The garbage pig was essentially “presented” with its food intake, either at a fixed site or within a circumscribed area. In eastern Asia, where centuries-old deforestation and high population densities did not favor mast feeding, pig raising was long ago oriented toward consuming wastes. Important in China and Korea, at one time, was the privy pig, kept to process human excrement into flesh for human consumption. Four young pigs could derive sustenance from the waste of a family of four humans, which provided the animals with approximately 2 kilograms of human excreta and 220 grams of garbage each day (Miller 1990). In Asia, food provided by humans rather than by foraging promoted sedentary habits that, in turn, led to the evolution of several breeds with a sway-back and a dishlike face. But even the miniaturized types of Asian pigs have big appetites and large litters.
The garbage pig could also be found in ancient civilizations outside of eastern Asia. Robert L. Miller (l990) has brilliantly reconstructed the scavenging role of the pig in dynastic Egypt. But, thus far, similar
Evidence is lacking for ancient Greece and Rome. In Europe, the garbage pig goes back to the Middle Ages but seems not to have been common until the fifteenth century, when the so-called Celtic pig, with white skin and pendant ears, emerged. Families fattened their pigs primarily on food scraps, and when winter neared, the animals were butchered. Their meat was cured and their fat rendered to make lard for cooking and especially for food preservation. Thus, the human diet was diversified during the cold months.
This form of pig keeping expanded as forest clearing advanced and the scale of food processing increased. Grist and oil mills generated large quantities of waste materials that could be consumed by pigs, as could the garbage from institutions like hospitals and convents. Before proper sewage disposal was implemented, many cities had swine populations to serve as ambulatory sanitation services. In medieval Paris, so many pigs were locally available for slaughter that pork was the cheapest meat. The monks of Saint Anthony - the patron saint of swineherds - were given special rights to keep pigs within the city walls. In New York City, pigs wandered the alleyways well into the nineteenth century. Naples was the last large European city to use pigs for sanitation. Neapolitan families each had a pig tethered near their dwellings to consume garbage and excrement.
Certain peasant societies still value the garbage pig as an element of domestic economy. In much of rural Latin. America, pigs consume what they can find, to be later slaughtered with minimal investment in feed (Gade 1987). Lard has been an important product of pig keeping there. Frying was a cooking innovation introduced with the European conquest, and native people learned to depend on this source of animal fat. Today, however, the meat quality of these haphazardly fed animals no longer meets the health requirements of city dwellers, most of whom get their pork products through inspected channels.
Unlike sheep, whose wool may be more valuable than their flesh, or cattle that are kept for their milk or for use as draft animals, pigs have had no primary nonmeat uses. A possible minor exception has been the truffle pig, employed in France - mainly in the Perigord region - to locate the black truffles synonymous with gourmandise. A trained sow can detect from 6 meters away the smell of the unseen truffles.
World History
