Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig

by Mark Essig

  Though Chicago dominated the US pork market, it was not the only game in town. Cincinnati remained important, and the packing industry grew in St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Omaha. The telegraph lines that ran alongside railroad tracks gave farmers the most valuable of business commodities: information. Now farmers could drive or ship their pigs to the packinghouse offering the highest price per pound.

  In order to attract farmers with high prices while still turning a large profit, packinghouses strove for efficiency. In 1838, after a visit to Cincinnati, English writer Harriet Martineau observed, “The division of labour is brought to as much perfection in these slaughter-houses as in the pin-manufactories of Birmingham,” a reference to a famous passage in The Wealth of Nations in which Adam Smith explains that productivity rose enormously when the making of the simple pin was “divided into eighteen distinct operations.” Twenty years later Frederick Law Olmsted described “a sort of human chopping-machine” at a Cincinnati plant. “No iron cog-wheels could work with more regular motion,” he wrote. “Plump falls the hog upon the table, chop, chop; chop, chop; chop, chop, fall the cleavers. All is over. But, before you can say so, plump, chop, chop; chop, chop; chop, chop, sounds again. There is no pause for admiration. . . . We took out our watches and counted thirty-five seconds, from the moment when one hog touched the table until the next occupied its place.”

  Martineau and Olmsted observed efficient division of labor, but the dead hogs were still being carried by hand to the chopping block. Soon that would change, as the process became automated.

  The modern pork-packing line, fully developed by the 1860s, started with pigs being driven up a ramp—known as the “Bridge of Sighs” in Chicago—to the top floor of a two- or three-story plant. A worker attached a chain to a rear leg of each pig and hooked the other end of the chain to an overhead rail, which hoisted the animal, kicking and squealing, into the air. The “sticker” plunged a knife into the pig’s neck, and blood poured out of the wound and through a latticed floor, to be collected in barrels below. Now dead, the pig was plunged into a tank twenty feet long and six feet wide, filled with water kept near boiling by a continuous flow of steam. Men standing alongside used short poles to keep the line of hogs bobbing along the trough, rolling them over to ensure an even scald that would loosen the hair.

  At the end of the tank a rake-like device lifted the carcass and dumped it onto an inclined table with eight or nine men on each side. Their job was to scrape off the hog’s hair and bristles: cattle were skinned, but pork was sold skin-on because the skin was tender enough to eat. The first two men took off only the bristles—valuable for use in brushes—along the spine. The carcass then slid or rolled down to the next men in line, who used short-handled hoes or sharp knives to scrape and shave the hair from every bit of the pig. (By the 1890s, most of these hair-removing jobs had disappeared, taken over by automated scrapers.)

  At the end of the table, two men attached a stick called a gambrel that stretched the rear legs apart, then hooked the gambrel to an overhead track—known as “the railroad”—so that the pig swung free of the table, hanging from its splayed feet. Propelled by gravity or a steam-driven chain, the pig carcass started down the line. At the first station, two men sprayed it with cold water to wash away loose hair and filth; then the railroad made a series of stops at four foot intervals: the “dry shaver” removed stray hairs; the gut man slashed the belly open with a single stroke, allowing the intestines to pour out; the organ man removed the heart, liver, and other innards; finally, another man with a hose sprayed out the interior of the carcass. Each worker had just twelve seconds to perform his task. The hog then rolled off to the cooling room to await butchery the next day.

  The technology of this line was not complex. The idea was what mattered, and it was inspired by the nature of packing hogs, a messy job not easily mechanized. Pigs have complex shapes, and each is slightly different, so the work of killing, bleeding, gutting, cleaning, and cutting required the practiced eye of a human worker. There were two ways to make it more efficient: reduce the effort expended by workers in hoisting slippery carcasses and shorten the interval between each operation. The pork industry found ingenious ways of doing both.

  The overhead rail marked an epochal moment in the history of factory work. The Ford Motor Company holds the credit for inventing the modern assembly line to make the Model T in 1913. An assembly line entails a number of features, including the subdivision of labor (at least as old as Adam Smith’s pin factory in the 1770s) and interchangeable parts (developed by clock and gun makers even earlier). Pigs, of course, are living creatures that (at least before the era of genetic modification) lack the sort of anatomical consistency that would allow for this sort of processing. But pork packers in the nineteenth century did make one key innovation that set the stage for Ford’s assembly lines: they remained in place while the item of manufacture—in this case, a hog—came to them.

  Assembling cars and disassembling pigs had much in common. In most factories the worker “spends more of his time walking about [looking] for materials and tools than he does in working,” Henry Ford noted drily in his autobiography. “He gets small pay because pedestrianism is not a highly paid line.” Ford explained that his company found a solution in what he called the “overhead trolley” used by pork packers to carry dead hogs to a succession of workstations. A moving line—of pigs or cars—not only cut down on heavy lifting but also set the pace of the work. Each slaughterhouse worker had just seconds to perform his task before another pig arrived. It was rough on the workers, but the rate of production soared. The genius of the packers’ disassembly line and of the Model T assembly line, Ford explained, lay in their bringing “the work to the men instead of the men to the work.”

  The pig disassembly line became a standard stop for journalists and tourists visiting Chicago. “Great as this wonderful city is in everything,” a British traveler said, “the first place among its strong points must be given to the celerity and comprehensiveness of the Chicago style of killing hogs.”

  The “comprehensiveness” of Chicago’s pork producers extended to their use of the carcass. In Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a slaughterhouse employee says, “They use everything about the hog except the squeal,” and the novel’s narrator mocks him for using a stale “witticism.” Though the expression had already become a cliché by 1906, it was nonetheless true. Snout-to-tail eating may have been the frugal tradition of peasants, but no one could squeeze all the value from a pig like a profit-hungry pork packer.

  Workers in Chicago chain live hogs to a wheel that hoists them into the air for slaughter, just one part of a sophisticated system invented to process the enormous hog crop of the Corn Belt. Henry Ford said that the idea of the assembly line was inspired by a visit to a slaughterhouse. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

  Packers preferred pigs to be about two hundred pounds and fattened on corn. Acorn-fed pigs, though prized today, were considered second-rate in nineteenth-century America. Corn produced firm, shelf-stable pork fat. An acorn diet, heavy in unsaturated fats, made for soft, oily pork fat, which improves the flavor of dry-cured hams but makes barreled pork—the most marketable type at the time—mushy and prone to rancidity. In 1837 corn-fed hogs sold for $5 per hundred pounds of live weight, while mast-fed brought only $3.

  Most Corn Belt meat was placed in barrels and covered with a brine of salt, sugar, and saltpeter (potassium nitrate, a preservative that also imparted a pinkish color to otherwise grey meat). Known as “barreled pork,” “pickled pork,” or simply “pork,” it appealed to buyers because of its cheapness and long shelf life. Pickled pork was divided into three classes. The highest quality, “clear pork,” was sold mostly in New England, where cod and mackerel fishermen demanded the best as their shipboard provisions. The military and other large institutions primarily purchased “mess,” the second-best quality. Slaves in the United States and the
Caribbean ate the lowest quality, known as “prime.”

  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.

  Since 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”

  One 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.