The whole hog
The pig has contributed more to human happiness and well-being, in diverse ways, than any other creature.
‘During its lifetime the pig was an important member of the family,’ recalls Flora Thompson in her evocative Oxfordshire memoir, Lark Rise to Candleford. ‘Its health and condition were regularly reported on in letters to children away from home, together with news of their brothers and sisters.
‘Male callers on Sunday came not to see the family but the pig, and would lounge with its owner against the pigsty door for an hour, scratching piggy’s back and praising his points.’
At that time, in late Victorian England, a quarter of rural households kept a cottage pig. Not to do so ‘was almost unthinkable’, observed a Buckinghamshire man, quoted in Robert Malcolmson’s classic The English Pig: A History. ‘To have a sty in the garden was thought as essential to the happiness of a newly wed couple as a living room or bedroom.’
Purchased as a piglet after weaning, its rearing over several months epitomised nature’s alchemy, transforming waste into goodness, so little into so much. Vegetable scraps from the kitchen, the neighbour’s potato peelings, the water in which food had been cooked, all went into the pig tub at the back door. After school, children foraged for acorns, the farm worker labouring in the fields would gather bundles of hogweed, or cow parsnip, ‘well known to be a lucrative food for swine’, to bring home.
And the increasingly well nourished ‘family member’ would deposit its dung, fertiliser for the cottage garden.
Come November, this virtuous cycle of frugal self-sufficiency would come to an end. The loss of the companionship of the cottage pig was compensated for by the 300 pounds of black pudding, sausages, pork pies, ham and bacon it would become.
‘There was nothing like your own bacon from a pig you had fed yourself on good honest scraps and boiled-up hogwash,’ recalls a Worcestershire farmhand. ‘That bacon was sweet, as sweet as the vegetables we ate with it, and the fat was guaranteed to build beautiful babies.’
Other foods followed in due course: chitterlings from the intestines, faggots from other organs, the trotters salted in water and boiled, the head pickled to become brawn. The fat boiled down to make lard would serve for months to come, to fry the tail and spread on bread. In total, a silk purse, almost literally, from a sow’s ear.
While the major role of pigs in human affairs is undoubtedly feeding those who would otherwise go hungry, every bit from snout to tail has further uses.
It took Dutch writer Christien Meindertsma the best part of two years to track down for her book Pig 05049 all 187 products that can be derived from a single pig. They include, obviously enough, high-quality leather from its skin, paintbrushes from bristles and glue from bones.
There is pork fat in shampoo and anti-ageing cream, gelatin in cheesecake and chewing gum. Pig ashes are added to fine bone china, and you can apparently find elements of pig in bread, beer, cigarette filters, car parts, brake discs and as a coating for bullets.
This is all relatively minor compared to their monumental, if little appreciated, contribution to medicine. Pig insulin has been keeping diabetics alive for decades, while cardiac surgeons have been replacing damaged heart valves with their porcine equivalent since the 1960s.
The astonishing innovations of keyhole surgery and coronary angioplasty would never have happened, if not for the remarkable, almost interchangeable, anatomical similarity between the pig’s internal organs – kidneys, lungs, heart, gut – and our own.
Hats off to pigs, whose sacrifices on our behalf rarely receive the acknowledgement they so deserve.