30 Jul 2015 Why the pig is the most loved and most loathed animal on the plate

SWINE reproduce far more quickly than cows and sheep, thanks to brief gestation periods and large litters, and pork only improves when cured with salt and smoke. If your goal is to produce a great deal of meat and then store it at room temperature — crucial before refrigerators came along — the pig is the animal for you.

Enormously useful as they are, swine have not been universally adored. The history of pigs is a tale of love and loathing. As long as pigs have existed, people have weighed their hunger for meat against worries about how the animals lived and what they ate. And today, we have just as much reason to worry about how pigs are living.

Pigs and people have similar digestive systems and similar diets: Both are omnivores who thrive on meat, roots and seeds. It was food that first brought them together. About 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers in Anatolia — now Turkey — settled down into villages. Almost immediately, Eurasian wild boars began slinking into town to devour scraps, spoiled grain and rotten fruit. In time, some of those scavenging boars evolved into domestic pigs. Sus scrofa domesticus was the new species perfectly adapted to living alongside people.

By 1 000 BC, however, our partnership with pigs had soured, a development marked most notably in the Book of Leviticus, which deemed pigs “unclean.” The Israelites could eat any beast that “parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and cheweth the cud.” Cows, sheep and goats got the nod; pigs did not: “though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud.”

The Koran followed suit in the seventh century AD: “forbidden to you is … the flesh of swine.” Today a quarter of the world’s population — 14 million Jews and 1.6 billion Muslims — must avoid pork.

The rules strike many as arbitrary, and there has been no shortage of attempts to expose the supposedly hidden truth. The mostly popular explanation — that the ban protected against trichinosis — is almost certainly untrue (there’s no evidence the parasite existed in ancient Palestine, and other meats could be equally dangerous).

Some scholars point to the unsuitability of pigs for desert conditions, or the fact that pigs and humans might compete for food. Others suggest that poor people could raise pigs at home and thereby gain control of their own food supply; rulers, intent on total control, banned pigs so the poor would be hungry unless fed by the state.

All of these theories hold a piece of the truth, but the best explanation lies in Leviticus. The approved animals “chew the cud,” which is another way of saying they are ruminants that eat grass. Pigs “cheweth not the cud” because they possess simple guts, unable to digest cellulose. They eat calorie-dense foods, not only nuts and grains but also less salubrious items such as carrion, human corpses and feces. Pigs were unclean because they ate filth…..

NPR.org: Read the full article

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‘Tales’ of pig intelligence, factory farming and humane bacon