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

by Mark Essig

  164In 1855 more than 83,000 hogs: Asheville News, February 1, 1855.

  164The route through the Cumberland Gap: Dwight Billings, The Road to Poverty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47.

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  167Americans, she thought, were overconfident and undereducated: Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1832), 12.

  167“I am sure I should have liked Cincinnati”: Trollope, Domestic Manners, 85.

  168As she was on a stroll one day: Trollope, Domestic Manners, 85.

  168“’Tis to be a slaughter-house for hogs”: Trollope, Domestic Manners, 98.

  169Dozens of midsized packers were scattered: Margaret Walsh, The Rise of the Midwestern Meat Packing Industry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 41.

  169Just as importantly, the rivers allowed salt: Isaac Lippincott, “The Early Salt Trade of the Ohio Valley,” Journal of Political Economy 20 (1912): 1034–1035.

  170By the 1870s, it had reached 6 million: Margaret Walsh, “Pork Packing as a Leading Edge of Midwestern Industry, 1835–1875,” Agricultural History 51 (1977): 704.

  170“hog butcher for the world”: Carl Sandburg, “Chicago,” in Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003), 3.

  170slaughtering as many as 4 million hogs: Walsh, Rise, 8.

  170With the coming of the Civil War: William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 229–230.

  170In 1838, after a visit to Cincinnati: Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), 233.

  170a reference to a famous passage in The Wealth of Nations: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1843), 3–4.

  170Twenty years later Frederick Law Olmsted described: Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas (New York: Dix, Edwards, 1857), 9.

  172Each worker had just twelve seconds: James Parton, “Cincinnati,” Atlantic Monthly 20 (1867): 240–243; Charles Cist, “The Hog and Its Products,” in Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1866, ed. J. W. Stokes (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1867), 392–396; Charles Cist, Cincinnati Miscellany (Cincinnati, OH: C. Clark, 1845).

  172There were two ways to make it more efficient: S. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 93.

  173The genius of the packers’ disassembly line: Henry Ford, My Life and Work (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1922), 80–81; David E. Nye, “What Was the Assembly Line?,” Tidsskrift for Historie 1 (2010): 59–81.

  173“Great as this wonderful city is in everything”: Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 207.

  173In Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a slaughterhouse employee: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Penguin: 2001), 38.

  175In 1837 corn-fed hogs sold for $5: Rudolf Clemen, The American Livestock and Meat Industry (New York: Ronald Press, 1923), 54.

  175A visitor to the Illinois prairie in 1837: S. A. Mitchell, Illinois in 1837 (Philadelphia: S. A. Mitchell, 1837), 42.

  176Organs, as well as meat from ribs and necks: Cist, “Hog,” 386.

  177That meant big packers could pay higher prices for pigs: Cist, “Hog,” 385–386.

  177Widows typically received 120 pounds: Richard Cummings, The American and His Food (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 15.

  177In the antebellum South, a typical ration: Kenneth Kiple, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 81–82.

  177Laborers in the North ate 170 pounds: W. J. Warren, Tied to the Great Packing Machine (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), 221.

  177“There are a great many ill conveniences here”: Arthur Schlesinger, Paths to the Present (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 244.

  177The United States in 1900 saw itself as a nation: Warren, Tied, 223.

  178and even in 1900 only two: Roderick Floud, The Changing Body (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 309.

  178In his 1845 novel The Chainbearer: James Fenimore Cooper, The Chainbearer (New York: D. Appleton, 1833), 102.

  178In Eliza Leslie’s Directions for Cookery: Eliza Leslie, Directions for Cookery (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1844), 120.

  178One man, recalling his midwestern childhood: Robert Leslie Jones, History of Agriculture in Ohio to 1880 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983).

  178As a physician wrote in the magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book: Joseph Stainback Wilson, “Quantity of Gastric Juice,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 60 (1860): 178.

  179The upper class bought refrigerated beef: Richard Perren, Taste, Trade and Technology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 1–8.

  179As shipping technology improved and global trade expanded: Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine, and Class (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 154.

  179Workers who once had spent 50 to 75 percent: Stephen Broadberry and Kevin 179. O’Rourke, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1:148; Wilhelm Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe (London: Methuen and Company, 1978), 142.

  180The average height of adults: Gretel Pelto and Pertti Pelto, “Diet and Delocalization,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14 (1983): 514–515.

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  181As they rounded up stray pigs: Catherine McNeur, “‘The Swinish Multitude’: Controversies over Hogs in Antebellum New York City,” Journal of Urban History 37 (2011): 639.

  181Someone threw a brick: McNeur, “Swinish Multitude,” 639.

  181The city’s streets functioned: Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Law Review (July/August 1985): 904.

  182The odds of that happening were good: McNeur, “Swinish Multitude,” 640.

  182The pigs devoured “all kinds of refuse”: Ole Munch Ræder, America in the Forties (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1929), 78.

  182Colonial New England towns appointed “hog reeves”: William Cronon, Changes in the Land (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 136.

  183These were not chubby Corn Belt pigs: Charles Dickens, American Notes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1868), 38.

  183Loose pigs in the streets: C. H. Wilson, The Wanderer in America (Thirsk, UK: H. Masterman, 1822), 18.

  183In The Condition of the Working-Class in England: Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1892), 52–53, 49.

  183In the Potteries, a large slum: Peter Stallybrass, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 147.

  183In Reflections on the Revolution in France: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), 117.

  184In the 1860s and 1870s, public health measures: Robert Malcolmson, The English Pig (London: Hambledon, 2001), 43.

  184New York’s professional police force: McNeur, “Swinish Multitude,” 648.

  185Southerners “delight in their present low”: Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, “The South from Self-Sufficiency to Peonage: An Interpretation,” American Historical Review 85 (1980): 1095.

  185If this were true: R. Ben Brown, “The Southern Range: A Study of Nineteenth Century Law and Society” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1993), 161.

  186That left millions of acres available: Brown, “Southern Range,” 3; Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 118–120.

  186“You can keep as many pigs as you wish”: Joseph Eder, “A Bavarian’s Journey to New Orleans and Nacogdoches in 1853–1854,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 23 (1940): 497.

  186A prosperous farmer in the Blue Ridge Mountains: M. R. Walpole, “The Closing of the Open Range in
Watauga County, NC,” Appalachian Journal 16 (1989): 326.

  186Barbecue—both the word and the technique were borrowed: John Shelton Reed, Dale Volberg Reed, and William McKinney, Holy Smoke (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 12–14.

  186As one English visitor to America explained: Reuben Gold Thwaites et al., Early Western Travels, 1748–1846 (Cleveland, OH: Clark, 1905), 11:106.

  187Laborers, he wrote, if “furnished with free food”: Brown, “Southern Range,” 190.

  187Legislatures in every state closed the range: Brown, “Southern Range,” 280.

  187A newspaper claimed that this change: Brown, “Southern Range,” 217.

  187This was indeed the effect: E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964), 217.

  187Historians who examined six counties in Alabama and Mississippi: McDonald and McWhiney, “South from Self-Sufficiency,” 1114.

  188In the 1880s, one writer described: Brown, “Southern Range,” 222.

  188In nineteenth-century England: Peter Bowden, “Agricultural Prices, Farm Profits, and Rents,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. Joan Thirsk and H. P. R. Finberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 4:416.

  188“Life without a pig was almost unthinkable”: Walter Rose, Good Neighbours (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 58.

  188The pig was “one of the best friends of the poor”: Malcolmson, English Pig, 45.

  188“The pig was an important member of the family”: Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (Boston: David R. Godine, 2009), 10.

  189“Not much profit there”: Ralph Whitlock, The Land First (London: Museum Press, 1954), 78.

  189“Watching her now as she tucked into a sort of hash”: P. G. Wodehouse, Heavy Weather, in Life at Blandings (New York: Penguin, 1981), 415.

  189E. B. White, who lived: E. B. White, “Death of a Pig,” in The American Idea, ed. Robert Vare (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 286–294.

  190According to an English observer, “A man”: Reginald Ernest Moreau, The Departed Village (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 114.

  190A study of Oxfordshire suggested that raising pigs: Malcolmson, English Pig, 57.

  190“Pig clubs,” a sort of mutual insurance program: Malcolmson, English Pig, 59.

  190In Middlemarch, George Eliot defines a happy village: George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Harper & Brothers, 18732), 277.

  191“The killing of the pig”: Rose, Good Neighbours, 65.

  191Pa removes the bladder: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods (New York: Harper Trophy, 1971), 14–15.

  191One girl recalled that, during the pig killing: Thompson, Lark Rise, 12, 271.

  191Thomas Hardy devotes an entire chapter of Jude the Obscure: Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895), 1:71–72.

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  195“The ear was assailed by a most terrifying shriek”: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Penguin: 2001), 39–40.

  196A newspaper described Sinclair’s concern for pig suffering: W. J. Warren, Tied to the Great Packing Machine (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), 127.

  196“I aimed at the public’s heart”: James Harvey Young, Pure Food (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 229.

  196There was never the least attention paid: Sinclair, Jungle, 136–137.

  198The government victory proved only nominal: A. M. Azzam and Dale G. Anderson, Assessing Competition in Meatpacking (Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, 1996), 15–16; Alfred Chandler, Strategy and Structure (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 25–26.

  198Meatpackers had been using borax: Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 59.

  199The federal government took over inspection: Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 465–466.

  199In the decade after The Jungle’s publication: Warren, Tied, 145–146, 221.

  199Meatpackers, though, blamed The Jungle: Warren, Tied, 146.

  199According to Edward Hitchcock: Edward Hitchcock, Dyspepsy Forestalled (Amherst, MA: J. S. & C. Adams, 1831), 185.

  199“Fat bacon and pork are peculiarly appropriate for negroes”: Joseph Stainback Wilson, “Quantity of Gastric Juice,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 60 (1860): 178.

  199This was thanks in no small part to Sylvester Graham: Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 44.

  200America had inherited from England a hierarchy: Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England (London: Continuum, 2006), 249.

  200One cookbook writer dismissed barreled pork: Horowitz, Putting Meat, 45.

  200another described pork as “dangerously unwholesome”: Keith Stavely, America’s Founding Food (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 193–194.

  200An 1893 guide to household management claimed: Marion Harland, Common Sense in the Household (New York: Charles Scribner, 1893), 116.

  200For southern whites, the same was true: Horowitz, Putting Meat, 12.

  201American hams—especially Virginia’s Smithfield variety: Joseph Earl Dabney, Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread and Scuppernong Wine (Nashville, TN: Cumberland House, 1998), 189.

  201Later they invented “vein-pumping”: Horowitz, Putting Meat, 60–62.

  202The method could not deliver the intense flavor: Horowitz, Putting Meat, 58.

  202By 1960 bacon had shed its reputation: Horowitz, Putting Meat, 62–69.

  202leading to headlines such as: “Missouri Town Reports 47 Cases of Trichinosis,” New York Times, January 28, 1969.

  203When in-sink garbage grinders such as the DisposAll: “Garbage Grinder Becomes an Issue,” New York Times, May 5, 1966.

  203In a period of just over two years: Thomas Moore, “Prevailing Methods of Garbage Collection and Disposal in American Cities,” The American City 22 (1920): 602–608; Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 116, 127, 163, 206.

  203The farms survived until 1960: Orville Schell, Modern Meat (New York: Random House, 1984), 71–85.

  204“Human trichinosis is based almost entirely on porcine trichinosis”: Sylvester Gould, Trichinosis in Man and Animals (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1970), 506.

  204“Although garbage-fed hogs are daily sold as food”: Moore, “Prevailing Methods.”

  204Meat quality suffered: R. Lawrie, Lawrie’s Meat Science (Boca Raton, FL: Woodhead Publishing, 2006), 99.

  204As one scientific study noted: Gould, Trichinosis 394.

  204A 1942 study from the USDA noted: Family Food Consumption in the United States, Spring 1942 (Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, 1944), 15.

  205A 1955 study of urban consumers found: Faith Clark et al., Food Consumption of Urban Families in the United States (Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, 1955), Table 75.

  205Urbanites devoted half of their meat consumption to beef: Family Food Consumption, 14–15.

  205That year, for the first time, Americans ate more beef: J. L. Anderson, “Lard to Lean: Making the Meat-Type Hog in Post–World War II America,” in Food Chains, ed. Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 30.

  205By the 1970s, pork consumption had fallen: Warren, Tied, 222; Christopher Davis and Biing-Hwan Lin, Factors Affecting U.S. Pork Consumption (Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, 2005), 4.

  205The president of the National Pork Producers Council traveled the country: Don Muhm, Iowa Pork and People (Clive: Iowa Pork Foundation, 1995), 60.

  205They created a mascot, Lady Loinette: Jenny Barker Devine, “‘Hop to the Top with the Iowa Chop’: The Iowa
Porkettes and Cultivating Agrarian Feminisms in the Midwest, 1964–1992,” Agricultural History 83 (2009): 480.

  206One queen asked, “Who first but Iowa”: Muhm, Iowa Pork, 100.

  206The Porkettes held contests for baking with lard: Muhm, Iowa Pork, 90.

  206The group’s magazine, Ladies Pork Journal, included: Muhm, Iowa Pork, 79.

  206The first president of the Porkettes told a story: Devine, “Hop to the Top,” 478.

  206Another Porkette was conducting a grocery store promotion: Muhm, Iowa Pork, 107.

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  207When the lights came on: Rolland Paul et al., The Pork Story (Des Moines, IA: NPPC, 1991), 183.

  207Many thought it was a “dumb idea”: Paul et al., Pork Story, 183.

  208In one survey more than a third of Americans agreed: J. L. Anderson, “Lard to Lean: Making the Meat-Type Hog in Post–World War II America,” in Food Chains, ed. Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 42; also see National Research Council, Designing Foods (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1988), 43.

  208Eight out of ten Americans recognized the phrase: “Humane Society Lawsuit Brings National Pork Board Response,” Western Farm Press, September 27, 2012; Richard Horwitz, Hog Ties (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 39.

  208In 2011 Adweek deemed the campaign: Ed Norton, “‘The Other White Meat’ Finally Cedes Its Place,” Adweek, March 4, 2011.

  210In 1907 the Danes had created swine testing stations: Earl B. Shaw, “Swine Industry of Denmark,” Economic Geography 14 (1938): 23; Julian Wiseman, The Pig, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 2000), 71–73.

  210The Hampshire registry, for instance, specified: Don Muhm, Iowa Pork and People (Clive: Iowa Pork Foundation, 1995), 196.

  211By the 1970s, a pig of the same size: Anderson, “Lard to Lean,” 39.

  211They roamed on pasture in the spring: F. B. Morrison, Feeds and Feeding (Ithaca, NY: Morrison Publishing, 1956), 843–867.

  211In 1938 the United States raised 62 million hogs: Richard Perren, Taste, Trade and Technology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 110; Earl B. Shaw, “Swine Production in the Corn Belt of the United States,” Economic Geography 12 (1936): 359.