Homage to Hogs

PIGS: FROM CAVE TO CORN BELT (305 pp.)--Charles Wayland Towns & Edward Norris Wentworth--University of Oklahoma ($4).

Back in 1812, all the dock workers around Troy, N.Y. knew "Uncle Sam" Wilson. A tall, talkative meat packer with a friendly word for everybody, Uncle Sam was often on hand to see his Government-consigned barrels of pork and beef loaded on boats and sent down the Hudson for the war against the British. When one passenger asked an Irish watchman at the dock what the "U.S." stamped on each barrel meant, the watchman had a ready answer: "It must mean Uncle Sam ... he's feeding the army!"

The story got around and the label stuck. In their passionately partisan study of Pigs: From Cave to Corn Belt, Authors Charles Wayland Towne (retired publicity director for Anaconda Copper) and Edward Norris Wentworth (director of Armour's Livestock Bureau) make it clear that a pork packer as Uncle Sam's prototype is not too outlandish an idea. "More than any other commodity," say the authors, "pork implemented American retaliation against [British] tyranny in colonial days, and incidentally initiated the great international commerce that has characterized . . . modern [U.S.] culture." By 1850, "Porkopolis" (Cincinnati) had become the greatest pork-packing city in the world, a distinction it lost to Chicago when the Civil War froze Southern markets.

Adonis & Hercules. Although Pigs waddles rapidly through world porcine history in a hurry to concentrate on U.S. hogs, it nevertheless roots up enough factual truffles along the way to qualify for its ambitious title. The pig, "the most primitive form of domestic mammal that exists today," is 39 million years older than million-year-old man. Boars charge about wildly through ancient mythology; one of them killed handsome Adonis, another was captured alive after a mighty struggle with hefty Hercules. About 5,000 years ago, the Chinese were already eating domestic swine, along with dogs and fowl. When France's Louis XI was sick, only a troupe of "gaily garbed" pigs dancing to bagpipe music succeeded in curing his melancholy.

Through the centuries, the hog has obligingly accommodated himself to man's changing tastes and needs. Refrigeration put an end to the small-boned, fat-heavy hogs; consumers wanted leaner meat. But hog farmers, working to breed their animal out of the barrel and into the icebox, soon found themselves in another fix: the big-boned hogs of the early 20th Century were shorter on fat all right, but their giant hams were sized to feed an army rather than a family, and they were stringy besides. After World War I, hog breeders went to work again and finally molded today's trim, streamlined 225-lb. porker, with apartment-size hams.

The Mortgage Lifter. Before they plunge into their descriptions of breeds and crossbreeds and their careful detailing of modern packinghouse procedures, Authors Towne and Wentworth attempt to lift their hero out of the sty and onto the pedestal. A pig, they say, can swim, pull a small cart, even substitute for a bird dog or a child's pony. And he can be housebroken : "By nature he is one of the cleanest of animals."

Hard-pressed farmers call him the "mortgage lifter," because he breeds faster and, pound for pound, gives back more of his food as flesh than any other farm mammal. It's true that he chomps down about 40% of the U.S. corn crop every year. But in return he supplies half or more of the U.S. meat supply.

"Perhaps little heed will be given any defense of the animal," say Pigs' authors with a touch of bitterness, "and people will continue to libel him to the end of his days. But when that end comes, what a turn-about-face! When pig becomes pork, what eulogies, what panegyrics!"

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