Human beings and pigs have a very peculiar relationship
The other evening I went to a ‘pig roast’ in our Somerset village. It was a tremendous turnout from far and wide. There is something about the idea which stirs up deep guzzling instincts, and certainly this pig on his spit looked, and smelt, gastronomically alluring, despite the fact that six of his live colleagues waited in a nearby pen for their ‘pig race’, another local custom. People sat on bales of hay, eating slices of the pork wedged in buns. There is no elegant way of doing this, I reflected, an observation subsequently confirmed by study of the photographs taken.
So what? I don’t suppose the original feast when the Chinese first discovered roast pork was an elegant occasion, punctuated as it must have been by lip-smacking, finger-sucking, pigtail-pulling and expressions of delight in archaic Mandarin. I take it for granted that Charles Lamb’s noble essay, ‘A Dissertation on Roast Pig’, is founded on some kind of fact. Lamb got the notion from his friend Thomas Manning, who not only travelled in China, and spoke and read the language, but penetrated as far as Tibet, the first Englishman to do so. Though clever and learned, he never wrote a word about his experiences. Diffident? Lazy? We don’t know. But he talked to Lamb. The ‘Dissertation’ was the first grown-up essay I read, aged 12, and I believed every word of it. If you haven’t read it, do: it is a jewel.
Lamb wrote often on the delights of pork. It was his favourite food until, late in life, he replaced it by hare (see his essay ‘On Presents of Game’). He wrote: ‘Socrates loved wild boar, Sophocles truffles, and why should not pig’s meat be my gastronomic vanity?’ There is a tremendous letter to Coleridge who had written to him, in error, thanking him for a present of a suckling pig. No chance, said Lamb: ‘A pig is one of those things I would never think of sending away. Teals, widgeons, snipes, barn-door fowl, ducks, geese — your tame villatic things — Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeons, fresh or pickled, your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. But pigs are pigs. [And] I should think it an affront, an undervaluing done to Nature, who bestowed such a boon on me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift.’ In fact the publication of his essay brought him many gifts of pork from readers, and there is a magnificent letter to the Colliers, of 6 January 1823, thanking them, in verse and prose, for their munificence, ending ‘Vive l’agriculture!’ Lamb’s contemporary, Jane Austen, knew a lot about pigs, too. When she was a girl, the family kept pigs at the vicarage glebe-farm, and Mrs Austen used to cure choice pork for her two sailor-sons, Charles and Francis, to take with them on their voyages. Jane bestows a similar piggery on Mr Woodhouse’s little estate in Emma, and this leads to a delightful passage, when a present to the needy Bates family is discussed. It is called a ‘porker’, a technical term for a pig killed small for its pork and not fed to be huge and provide bacon and ham. So Mr Woodhouse says: ‘Now we have killed a porker, and Emma thinks of sending them a loin or a leg. It is very small and delicate — Hartfield pork is not like any other pork — but still it is pork — and, my dear Emma, unless one could be sure of their making it into steaks, nicely fried as ours are fried, without the smallest grease, and not roast it, for no stomach can bear roast pork — I think we had better send the leg — do not you think so, my dear?’ To which Emma replies: ‘I sent the whole hind-quarter,’ adding, ‘There will be the leg to be salted, you know, which is so very nice, and the loin to be dressed directly in any manner they like.’ Mr Woodhouse approves of this, but adds his word of caution: ‘They must not over-salt the leg; and then, if it is not over-salted, and if it is very thoroughly boiled, just as Serle boils ours, and eaten very moderately of, with a boiled turnip, and a little carrot or parsnip, I do not consider it unwholesome.’ This favourite passage of mine is an exam ple of the skill which endears Jane Austen to her readers, for it gently reveals character and at the same time takes you into a household, and kitchen, of the comfortable classes around 1814, the year in which Emma was mostly written (it was finished during the Hundred Days of 1815).
Like Mr Woodhouse, I cannot eat roast pork without the subsequent torture of indigestion, though nothing tastes better while you are actually eating it. I find it odd that I can eat bacon and ham, and even pork pies, with impunity. But I have sympathetic feelings about pigs which don’t exercise me about sheep and cattle. I think they are often highly intelligent and sensitive. They can be trained to do things, and anyone who has been, as I have, on a truffle hunt with pigs in France cannot doubt their brain power. My feelings about this delicacy are confirmed by my Danish friend, who inherited an estate including a large pig-farm. Producing pigs for bacon is the most famous industry in Denmark, but my friend gave it up because he was convinced that, in today’s highly competitive conditions, it was not possible to raise pigs for the commercial bacon market without cruelty. I often think about this when I am eating bacon, and wish I could give it up.
Most people, however, think of pigs only with disgust, and this is reflected in our language. Casting pearls before swine, and so on. When I was at Magdalen, our ancient history tutor, C.E. (‘Tom’) Stevens, when asked where he had spent the long vacation, replied: ‘Peeging it with French charcoal-burners.’ This left an ineffaceable image in my mind, though I have forgotten everything else he taught me. Then I think of Gadara and the Devils, and what Malcolm Muggeridge said, which made me roar at the time. ‘Why did the Gadarene swine rush off the cliff? Because they thought Group Captain Townsend was waiting at the bottom.’ Meaningless now, I admit. Then there is the lovely story of Evelyn Waugh sitting alone in the hall of Whites. Another member, passing through, said: ‘Why are you all by yourself?’ ‘Because nobody wants to talk to me.’ ‘Yes, and I’ll tell you why. Because you sit there, on your arse, looking like a stuck pig.’ Why should a stuck pig, a creature in agony, be an object of derision rather than pity? And why should a lonely man be sneered at, and compared to such a dying beast? Pigs and humans have an uneasy relationship. We eat them and make fun of them. They give us pleasure and fill us with repulsion. Why the ambivalence? Perhaps because we have so much in common.
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