Free Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig by Mark Essig

conquered Jerusalem, and the Jews once more fell under the rule of pork eaters. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans responded to Jewish pork avoidance not with violence but with puzzlement and feeble jokes. Juvenal, the Roman satirist of the first century ad , noted that in Palestine “a long-established clemency suffers pigs to attain old age” becauseJews “do not differentiate between human and pigs’ flesh.”It was said that Caesar Augustus, after hearing that King Herod of Judea had executed one of hisown children, joked that he would “rather be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son.”
    There was a reason Jewish dining habits attracted attention: Romans loved pork with a passion matched by few people before or since. They developed the most sophisticated farming and breeding techniques that the world had ever seen and created elaborate—occasionally obscene—recipes to prepare pork for their lavish feasts. Such ostentatious pork consumption would only reinforce the divisions between Jews and Romans, and it would eventually establish pork as the meat of choice in the religion the Romans would help disseminate throughout Europe: Christianity.

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    “Monstrosities of Luxury”
    A n enormous pig, belly up, is wheeled into a banquet room in one scene of Federico Fellini’s Satyricon . Trimalchio, the host, accuses the cook of roasting the animal without first gutting it and orders him whipped as punishment. The guests call for mercy, so Trimalchio demands, “Gut it here, now,” whereupon the cook swings an enormous sword and slashes the pig’s belly. The guests recoil in horror, but the steaming mass that pours forth is not the pig’s viscera but cooked meat.“Thrushes, fatted hens, bird gizzards!” one character calls out. “Sausage ropes, tender plucked doves, snails, livers, ham, offal!” The dispute with the cook has been all in fun. The guests applaud, then grab hunks of meat and begin to gorge themselves.
    Fellini’s film, released in 1969, stays true to its source material, a work by Petronius written not long after the death ofChrist. In depicting Roman dining, Petronius satirized but did not exaggerate: there was no need to embellish the extravagant reality. The dish portrayed in the film, a medley of meats hidden within a whole hog, was known as porcus Troianus , or “Trojan pig,” a nod to another great act of concealment.Petronius also describes a whole roast pig served with hunks of meat carved into the shape of piglets and placed along its belly, “as if at suck, to show it was a sow we had before us.” Another feast featured what appeared to be a goose and a variety of fish, all carved from pork.“I declare my cook made it every bit out of a pig,” the host exclaims. “Give the word, he’ll make you a fish of the paunch, a wood-pigeon of the lard, a turtle-dove of the forehand, and a hen of the hind leg!” Why he should do so is left unexplained.
    In cuisine, culture, and mythology, Romans delighted in concealment and disguise, metamorphosis and transformation, and in this they could hardly have been more different from the Jews. The Roman Empire formed a vast, cosmopolitan civilization that embraced and absorbed dozens of cultures. Few identities—whether of meats or of people—remained fixed. Trimalchio, in Satyricon , is a former slave who has won his freedom and then attained great wealth. A man calling himself a Roman citizen might have been born in northern Europe, Africa, or Asia Minor. Jews, by contrast, were dedicated to marrying among themselves, defending their small homeland, and preserving their ancient ways.
    The differences between Romans and Jews extended to food. One people defined itself by rejecting pork, the other by embracing it. One called the pig abominable, the other miraculous. One saw the pig as a carrier of pollution, the other as a sign of abundance. Between them, Jews and Romans set the terms that would define the pig throughout the history of the West.

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