by Mark Essig
In medieval and Renaissance Europe, pork came to define status, but in complicated ways. At first a ubiquitous food for all, pork later became a luxury enjoyed only by the rich, then, later still, a dangerous food fit only for peasants. Pigs, meanwhile, continued to lose habitat and food sources: forests fell to the axe, commons were enclosed, and more cities banished free-ranging animals. By 1600, the European pig was in serious decline—until it found a new niche within modern commerce and received an infusion of fresh blood from China.
Between 1000 and 1400 ad, Europe’s population and food supply experienced wild swings. Before 1000, when Europe’s forests were deep, pigs ran wild and nearly everyone ate pork—the only key distinction being that the rich ate more of it than the poor. Such widespread meat eating was possible only when the human population remained small and rangeland for livestock was plentiful. When the Medieval Warm Period started about 950 ad, higher temperatures lengthened the growing season. This prompted farmers to clear forests and plant more crops, and the human population grew in tandem with the supply of grain: between 1000 and 1350, the number of people in Europe exploded from about 25 million to about 60 million. More food meant more people, and more people meant more demand for food. As the great economist Thomas Malthus would later explain, this was bound to end badly.
The population boom changed the types of food people ate because eating plants is more efficient than eating animals: on a given plot of land, growing grain can produce twenty times as many calories as raising livestock. As the number of humans rose in Europe, the number of farm animals plummeted. Nobles continued to eat large amounts of flesh—as much as three pounds of meat and fish per day—but the peasant diet consisted almost entirely of cereals, which lacked protein and essential nutrients. As this trend continued, the ecological and health effects became more severe. By 1250, intensive cropping had drained the soil of nutrients, and there were fewer farm animals producing manure for fertilizer. Already malnourished, European peasants began to starve. Soon environmental change would make the situation even worse.
Around the turn of the fourteenth century, the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age, and the colder weather hurt harvests. By 1300, Europe had seen the first of a series of crop failures and famines that would devastate the region over the next half century. When the Black Death—most likely bubonic plague carried by fleas on rats—arrived in southern Italy in 1347, it found a continent weakened by famine and unable to fight off disease. Over the next four years, about a third of the people in Europe died.
The Black Death produced one positive side effect: peasant diets improved. Demand for food fell, which caused prices to decline. In France and Germany the price of grain plunged by as much as 70 percent. With workers scarce, wages rose and peasants could afford to buy meat. In 1397 the average resident of Berlin ate more than three pounds of meat a day, far more than today. On one manor in Norfolk, England, harvest workers in the pre-plague era had received just one ounce of meat with every two pounds of bread; after the plague, a full pound of meat accompanied those two pounds of bread. Europeans may have suffered the horror of watching a third of their neighbors die, but they at least could console themselves with a good meal.
The Black Death democratized meat, and democracy is always troubling to the elite. When the meals served in castles began to resemble those cooked in cottages, Europe’s nobility made a dietary pivot, and pigs were one of the animals most affected. During the prior few hundred years, when peasants had supped on gruel, eating pork offered nobles sufficient proof of their elite status. Now, as pork became affordable even to the lower orders, the wealthy began to spurn it.
Europe’s elites turned from hoofed livestock to winged beasts. When archaeologists dig up castle sites around England, they find that pig bones begin to dwindle not long after the Black Death and are replaced by those of fowl, especially wild birds, which had become the new marker of wealth. In 1501 the Duke of Buckingham hosted a meal that omitted pork, beef, and mutton entirely; instead he served five pheasants, twelve partridges, twenty-four chicks, six capons, twelve rabbits, and thirty-six small birds. Particularly suspect to Europe’s wealthy were the cheapest and most widely available forms of pork: sausage and bacon. Even the finest sausages and other cured meats were fit only for merchants and the more affluent peasants. Woodcut illustrations of peasant weddings from this era almost invariably showed tables laden with sausages and a dog running off with a purloined strand.
Physicians gave these new prejudices the sheen of medical authority. A couple of thousand years of medical thought had promoted pork as the most healthful meat, but physicians in the sixteenth century revised that tradition. They now argued that pork, rather than being the easiest flesh to digest, was the most difficult: only peasants toiling in the fields produced sufficient heat in the body to break down pork. One Renaissance doctor advised that the sedentary elite should restrict themselves to lighter fare, while sausages and bacon were fit only for the “rustical stomach.”
For reasons of status, health, or both, the elite avoided pork. “Pork is the habitual food of poor people,” a visitor to Paris observed in 1557. A century later a Frenchman noted, “With the exception of hams and a few other more delicate portions, today only the lower classes are nourished on pork.” In Scotland, another writer reported, “pork is generally despised, and left to be consumed by the mean populace.”
The “mean populace,” however, delighted in pork, especially on festival days when they gorged on roast pig and sausages. The sausage played the same role in the Renaissance as the hot dog in twentieth-century America—providing a cheap, filling meal for urban crowds. The elite, then as now, suspected that the common people congregated only to feast, gamble, and whore. Though the wealthy were prone to these vices as well, they could indulge privately. The poor, among their many misfortunes, were forced to sin in public, and their sinning and pork eating became intertwined.
The English sometimes referred to a brothel as a “hog house,” and indeed the connection between pork and sex stretches back to the ancient world. The boys who sold sausages at Greek and Roman markets often doubled as prostitutes. And then there is the inescapable fact that chopped meat stuffed into an intestinal casing produces a rather suggestive shape. The most common Greek word for sausage, allas, makes its first written appearance referring not to food but to sex: a line from the Greek poet Hipponax describes an aroused man “drawing from the tip down, as if stroking a sausage.”
The sexual associations of pork carried on into the Renaissance. Bartholomew Fair, a riotous event that took place in London each August, gave its name to the Bartholomew pig, roasted whole and served to fairgoers eager to indulge all of their sensual cravings. Shakespeare’s Falstaff, a man of large and indelicate appetites, is described as a “whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig.” In Ben Jonson’s comedy Bartholomew Fair, the most dissolute characters gather at a pork-selling stand operated by Ursula, an obese, filthy, delightfully foul-mouthed “pig-woman.” Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, a Puritan intent on remaining holy despite the fair’s corrupt enticements, decides to sample a bit of pork and ends up devouring two entire pigs—proof, as another character suggests, that “the wicked Tempter” does his work through “the carnal provocations” of the pig.
Jonson was satirizing Puritan hypocrisy, but the fear he targeted was real enough. Pork, in the minds of many Renaissance Europeans, was for people who had fallen prey to fleshly appetites. Those who wished to maintain control—Puritans, nobles, priests, a rising bourgeoisie—had best choose other foods.
Avoiding pork was getting easier. After the Black Death, abandoned fields didn’t return to forest but instead became pasture for sheep and cattle. With grazing more abundant, England’s romance with roast beef came into full flower. The wool industry boomed, producing abundant cheap mutton as a by-product. The enclosure movement, which brought land previously held in common under private control, elim
inated the woods and wastes where peasants had formerly kept pigs. By 1696, England had about 12 million sheep and 4.5 million cows, but only 2 million pigs.
Most farmers kept just one or two pigs to convert waste. Gervase Markham, in a 1614 book titled Cheape and Good Husbandry, judged pigs “the husbandman’s best scavenger, and the huswive’s most wholsome sink,” because they eat everything that would otherwise “rot in the yard [and] make it beastly.” In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith praised the pig because it “greedily devours many things rejected by every other useful animal” and as a result can be “reared at little or no expense.” This trait made the pig attractive, but only in small numbers, limited by the amount of available waste.
By the seventeenth century, however, a growing economy had created a new niche for pigs. Activities such as dairying and bread making, once undertaken in every household, became large commercial enterprises. The concentration of by-products rose, and so did the concentration of pigs: they began to devour all sorts of commercial wastes. One writer noted that pigs could be fed “chandlers’ grains,” the crispy bits of flesh and gristle left over after rendering beef fat into tallow. In 1621 a London maker of starch—refined wheat used to stiffen clothes—fattened two hundred pigs on his leftover bran. Alcohol production provided an even larger source of feed: thousands of pigs lived in lots adjacent to distilleries and breweries to consume the spent grains. At dairies, milk cows shared space with pigs. Daniel Defoe reported that Wiltshire and Gloucestershire produced “the best bacon in England” from hogs fattened on “the vast quantity of whey, and skim’d milk . . . which must otherwise be thrown away.” Dairymaids churned butter, and the whey flowed through a channel directly to the pig trough. One writer defined a dairy as “a center about which a crowd of pigs was collected.”
By 1700 pigs were far less numerous in England than cattle and sheep, ruminants that provided milk, wool, and more highly prized meat. Most farmers kept only a few pigs to eat agricultural waste, as in this illustration from a 1732 farming guide. Soon, however, pigs would be raised on a larger scale to eat the by-products from commercial dairies, breweries, and distilleries.
These large herds of swine found eager buyers. In the great age of exploration, sailors needed foods that wouldn’t spoil during long voyages. This prompted a vast expansion of the salt-food industry, as pork, beef, and fish were packed into barrels and rolled aboard ships. Pork, because it preserved so well, commanded much of this market. The British navy required as many as 40,000 pigs annually, and a member of the Victualling Commission explained that he bought mostly “town-fed hogs” fattened in the yards of liquor distillers.
By the later eighteenth century, the navy had found another source of pigs. As part of the so-called agricultural revolution, farmers had started to employ new crop rotations that involved planting peas and beans to fix nitrogen and revive exhausted soil. Those legumes became hog feed, and farmers sold the pork to the navy.
Thanks to these abundant new food sources—legumes, dairy waste, distillery grains—farmers could raise pigs on a larger scale, a circumstance that favored changes in the pig’s constitution. Swine no longer roamed the streets or the woods to find their own food. Now they lived in pens and had their food delivered to them. Farmers suddenly had a strong interest in determining which types of pigs turned feed into meat most efficiently.
Like Rome a couple of thousand years earlier, London had created conditions that favored a fat sty pig. The first step in this direction was the Old English hog, a breed of obscure origin that existed in slightly different varieties all over the country. Unlike the prick-eared medieval pig, the Old English pig had lop ears drooping over its eyes. Rather than black or brown, it tended to be white, mottled, or saddled. In many cases, these pigs reached slaughter weight at about eighteen months—older than the six months of modern pigs but younger than the two or three years common for woods hogs.
The Old English marked a small improvement over the medieval forest pig, but a bigger change was on the horizon. An English agricultural writer picked up on this in 1727 when he noted the recent appearance of some odd pigs, “the little black sort with great bellies.” The animal he describes sounds nothing like any European variety—but very much like a pig from China.
Chinese swine began infiltrating Europe about the same time that the industrial and agricultural revolutions picked up steam. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA shows that European and Chinese pigs first started swapping genes sometime in the eighteenth century. And Chinese hogs were, at this point, far better suited than their European counterparts to the conditions of English agriculture.
Unlike their forest-dwelling European counterparts, Chinese swine had evolved into fat creatures of the sty, used to produce both meat to eat and manure for fertilizer. Imported to Europe after 1700, Asian pigs—such as this one depicted in an 1858 American farming manual—were interbred with European varieties to create the modern pig breeds we know today.
China, over the centuries, had developed a devotion to pigs just as intense as that of ancient Rome or early medieval Europe. In Neolithic China swine had served as a key source of wealth, and in the second millennium bc, they were commonly used in sacrificial offerings. In the centuries to come, pork remained the daily meat of wealthy Chinese and the key animal protein in a sophisticated cuisine. For China’s poor, as for Europe’s, it was the food of festivals and of survival. Peasants marked the New Year with the slaughter of the family pig, consuming the organs immediately and selling the meat or salting it away for the coming year. Even in the twentieth century, pork accounted for 70 to 80 percent of the calories from animal products consumed by the Chinese.
Overall, however, pork represented just a tiny part of the Chinese diet: in the twentieth century it accounted for just 2 percent of the total number of calories consumed by the Chinese, compared to 83 percent from grains and 7 percent from legumes. And this is not a modern development. The ancient works on Chinese agriculture virtually ignore animal husbandry, concentrating instead on rice, millet, wheat, and soy production.
How, then, did the pig come to play such an outsized role within China’s overwhelmingly vegetarian society? In the words of Chairman Mao, the pig was a “one-man fertilizer factory.” Though a large country, China’s terrain is largely rugged, with limited areas suitable for planting. It faced the problem of a growing population and dwindling food sources far earlier than Europe—as early as the third century bc—and responded with advanced agricultural methods. Pressure on the land was especially strong in the subtropical rice-growing regions of central and southern China, where every scrap of arable land was brought into production and farmers produced two or even three crops a year. This left no open land for pasturing sheep or cattle, and the intensive growing threatened to strip all nutrients from the soil. But the pig saved the day, ensuring that China’s soil didn’t become depleted the way that Europe’s did.
Chinese swine were penned and fed on agricultural waste—especially the hulls of rice—mixed with wild-growing plants such as water hyacinth. The pig functioned as a composting machine, transforming coarse vegetation into precious fertilizer. More intensive agriculture increased the need for fertilizer, but it also boosted the amount of agricultural by-products to feed pigs and therefore the quantity of manure. Pigpens were constructed with watertight floors to collect not only feces but also urine, an especially rich source of nitrogen. When modernizers introduced American pig breeds into China in the 1930s, the farmers complained that though the animals grew quickly, they produced too little manure.
From a very early date, pigs in China were confined to small sties, and this created distinct evolutionary pressures. They became short-legged, swaybacked, and potbellied, with squashed snouts and concave faces. They were adapted to eat, gain weight, and breed. Some Chinese sows produced litters of twenty piglets.
Merchant ships began plying the ocean routes
between Europe and Asia in the sixteenth century, and by 1700 or so, they had carried Chinese pigs to England. The timing was propitious. In the European forests of 900 ad, the Chinese pig would have been easy prey for wolves and bears, and it would have lost badly to the forest pig in the race to gobble up falling acorns. But it was adapted well to the conditions of eighteenth-century industrial England: living in pens and eating beans, distillery grains, and dairy waste. The subtropical Chinese pigs were a bit delicate for colder British conditions, so breeders crossed them with European types, hoping to produce a hardy pig that would gain weight quickly and produce piglets by the dozen. Eventually, that is exactly what happened: the forest pig was pushed to the margins in Europe, ousted by its fatter rival.
But the forest pig’s moment in history hadn’t quite passed—it had new lands to conquer. The wild boar and domestic pig had spread throughout Eurasia, from Norway to Thailand, but oceans had prevented them from colonizing the Western Hemisphere. That changed after 1492, when ships started sailing west across the Atlantic. The New World, as it turned out, was a perfect place for pigs. Swine thrived in the Americas and played a crucial role in assisting Europeans as they conquered new lands.
NINE
“All the Mountains Swarmed with Them”
Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had little faith in Christopher Columbus’s plan to find the Orient by sailing west, so in 1492 they outfitted him grudgingly with three small ships and a crew of ninety men. When he returned to Spain in March the following year with a few gold trinkets, a flock of parrots, and a handful of captive “Indians,” the monarchs’ enthusiasm grew. Six months later Columbus departed again with seventeen ships holding 1,200 men and enough supplies to establish a permanent colony, including everything they needed to re-create the Spanish diet in the New World. They took seeds and cuttings for wheat, chickpeas, melons, onion, radishes, salad greens, sugarcane, grapes, peaches, pears, oranges, and lemons. The ships also carried a menagerie of domestic animals: chickens, horses, cows, sheep, goats, and pigs.