by Mark Essig
To remain pure, the Israelites must eat only pure things. The eleventh chapter of Leviticus lays out the taxonomy: there were clean and unclean birds, clean and unclean insects, and clean and unclean fish. And then there were the land animals. The key rule was this: “Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat.” Animals that “goeth upon paws”—dogs, wolves, lions—chewed no cud and divided no hooves and therefore were unclean. The same rule disqualified pigs: “The swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.”
Diet played an important role in scripture even before God handed down the rules of Leviticus. Adam and Eve were vegetarians: in the book of Genesis, God gives them the grains, fruits, and vegetables to eat. Only after God had expelled them from the Garden and later scoured the earth with a flood did people begin to eat flesh. Meat, in other words, is the food of the fallen. God told Noah that he could eat “every moving thing that liveth” but then added a stipulation: “You shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” Noah’s descendants were allowed to eat meat but never blood, which was thought to contain the “life force,” or nefesh in Hebrew. Because the life or soul of an animal resided in its blood, to eat flesh with blood was to mingle life and death, two things that should be kept separate: “Eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.”
Just as God’s people did not eat blood, they also did not eat animals that ate blood. Deuteronomy forbids eating carrion or “anything that dies of itself”—though it’s lawful to “sell it to a foreigner” (caveat emptor)—presumably because the blood had coagulated within its veins and could not be drained. This explains why certain animals came to be declared unclean: they are predators and scavengers that eat the flesh of animals from which the blood has not been drained. Unlike Adam and Eve, the Israelites were no longer vegetarians—even so, they could eat only vegetarian beasts.
In specifying that God’s people could eat only animals that chewed the cud and split the hoof, the priests displayed an intuitive sense of biological classification. Cud chewers, such as cows and sheep, are vegetarians. The pig didn’t “chew the cud” because its gut had evolved to digest high-energy foods, including meat.
Scripture expresses disgust for the two most common scavengers, pigs and dogs. In the Christian Bible Jesus advises, “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” “Dog” is an insult in the Bible, reserved for the most despised of people and linked to the animal’s eating habits. “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly,” we learn from Proverbs. According to the book of Kings, “Thus says the Lord: ‘In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood.’” In the next chapter: “So the king died . . . and the dogs licked up his blood.” Such is the standard version of those verses. But in the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Jewish Bible made in the second and third centuries bc, those dogs do not dine alone: “The pigs and dogs licked the blood of Naboth,” and “the pigs and dogs licked up the blood” of the king. Some scholars speculate that this was the original version of the text.
Uncleanliness, in the Bible, is a contagion: predators and scavengers become unclean by eating bloody meat; men become unclean by eating the unclean flesh of animals that have eaten bloody meat; unclean men contaminate the temple so that God can no longer dwell with his people. That is why pigs, lickers of blood and eaters of carrion, could not be food for those who wished to remain pure: they were a vector for the unholy and would pollute anyone who consumed them.
Scriptural dietary rules grew more significant with time. When the laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy were set down, few people in the Near East were eating pork. Archaeologists find no pig bones at all, or just a scattered few, in settlements from this period. Then, starting in about 300 bc, pig bones begin to appear in great profusion. The Greeks had arrived—and pigs would soon enjoy a renaissance after some nine hundred years of persecution.
Greek rule spelled major changes for the Israelites. The Greek king Alexander the Great had conquered the Persian Empire in 333 bc and taken over all the lands Persia had controlled, including Palestine. Whereas the Persians had worked through local rulers and allowed local peoples to live as they wished, the Greeks forcefully imposed Hellenistic culture on their subjects. In 167 bc the ruler Antiochus IV, a successor to Alexander, invaded Jerusalem and tried to stamp out Judaism, a story recorded in the Books of the Maccabees. The first book relates how Antiochus demanded “that all should be one people, and that each should give up his customs.” Many Jews acquiesced and “sacrificed to idols and profaned the Sabbath.” Worst of all, Antiochus ordered the Jews “to defile the sanctuary, . . . to sacrifice swine and unclean animals, and to leave their sons uncircumcised.”
In the Second Book of the Maccabees, the invaders force pork into the mouth of Eleazer, an elderly Jewish scribe, but he spits it out. His tormenters, old friends who have gone over to the enemy’s side, bring him aside and quietly tell him they will secretly replace the pork with kosher meat so that he can obey God’s law while pretending to obey Antiochus. Again Eleazer refuses: “Many of the young should suppose that Eleazer in his ninetieth year has gone over to an alien religion,” he says. “For the sake of living a brief moment longer, they should be led astray because of me.” His purpose, he explains, is to leave “a noble example of how to die a good death willingly and nobly for the revered and holy laws.” So he goes to the rack and is beaten to death over a mouthful of pork.
In the next chapter of the Second Book of the Maccabees, the pork-related punishments continue. A mother and her seven sons are arrested and told they must eat swine’s flesh, but they too refuse. On the king’s orders, a guard cuts out the tongue of one of the brothers, scalps him, and chops off his hands and feet. Then a large pan is heated over a fire, and the king orders his guards to take the brother, “still breathing, and to fry him in the pan,” which they do. After he is dead, they kill another brother in the same way, and then another, until all seven brothers are dead, at which point Antiochus orders the mother slain as well.
Although these episodes occurred hundreds of years after the laws of Leviticus were laid down, they comprise only the second recorded instance of pork eating among the Jews. The first occurs in the book of Isaiah, when God expresses his fury at a few people who have eaten “swine’s flesh, and broth of abominable things.” They have done so in secret, hidden away in gardens and graveyards, and their sin is known only to God. It is a matter between the Lord and his people, and God promises to destroy the offenders.
In Maccabees, the situation is public. Infuriated by the Jews’ desire to remain a separate people, Antiochus has outlawed the most visible symbol of their difference: their refusal to share a table with their neighbors. Here eating pork is not simply a matter of ritual purity, of remaining holy in order to keep the temple pure. It has become, instead, the key to cultural identity. The Books of the Maccabees provided a model of what it meant to be Jewish: even in the face of death, a Jew must refuse pork in order to remain true to his people.
Greek rulers killed the Jewish elder Eleazer because he refused to eat pork. For centuries, the scriptural prohibition played little role in Jewish life because all of the Israelites’ neighbors rejected pork as well. Only with the arrival of pig-loving Greeks and Romans did pork abstention become a crucial aspect of Jewish identity.
Pork eating hadn’t carried much significance as a marker of Jewish identity before the Greek conquest of Persia because most others in the region didn’t eat pork either. Since the Israelites’ return from exile in Egypt, abstaining from pork simply had been one way that they remained pure in order to preserve their relationship with God. Now, however, it also became a way that the
y drew boundaries between themselves and those they lived among. Indeed, when pork-eating Greeks ruled over the Jews, refusing pork became a key element of what it meant to be Jewish. You are what you eat, the saying goes, but the Jews were what they didn’t eat.
The Jews rebelled against Antiochus and in 142 bc won control of Palestine and reconsecrated the Temple, an event commemorated in the celebration of Chanukah. Their independence lasted less than a century: in 63 bc the Romans conquered Jerusalem, and the Jews once more fell under the rule of pork eaters. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans responded to Jewish pork avoidance not with violence but with puzzlement and feeble jokes. Juvenal, the Roman satirist of the first century ad, noted that in Palestine “a long-established clemency suffers pigs to attain old age” because Jews “do not differentiate between human and pigs’ flesh.” It was said that Caesar Augustus, after hearing that King Herod of Judea had executed one of his own children, joked that he would “rather be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son.”
There was a reason Jewish dining habits attracted attention: Romans loved pork with a passion matched by few people before or since. They developed the most sophisticated farming and breeding techniques that the world had ever seen and created elaborate—occasionally obscene—recipes to prepare pork for their lavish feasts. Such ostentatious pork consumption would only reinforce the divisions between Jews and Romans, and it would eventually establish pork as the meat of choice in the religion the Romans would help disseminate throughout Europe: Christianity.
five
“Monstrosities of Luxury”
An enormous pig, belly up, is wheeled into a banquet room in one scene of Federico Fellini’s Satyricon. Trimalchio, the host, accuses the cook of roasting the animal without first gutting it and orders him whipped as punishment. The guests call for mercy, so Trimalchio demands, “Gut it here, now,” whereupon the cook swings an enormous sword and slashes the pig’s belly. The guests recoil in horror, but the steaming mass that pours forth is not the pig’s viscera but cooked meat. “Thrushes, fatted hens, bird gizzards!” one character calls out. “Sausage ropes, tender plucked doves, snails, livers, ham, offal!” The dispute with the cook has been all in fun. The guests applaud, then grab hunks of meat and begin to gorge themselves.
Fellini’s film, released in 1969, stays true to its source material, a work by Petronius written not long after the death of Christ. In depicting Roman dining, Petronius satirized but did not exaggerate: there was no need to embellish the extravagant reality. The dish portrayed in the film, a medley of meats hidden within a whole hog, was known as porcus Troianus, or “Trojan pig,” a nod to another great act of concealment. Petronius also describes a whole roast pig served with hunks of meat carved into the shape of piglets and placed along its belly, “as if at suck, to show it was a sow we had before us.” Another feast featured what appeared to be a goose and a variety of fish, all carved from pork. “I declare my cook made it every bit out of a pig,” the host exclaims. “Give the word, he’ll make you a fish of the paunch, a wood-pigeon of the lard, a turtle-dove of the forehand, and a hen of the hind leg!” Why he should do so is left unexplained.
In cuisine, culture, and mythology, Romans delighted in concealment and disguise, metamorphosis and transformation, and in this they could hardly have been more different from the Jews. The Roman Empire formed a vast, cosmopolitan civilization that embraced and absorbed dozens of cultures. Few identities—whether of meats or of people—remained fixed. Trimalchio, in Satyricon, is a former slave who has won his freedom and then attained great wealth. A man calling himself a Roman citizen might have been born in northern Europe, Africa, or Asia Minor. Jews, by contrast, were dedicated to marrying among themselves, defending their small homeland, and preserving their ancient ways.
The differences between Romans and Jews extended to food. One people defined itself by rejecting pork, the other by embracing it. One called the pig abominable, the other miraculous. One saw the pig as a carrier of pollution, the other as a sign of abundance. Between them, Jews and Romans set the terms that would define the pig throughout the history of the West.
Pigs were the most common sacrificial animal in both Greece and Rome. They didn’t pollute—they purified. In Greek mythology, after Jason and Medea kill Medea’s brother, the enchantress Circe captures a piglet from “a sow whose dugs yet swelled from the fruit of the womb,” slits its neck, and sprinkles its blood over the hands of the killers to remove the stain of murder. Similarly, a painted vase shows Apollo holding a sacrificed piglet, still dripping blood, over the head of Orestes, who has killed his mother. Priests killed a suckling pig to honor the gods before every public gathering in Athens. Romans killed pigs to seal public agreements, such as contracts and treaties, and to mark important private occasions, such as births and weddings.
Although the pig served as an all-purpose sacrificial animal, it carried a more specific meaning as a symbol of fertility. Demeter, Greek goddess of wheat, was honored with pig sacrifices. With her daughter Persephone—who was condemned to spend a third of each year in Hades—Demeter symbolized the circle of life, of death in winter followed by rebirth in spring. At Thesmophoria, the most widespread festival in ancient Greece, priestesses cast piglets into a pit and later retrieved their rotting carcasses and placed them on the altar of Demeter. The rotted pork was then scattered in the fields to ensure a good harvest. In Greece young pigs were known by the terms khoiros and delphax, both of which also could refer to women’s genitalia, and the Latin porcus carried the same dual meaning. Aristophanes makes some horrifying puns on this double meaning in his play Acharnians, where a starving man disguises his two daughters as pigs and sells them in the market. The scholar Varro noted that Romans “call that part which in girls is the mark of their sex porcus” to indicate that they were “mature enough for marriage.”
A swine, a sheep, and a bull are led to their deaths on a Roman altar. Whereas Jews rejected pigs as unclean, Romans sacrificed them to the gods and feasted on them with abandon. These two attitudes—Jewish repulsion and Roman embrace—have defined Western attitudes toward pigs ever since.
The use of pigs as fertility symbols traces back to the region’s first farming communities. Just north of Greece in the Balkans, archaeologists have found early Neolithic statues of pigs studded with grains of wheat and barley. Like a seed germinating in the soil, a sow giving birth to many piglets demonstrated the bounty of nature. Sacrificing pigs honored the gods and ensured that the fields, and the people themselves, would enjoy abundant fertility.
Most people in the ancient world ate vegetarian diets heavy on grains and beans. This was the cheapest way to feed large populations. Rome was different. Although meat was expensive, Rome was rich, and a sizable class of people had enough money to eat it regularly.
Romans ate beef, lamb, and goat, but they preferred pork. Hippocrates, the Greek physician, proclaimed pork the best of all meats, and his Roman successors agreed. There were more Latin words for pork than for any other meat, and the trade became highly specialized: there were distinct terms for sellers of live pigs (suarii), fresh pork (porcinarius), dried pork (confectorarius), and ham (pernarius). According to the Edict of Diocletian, issued in 301 ad, sow’s udder, sow’s womb, and liver of fig-fattened swine commanded the highest prices of any meat, costing twice as much as lamb. Beef sausages sold for just half the price of pork. After the Punic Wars, the percentage of pig bones in Carthage doubled, just as it had in Jerusalem under Roman occupation: Romans kept eating pork even in arid climates such as North Africa and Palestine, where pigs were more difficult to raise.
The richest source on Roman cuisine, a recipe book known as De re coquinaria, or On Cooking, confirms this love of swine. Pork dishes far outnumber those made with other meats. The section called “Quadrupeds” contains four recipes for beef and veal, eleven for lamb, and seventeen for suckling pig. Other sections of the book offer recipes for adult sows and boars an
d nearly all of their parts, including brain, skin, womb, udder, liver, stomach, kidneys, and lungs. Archeology confirms that Romans carved up pigs more carefully and thoroughly than they did other creatures: pig skulls found in Roman dumps contain far more butchery scars than the skulls of sheep and cows, evidence that butchers excised the tongues, cheeks, and brains of pigs but not those of other beasts.
More than half of the dishes in On Cooking are relatively modest—barley soup with onion and ham bone, for example—and within the means of much of the urban population, but others demanded greater resources. Apicius is credited with inventing the technique of overfeeding a sow with figs in order to enlarge the liver, much as geese were stuffed with grain to create foie gras. In Apicius’s recipe, the fig-fattened pig liver is marinated in liquamen—a fermented fish sauce central to Roman cuisine—wrapped in caul fat, and grilled. The recipe for pig paunch starts with this salutary advice: “Carefully empty out a pig’s stomach.” The cook is then instructed to fill the stomach with a mixture of pork, “three brains that have had their sinews removed,” raw eggs, pine nuts, peppercorns, anise, ginger, rue, and other seasonings. Finally, the stomach is tied at both ends—“leaving a little space so that it does not burst during cooking”—boiled, smoked, boiled some more, and then served.
Some of the more elaborate dishes in On Cooking fall under the heading ofellae, which literally means a morsel of food. In one recipe, a skin-on pork belly is scored on the meat side, marinated for days in a blend of liquamen, pepper, cumin, and other spices, and then roasted. The chunks of meat would then be pulled from the skin, sauced, and served, forming bite-sized pieces that a diner could eat by hand while reclining, the preferred posture for Roman feasts. Another of the luxury dishes involves boiling a ham, removing the skin, scoring the flesh, and coating it with honey, a preparation that would not be out of place at Christmas dinner today.