, survive, reproduce, and have a ready supply of meat waiting for the people who needed it.

Now, pigs first made their way to the New World on Columbus's second voyage, and on that voyage, they brought pretty much everything they would need to recreate the Spanish diet in the New World.

They brought wheat and other crops, they brought cuttings to start orchards, and they brought the full range of domesticated animals.

The crops almost entirely failed because they were trying to grow these Spanish crops in a tropical climate.

The animals tended to not do very well too, particularly sheep suffered in the heat, and cows eventually did well, but it took them a while to acclimate.

Pigs, on the other hand, as soon as their sharp little hooves landed in the jungle mud, they must have thought they were in heaven.

They found so much to eat, fruits, nuts, small dwelling birds, or amphibians and frogs.

And within just a decade or two, you start getting complaints that the hogs were breeding like vermin in the hills, not only in what's now the Dominican Republic, but also in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean.

You might say comparing something to vermin would be a complaint, but this actually was one of the keys to success of Spain in the New World.

Because on those islands, what they were doing was massing their forces to conquer not only the islands that they had already taken also the mainland of Mexico and Central America and South America and what those pigs provided was a food supply in very generous amounts.

Pigs of course are famous because they cure so well.

So with salt those pigs could be butchered and stored in the ships.

But also pigs were probably played their most important role in the live form because when the Spanish armies went to Mexico, for instance, they took with them three animals, horses which were ridden into battle, dogs which were used to intimidate and attack adversaries in battle.

But then trailing behind the forces would be a herdsman with a herd of pigs, and those pigs ensured that they would be well fed along the way.

One of the most interesting things I learned is that many of the conquistadors, including the Pizarros and Cortes, came from Extremadura, which is the region now famous for producing some of the best hams in the world.

So they were not only skilled soldiers, they were skilled pig men as well.

And so

that herd of pigs trailing behind the army ensured that they would have plenty of food to eat along the way.

So then also what's really interesting about pork in the New World, or pigs in the New World, is the way they contributed to the destruction of the Native American way of life, particularly in North America.

What happened there?

This is a story that's recorded best not only in New England and Virginia, but also as far away as the Pacific Northwest.

We have to keep in mind that the story of pigs in North America is very much like Central and South America.

The business of settling a new land is difficult.

You have buildings to build.

You have, in many cases Native Americans that were hostile that you needed to build fortifications.

You had many things to do and often you did not have time for the very careful husbandry that was practiced in New England.

You didn't have time to build barns.

You didn't have time to melt cows.

And these colonists relied on pigs because pigs are so low maintenance.

Essentially, they turned their pigs loose into the woods.

Sometimes they would throw out a little salt, which the pigs liked, to keep them relatively close and relatively tame.

But for the most part, this was a hands-off operation.

You could turn the pigs loose, round them up in the fall, cure them for the winter, and then have provisions so you could be all set.

So what were the pigs doing in the woods?

On the one hand,

they were rooting up acorns, chestnuts, beechnuts that were falling from the trees.

But on the other hand, they were also finding many of the same foods that Native Americans counted on for food.

They ate those nuts.

They also ate some things you might not think about.

Along the shores of New England, they were known for rooting into the clam banks, and you have complaints from Indians that the pigs were despoiling this important source of food.

Native Americans would often have food caches at various places storing their own winter food supplies, and the pigs would get into those.

The pigs would root up the crops they had in the field, not only corn, but also squash and beans.

Native Americans also counted on various roots and tubers.

There's a story from the 1850s in Oregon about complaints from Indians about these the particular kind of marsh lilies that had a starchy root that they counted on for food and the pigs were destroying this source of food as well.

Settlements in the colonial period and in the West in the pioneer period were sort of few and far far between.

You could think of it as a small planet where these Europeans lived, but orbiting around it were these free-range pigs, which essentially expanded the footprint.

They were thought of as harassing the Indians off their fields, destroying the food that these people needed to survive.

So in the process of driving the original inhabitants off the land, the people played a role, the guns played a role, but these animals, simply by destroying the food supplies, played an important role as well.

So it's a really interesting story, and one I hope people will go to your book and read, but I want to end this on a little bit of a lighter note.

And that's that I read your book when I was visiting my 85-year-old aunt with my mother, and I kept bringing up fascinating parts of it as I read it.

And then I got to those couple paragraphs about pig sex.

And I know it's not the focus of your book, but I read them out loud the paragraph about how pigs have a two-foot-long penis with a corkscrew on the end that fits into the sow's cervix and then over about 15 minutes he releases a pint of semen and I have to say they could not stop talking about it all weekend

anyway you know there's quite a few people who are who are very familiar with that process because in modern pig husbandry a lot most sows are inseminated through artificial insemination which means that there are men whose job it is to collect that so they they become very expert in in the particular needs of the boars and how to get them to provide what this industry needs.

So I've read some funny stories about the,

let's just say, the quirks of what the boar needs to get the job done.

That has to be provided by these mostly men who are working in these barns with them.

I don't even want to know.

I don't think I do either.

Along those similar lines, it was one of my favorite quotes of the book.

There's a long tradition of pigs being not only gluttonous, but also lecherous.

Like they're considered to be these symbols of lust, and that was one of the reasons people should avoid them and not take them as an example.

But I found one farming manual that described pigs as being very lecherous and in that act, tedious.

which I think gets exactly to that 15-minute span.

I've even been on the farm where mating was happening the old-fashioned way, and it is,

I would call it a tedious process.

I would hazard that the sows would agree.

If the sows are start drumming their hooves, like, come on, man.

Then we'll know.

Yeah.

And on that happy note, we are going to leave you wanting more.

Unlike the sows.

Really?

It's an awesome book, Lesser Beasts by Mark Essig, and we think you should read it.

There's so much we didn't talk about, from descriptions of packs of hogs roaming the streets of Manhattan to how pork transitioned from being a red meat to a white meat, literally.

And in an embarrassment of riches.

Who knew that there could be such riches when it comes to pigs?

There is another great new book about pigs out right now.

It's called Pig Tales, and it's by a great food writer, Barry Estabrook.

My favorite chapter was about shooting wild hogs from helicopters in Texas.

This book basically kind of picks up where Mark leaves off.

Mark talks about the problems with current industrial-scale pig farming, but Barry takes a deep dive into all the big pig issues of today.

It goes from pig manure being sprayed on poor black communities in North Carolina and the incredible physical danger for immigrants working in big industrial pig slaughterhouses.

To the amazing example of Denmark, where they actually managed to raise pork at industrial scale and cheaply, but without all the antibiotics and the nasty, inhumane conditions that you find in a lot of the large-scale, confined hog-raising operations in the U.S.

In short, you have two fantastic pig books to read this month.

I have to say, I mean, I read both back-to-back and I did not feel pigged out or over-pigged in any way.

I agree, they were both super interesting.

The pig is a fascinating creature.

And that's it for this week's episode.

A huge thanks to Mark Essick, who is a fan of the show.

He wanted to give a particular shout out to our No Scrubs episode, where we talk about putting bulls on trial.

Pigs have also had their day in court, as you'll find out in his and Barry's books.

In two weeks, you'll learn all about how Chinese restaurants became so popular in America and even why they were the hot date at the start of the 20th century.

And they were particularly particularly receptive to men and women doing all kinds of scandalous acts right there open in the public, so much so that they caught the attention of anti-vice investigators.

All that and more in two weeks.

That's all for this week.

Till next time.

This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

That's this month on Explain It to Me, presented by Pureleaf.