SEDENTARY PIGS, NOMADIC COWS, URBAN CHICKENS

"The emergence of the great Western cattle cultures and the emergence of world capitalism are inseparable".
Jeremy Rifkin

"It could be said that European civilization – and Chinese civilization too – has been founded on the pig".
Jane Grigson

In respect of their environmental performance, carnivores didn’t get off to a very good start. Round about 11,000 BC as the glaciers of the last ice age receded, five Eurasian species of large mammal (the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhino, the giant elk, the musk ox and the steppe bison) were hunted to extinction. In the Americas and Australia the record was even worse: by 7,000 BC, 32 genera of large animals, including horses, giant bison, oxen, elephants, camels, antelopes, pig, ground sloths and giant rodents had disappeared from the future New World. Nobody is quite sure to what extent their extinction was due to climate change, but there is little doubt that human predators had a hand in the matter.1

The problem for humans at the time was that they didn’t have much else to live off (though they did appear to pick off one preferred species before moving onto the next). Once humans had learnt how to practise agriculture, and how to domesticate animals – two processes which happened more or less at the same time because the crops attracted the animals – hunting pressure could be reduced, and demand for extra meat focussed upon increasing the domesticated stock rather than killing off the wild. Domestication of sheep is thought to have first occurred in Mesopotamia around 9,000 BC, while domesticated cattle appear first in southeast Europe three millennia later. Darwin thought that the domestic pig probably first emerged in China, and there is uncertain evidence of its presence there around 8,000 BC.2

There are a few elementary ecological facts which explain why cows and pigs have since followed different patterns of domestication, and why pig culture can be viewed as ‘Eastern’ while cow culture is more ‘Western’.

Cows, sheep and goats are ruminants; their digestive system, with mutiple stomachs, is designed to extract carbohydrates and proteins from low quality fibrous vegetable material, in particular grass. Horses are not ruminants, but they have a long colon which enables them to subsist on a diet of coarse grass. Though cattle can subsist in woodland, their preferred terrain, and the terrain where they excel, is savannah. Grassland, when it occurs naturally, is usually dry, and a relatively small percentage of the nutrients are available above ground in the form of leaves. Large grasseating mammals have to migrate over large distances to locate sufficient food and water, and because the terrain is open, they prefer to move in large herds as a defence against predators, which in turn tend to hunt in packs.

Pigs on the other hand are omnivores, and like humans they are monogastrics (equipped with only one stomach). They cannot survive on a high fibre diet of leaves and grass, they need higher quality foods such as grains, nuts, roots, insects and carrion. Chickens are much the same. Neither animal is adapted for living in open grassland (except the specialized warthog) and pigs, who have no sweat glands and sparse fur, are not fond of prolonged sunshine. Neither pigs nor chickens migrate over long distances or move around in herds.

For these reasons, cows and horses were the animals favoured by the Kurgans, Aryans, Mongols, Huns and the other tribes who emerged out of the East and swept in waves across Russia and Europe, down into the Indian subcontinent and through the North of Africa over a period of 5,000 years until, in a sense, they were finally stopped by Charles Martel’s cavalry at Poitiers in 732. We have only to imagine, briefly, the picture of Genghis Khan and his followers trying to herd thousands of swine across the Asiatic steppes, to appreciate why nomads didn’t mess with pigs.

The pig, on the other hand, became the dominant domestic animal of those cultures which preferred to stay put. For the sedentary civilizations of China, and the forest dwellers and farmers of South East Asia and Polynesia, the pig was a much more sensible choice. Where there were trees and little grass it was more at home. And in areas where forests had been substantially replaced by intensive agriculture, the pig had a great advantage over the cow: because its digestive system is geared towards high value foodstuffs, a pig is about twice as efficient as a cow at turning substandard grains, waste foods and faeces into meat. Most animals are good at mopping up waste, but the omnivorous pig is king of the midden, and it is sedentary human societies which require scavengers. Nomads move on and leave their rubbish behind.

It is possible to pursue the distinction between pig-loving sedentary cultures and herbivore-dependent nomads a good deal further: for example it can hardly be a coincidence that it is Judaism, Islam, and Coptic Christianity, religions of nomadic herders, which forbid the eating of pig meat. ‘Whatsoever parteth the hoof and is cloven-footed and cheweth the cud among the beasts that shall ye eat … The swine, though he divide the hoof, and be cloven footed, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you. Of their flesh shall ye not eat.’ These dietary rulings in Leviticus 11 are a clear endorsement for eating ruminants and little else. (One can take these observations further, and note that, by and large, the nomadic, coweating cultures whose people lived under a big sky, veered towards monotheism, whereas the pig-eating forest dwellers of South East Asia remained faithful to pantheistic cosmologies that saw spirits and ancestors lurking behind every tree. But that is beyond the scope of this book.)

The distinction between sedentary pig cultures and mobile cow cultures starts to become muddied when the nomads reach the point where they can go no further and are forced to settle. The Aryans who colonized India, pushing the Dravidians down to the bottom third of the subcontinent, brought their cow culture with them, and as one account puts it, they got rid of all the pigs.3 According to an interpretation best explained by Marvin Harris (which I have yet to see challenged), the population became sedentary and increased to the point where beef eating on any widespread scale was unsustainable. Pigs were not viable because Indian agriculture, much of it on dry rainfed soils, was more dependent upon oxen for ploughing than Chinese paddy, and so a cattle population had to be maintained in a country which is notoriously short of grazing lands. The solution, which developed as a result of Buddhist influence, was to keep the cow, but to forbid eating it, not because it was ‘unclean’ like the Semites’ pigs, but because it was ‘sacred’.4

In Africa, these problems do not seem to have occurred because there were wide areas of uncultivable grazing land and populations rarely attained the level where there were severe restrictions upon meat consumption. Prior to the arrival of European colonialists, nomadic and seminomadic cow-herding tribes followed established patterns of movement and observed customary rights and regulations which maintained some degree of ecological stability – but the cows, the tribes, and with them Islam, never permeated sub-Saharan Africa, probably because tsetse fly prevented their advance. Pig-rearing was practised patchily amongst sedentary populations, perhaps because Islam and the Saharan belt prevented them spreading from Asia, and perhaps because settled tribes could acquire animal protein either by hunting bushmeat, or by trading with nomads.

It was in the temperate climate of Europe that pig culture and cattle culture were to meet and combine. Much of Europe was wooded, and therefore highly suitable for pigs. Oak, beech, hazel and chestnut trees all provided nutritious mast (nuts) to fatten them on. But where the woodland was cleared away, grass grew – extremely good grass in many places, especially where the Atlantic Ocean washed the land with regular doses of light rain. Cattle thrived on these pastures, as well as sheep, which provided the wool to keep people warm through cold damp winters. And oxen were needed to plough the arable fields, many of which were heavy and clayey.

For two or three thousand years pigs, cattle and sheep (as well as horses, goats and chickens) seem to have thrived side by side with each other in Europe, and often complemented each other. Sheep, which grazed the rougher land, manured arable land that the oxen ploughed; pigs were fed on the whey that resulted from the peculiarly European method of making hard cheeses to keep through the cold winters when there was little milk. Towards the end of the Middle Ages when populations began to outstrip carrying capacity, there were signs of destructive competition between different elements of this mixed farming system. The shortfall in food production was exacerbated by a gradual deterioration in the fertility of the arable land, due to an insufficiency of nitrogen. Ploughing up more land was no remedy, since it decreased the amount of pasture available to provide manure.

Population pressure was relieved by the Black Death in 1350, which meant that much of the exhausted cornland could be turned back to pasture. As the population grew back to its former levels, one solution to population pressure was found in new crops of beans, turnips and nitrogen-bearing fodder varieties such as clover and sainfoin, which enabled more animals to be kept over winter, without diminishing the area devoted to corn. The other was the colonization of the New World which opened up new lands for emigrants who grew food and fibre to send back to the home country. European farming was to undergo further ups and downs, more the consequence of capitalist opportunism than of ecological constraints. But in the interim more momentous events were taking place overseas. The cattle nomads whose westward drift had been held up for 1000 years on the Atlantic seaboard, were on the move again.

As we have seen, the Pleistocene extinctions had been more ruthlessly carried out in the Americas than in Eurasia. Virtually every large mammal that was potentially domesticable had been made extinct, and after the disappearance of the bridge of land across the Bering Straits there was no means of getting them back. In the Andes the llama and alpaca were domesticated by the Incas. In North America, if it was possible to domesticate the bison without the aid of the horse, native Indians had shown little interest in trying. As far as domestic animals were concerned, the New World presented itself as a tabula rasa to the European colonialists, upon which they could stamp whatever sort of animal economy they saw fit.

Jeremy Rifkin, in his flamboyant polemic against the cattle industry, Beyond Beef, expounds what might be called the ‘bovine prerogative’ theory of American history. The manifest destiny of the pioneers, he suggests, was the proliferation of an atavistic cattle culture whose roots lay in the rituals of the ‘neolithic cowboys’ who had migrated across the Steppes, in the ‘Mithraic blood sacrifices’ of ancient Rome, and in the Celtic ‘warrior bull cult’ (not, I might add, to be confused with ‘the boar cults of the Celts, which identify fearsome warriors as boars with giant tusks’.5
Rifkin writes:

Centuries before Melville’s Captain Ahab battled with the great white whale, Spanish matadors were already apprenticing for man’s new role on the world scene, facing down the ‘forces of nature’ in dusty arenas in scores of small village towns on the Iberian Peninsula. Spanish explorers transported the ancient Iberian cattle complex to the shores of America in the 16th century. The Spanish conquerors of the New World bore a striking resemblance to the fierce nomadic tribesmen of the Eurasian steppes who had set out to conquer Europe over 5,000
years earlier.6

Columbus, Rifkin notes, on his second voyage, unloaded in Haiti ‘24 stallions, ten mares and an unknown number of cattle’, and Cortes introduced longhorn cattle to Mexico, as if that was an indication of what was to follow. But Rifkin neglects to mention that on the same voyage, Columbus also brought ‘eight sturdy Iberian pigs’, while Cortes entered Mexico City at the head of a cavalcade which included a drove of Spanish swine.7 The Plymouth Brethren arrived without cows, but with six goats, 50 pigs, and many hens – not surprising, since they were arriving on a well-wooded seaboard. Cattle didn’t arrive until the following year. Ten years later, the Massachusetts Bay colony boasted ‘1500 cattle, 4000 goats and innumerable swine’. Imported pigs were allowed to run loose over most of northern Manhattan Island, and the stockade which kept them away from the farms later gave its name to Wall Street.8

Cattle spread up through the drylands of Mexico, but the predominance of pigs over cattle was to persist on the East coast, while the Southern states, from Virginia to Louisiana, became famous for their hams and fatback. A Southern physician called Dr John Wilson complained that people in the USA ate three times as much pork as Europeans: ‘The United States of America might properly called the great Hog-eating Confederacy, or the Republic of Porkdom.’9 By the second half of the 18th century, the eastern states were salting surplus pork and shipping it to Europe, a century before chilled beef was able to make the same journey. In the early 19th century, up to half a million pigs a year were driven from as far away as the Ohio river to New York and Philadelphia, along ‘well-worn hog trails as clearly marked and as famous as the cattle trails of the Southwest’10 – although Hollywood has yet to come up with a hogman movie. Even during the cattle bonanza years of the late 19th century, the pig industry held its own: ‘It was the runaway success of homesteaders’ hogs that stopped them from dreaming about ranches in Oklahoma or gold in California’.11 Eventually, as the midwest began producing increasing surpluses of corn, the hog frontier and the salt-pork barrelling industry advanced to Cincinnati and finally Chicago. In the United States, just as in the Old World, the folks who settled in the east stuck with pigs, and they outnumbered the pioneers who moved west with their cattle.

Right up until the 1950s, US citizens ate more pork than they ate beef, though you would never have guessed this from reading Rifkin. The two factors that finally tipped the balance in favour of beef had nothing to do with land use, still less a macho cow cult, but reflected the needs of the meat packing industry. The first was the introduction of refrigeration which allowed cattle carcases to be trimmed and packed in Chicago slaughterhouses, rather than having to be distributed on the hoof in cattle trucks to butchers in the East. Refrigeration took away the main advantage of pork – that, being fatty, it tasted better when salted, and so could be packed and preserved without refrigeration; and it meant that Chicago packers could take over and centralize the lucrative beef byproducts industry.12

But it was the rise of the hamburger that finally tipped the scales in favour of beef. As far as the meat industry was concerned the hamburger carried out one crucially important function. Because it consisted of ground beef, meat from different cows could be mixed together. Lean beef, from the Western rangelands, or from Central or South America, could be made more palatable by mixing it with fatty beef fed on grains in feedlots. There was no reason why the lean beef could not have been mixed together with a small amount of fatty pork; this would have been more efficient in terms of grain use and probably cheaper. But such a hybrid would not have conformed to the statutory definition of ‘hamburger’. Marvin Harris, after making unsuccessful inquiries to the US Department of Agriculture as to how the Federal Code’s defiition was decided, concluded:

The exclusion of pork and pork fat from hamburgers suggests that beef producers had more influence in government than pork producers. If true, this would be the natural outcome of a basic difference in the organization of the two industries which has persisted since the late 19th century. Beef production has long been dominated by a relatively small number of very large ranches and feedlot companies, while pig production has been carried out by a relatively large number of small to medium farm units … To sum up, beef achieved its recent ascendancy over pork through the direct and indirect influence of all-beef hamburger.13

If Harris is right, the definition of this one word is responsible for one of the biggest ecological cock-ups in modern history, the beef feedlot industry, which pumps vast amounts of corn and forage from irrigated pastures down the throats of animals that are least able to process it efficiently. One wonders also whether the Jewish lobby did not have some influence upon the definition, since Harris adds:

Ground pork can be eaten, ground beef can be eaten; yet to mix the two together and call it a hamburger is an abomination. It all sounds suspiciously like a rerun of Leviticus ... In mediating the age-old struggle between pigs – consummate eaters of grain – and cattle – consummate eaters of grass – the USDA had followed ancient precedents.

Over the last 20 years, the grain-fed meat industry has spread from the USA and other wealthy countries to emerging countries in the Third World, but it has not taken much beef with it. Brazil is producing increasing quantities of feedlot chicken, much of it for export to Europe. China’s consumption of pork and poultry has shot up, and she is having to import grain in order to meet demand. India has outstripped the USA as the world’s largest producer of dairy products, a feat that has been achieved without a massive increase in feed-grain input. Where developing countries, such as Argentina, Botswana or Brazil, have developed beef industries, they have been based on grazing, rather than on grain. The USA’s excessively grain and hormone fed beef is not the norm, but an aberration, reflected in the fact that both Canada and the EU refuse to buy it.

The 6,000 year long movement of cowboy culture westward has not yet come to an end. Its last frontier is in the Amazon where it is probably wreaking more havoc than anywhere previously. But it is ‘atypical’ and hopefully soon on the wane. The world’s livestock consumption is currently broadly split into four quarters: beef, dairy, pork and poultry. Beef is declining in popularity, while pork, and more especially poultry, are on the ascendant. ‘Ruminant production’ the FAO remarks, ‘both meat and milk, tends to be much more rural-based,’ because ‘ruminants’ higher daily fibre requirements entail bulk movement of fodder.‘14 As human civilization urbanizes, and more people are crammed into larger and denser concentrations, so our livestock become urbanized, and they too are crammed into larger and denser concentrations. The pastoral steer and the rural cow yield to the agrarian and proto-urban pig, which in turn is now yielding to the megapolitan broiler hen.

Nonetheless the rivalry between ruminants and monogastrics is far from exhausted. The ‘white revolution’, which has quadrupled milk production in India and made her the world’s largest dairy producer, vies for importance with China’s booming pork and poultry industry. In overdeveloped countries, battle lines are hardening between those who advocate ‘grass farming’ as the most ecological and humane approach to animal husbandry, and those who hold that the world’s appetite for meat can only be met by feeding grain to pigs and chickens in ‘confined animal feeding operations’. This is a separate conflict from the ethical dispute between carnivores and vegans. Yet beyond factory-farmed chicken lie species of lab-cultured meat that the writers of Leviticus never even dreamed of, and that is where the interests of agribusiness and of vegans may one day converge.

NOTES

1 Ponting, Clive (1991), Green History of the World, Sinclair-Stevenson; Harris, Marvin (1977), Cannibals and Kings, Random House, p 34.
2 Watson, Lyall (2004), The Whole Hog, Profile Books, p 125.
3 Spencer, Colin (1993), The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism, Fourth Estate. No support is given for this assertion.
4 Harris, Marvin (1986), Good To Eat, Allen and Unwin, pp 47-66.
5 Watson, op cit. 2, p 186.
6 Rifkin, Jeremy (1992), Beyond Beef, Dutton, p 41.
7 Watson, op cit. 2, p 140.
8 Ibid, p 143.
9 Cited in Adams, C (2000), The Sexual Politics of Meat, Continuum Publishing, p 169.
10 Watson, op cit. 2, p 166.
11 Ibid., p 166.
12 Ross, E (1980), ‘Patterns of Diet and Forces of Production: An Economic and Ecological History of the Ascendancy of Beef in the US Diet’, in E Ross (ed), Beyond the Myths of
Culture: Essays in Cultural Materialism, Academic Press.
13 Harris, Marvin (1987), The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig, Touchstone, p 126.
14 Steinfeld, H et al (2006), Livestock’s Long Shadow, FAO.

By Simon Fairlie in "Meat- A Benign Extravagance", Chelsea Green Publishing, USA, 2010, excerpts 14-16. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. 

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