Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig

by Mark Essig

  The American pork industry was floundering. It would take all the brainpower and ingenuity of the American government, universities, advertising firms, and pharmaceutical companies to set it right. By the 1960s, those resources were at the ready. Over the next four decades, the pork industry changed what pigs ate, where they lived, and how fat they grew. While they were at it, the experts went ahead and changed the color of pork from red to white.

  SIXTEEN

  “The Other White Meat”

  In 1986 leaders of the National Pork Producers Council gathered in a darkened room to hear their advertising agency pitch a new industry tagline: “Pork—the Other White Meat.” When the lights came on after the two-hour presentation, the pork producers found themselves “in a state of shock,” one executive recalled. Hog farmers, along with everybody else, had always viewed pork as a red meat, in competition with beef. Now they were being asked to spend good money promoting it as an alternative to chicken. According to National Hog Farmer, many thought it was a “dumb idea.”

  But these were desperate times, so pork producers took the plunge. Since the 1970s sales of poultry had soared as consumption of beef and pork plunged. Studies linking red meat to heart disease and cancer had taken a toll, and Americans had become fearful of fat. In one survey more than a third of Americans agreed with the statement “Pork would be a good meat except for the fat.” The new campaign would convince people that pork was not bloody and fatty like beef but pale and lean like chicken.

  With ice-skating star Peggy Fleming as spokeswoman, the pork industry launched the new marketing campaign at a January 1987 New York press event attended by the editor of Better Homes & Gardens and national television news reporters. Before the year was out, the advertising bill ran to more than $9 million. Almost immediately, the campaign was deemed a success. Eight out of ten Americans recognized the phrase “the other white meat,” which lodged itself in that special place in the American mind that holds slogans like “Got Milk?” and “Just Do It.” In 2011 Adweek deemed the campaign “among the most successful rebranding moves in the history of the food biz.”

  But it was more than a rebranding. The new slogan marked the culmination of a transformation in American farming. In 1945 pigs, bred by small farmers and raised outdoors on corn, grew thick layers of fat under their skin. By 1985, raised indoors on scientifically formulated feed and bred to exacting standards by large corporations, they produced very lean meat. The same qualities that suited pigs to small-scale production—fecundity and rapid growth—also made them perfect for industrial farming. In seeking to rebrand their product, pork producers had not just changed their tagline. They had created a new pig.

  The Corn Belt was home to the “lard-type” hog, as opposed to the “bacon type” or “meat type.” The leaner meat hogs—which included breeds like the Danish Landrace, Tamworth, and Large Yorkshire—had a thin layer of back fat and were often cured as bacon for the British market. The primary producers of these bacon-type pigs were Denmark, Canada, and Ireland, where pigs ate protein-rich dairy by-products that promoted lean muscle growth. Pigs that ate mostly corn—higher in carbohydrates than protein—ran to fat, which is why the Corn Belt became the center of global lard production.

  Corn Belt farmers historically had depended on the “lard-type” breeds—Poland China, Berkshire, Chester White, and Duroc Jersey—in response to market demands. Bulk purchasers of barreled meat, which was used to feed miners, sailors, and slaves, preferred fatty meat because it preserved better. There was also a big demand for lard as an industrial lubricant and cooking fat. Under some market conditions, a pig’s fat was more valuable than its flesh, and packers dumped whole hogs into the rendering vats, wasting all of the meat in order to extract the precious fat.

  Lard, however, became increasingly less valuable, a shift that started in the late nineteenth century and accelerated with each passing decade. After John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company developed the oil fields of Pennsylvania, factory workers began to oil their machines with petroleum products rather than animal fats. Thanks to better technology for both canned food and artificial refrigeration, sailors and laborers could enjoy foods other than fatty pork. More people turned to vegetable oils such as soybean, peanut, and corn, which allowed a simple production cycle—grow plants and extract their oil—rather than the extra step required with animals: grow plants, feed plants to pigs, extract fat from pigs. Health concerns about animal fats arose after World War II, and brands such as Crisco advertised their vegetable shortenings as healthier than animal fat. All of these factors contributed to a single result: demand for lard plummeted, and so did its price.

  As consumers turned away from lard and fatty meats in the years after World War II, the government and meatpackers encouraged farmers to raise leaner pigs like the one at left in this diagram from a 1971 USDA pamphlet. Meat-type hogs were the first step on the road to “the other white meat.” (Courtesy US Department of Agriculture)

  In response, scientists and farmers worked to breed leaner hogs. Their model was Denmark, the first specialist in intensive hog production and America’s key rival in the global pork market. In 1907 the Danes had created swine testing stations to carefully monitor feed intake and carcass quality, allowing them to choose breeding stock from those animals that gained the most lean muscle while eating the least feed. American agricultural colleges developed similar testing programs, and the USDA created new genetic lines to distribute to farmers. The meatpacker Hormel awarded prizes to farmers who raised the leanest pigs, and the private breed registries changed their standards as well. The Hampshire registry, for instance, specified that hogs should have no more than 1.8 inches of back fat and a pork chop measuring at least four inches square. In the 1950s, a 180-pound hog carcass yielded 35 pounds of lard. By the 1970s, a pig of the same size produced just 20 pounds of lard.

  As America’s pigs changed, so did the farms where they were raised. Before World War II American pigs lived almost precisely as they had a century before. They roamed on pasture in the spring and summer, grazing on crops such as clover or alfalfa. Farmers supplemented their diet with whatever was cheapest—one feed manual mentioned wheat middlings, bran, molasses, beet pulp, brewers’ grains, sorghum, potatoes, cassava, rapeseed, whey, blood meal, and dozens of other foods. In the fall, hogs were fattened on corn. Nearly all farmers practiced mixed farming: they raised dairy cows, beef cattle, and hogs and grew crops to feed to their livestock. Diversification acted as insurance: if hogs were selling low, beef or dairy might be high. This small-scale system was enormously productive. In 1938 the United States raised 62 million hogs, compared to 39 million for all of western Europe.

  Soon those pigs would be eating a different sort of diet, one that paired corn with soybeans—while also adding standard doses of antibiotics. During the meat shortages of World War II, scientists at the University of California researched a fact long known in Asian cultures: soybeans provided a concentrated source of high-quality protein. Paired with carbohydrate-rich corn, soy became an excellent animal feed. But it wasn’t perfect. Researchers found that pigs gained weight most efficiently only if their corn-soy feed was supplemented with an animal-derived protein such as skim milk, fish meal, or slaughterhouse by-products. Since the 1920s scientists had understood the dietary importance of vitamins A, D, and E. They hoped to discover a similar nutrient, provisionally named “Animal Protein Factor,” to explain the growth patterns of pigs. In 1948, researchers at pharmaceutical firm Merck and Company announced that they had isolated the mysterious agent: it was a new vitamin, B12. By 1949 feed companies and agricultural colleges were promoting B12 as a feed additive that could replace animal protein supplements.

  Pharmaceutical companies needed a cheap source of B12, and they found one close at hand. The microorganisms used to grow streptomycin and other antibiotics also generated B12, which remained as a by-product in production vats after the desired antibi
otic agents had been skimmed off. This B12 became a supplement in hog feed. Farmers soon developed a strong preference for this particular B12 supplement. Animals fed B12 that had originated as an antibiotic by-product gained weight much faster than those given B12 from other sources. Tests soon revealed why: B12 sold as pure had in fact contained antibiotics. The big boost in growth rate came not from B12 but from the drugs.

  Soon antibiotics became the supplement of choice for American farmers. Further research showed that pigs given low doses of antibiotics gained as much as 13 percent more weight than pigs given the same amount of feed without the drugs. Pfizer claimed that pigs dosed with Terramycin reached market weight seventeen days faster and with far less feed, saving farmers a lot of money. With little examination, the Food and Drug Administration in the 1950s approved the use of several antibiotics as a feed supplement. By the 1960s, livestock consumed 1.2 million pounds of the drugs each year. By the late 1990s, that figure had risen to 25 million pounds.

  Using antibiotics to promote growth had a side effect popular with farmers: the drugs helped ward off illness. This fact became more significant as the next major shift in hog farming took place. At about the same time that antibiotics emerged as a feed supplement, farmers started pulling their hogs off pasture and crowding them together in barns. Land prices began to rise quickly in the mid-1950s, which made pasture too precious for pigs. With farmland so expensive, one farmer asked, “How can you afford to let pigs run around on it?” It made more sense to plow under the hog pasture, plant corn and soy, and feed those crops to pigs, now confined to barns.

  The disadvantage of this plan was disease, since hogs kept in close quarters passed around illness more easily. That’s where the antibiotic supplements came in. “The situation is sort of like kids at school,” a pharmaceutical representative explained. “You know, one kid gets sick with the sniffles, and then all of ’em get it.” Antibiotics, the drug salesman said, help pigs “start healthy, stay healthy, and gain as much weight as they can.” In 1972 an agricultural magazine predicted, “The modern hog business would collapse without antibiotics.”

  Antibiotics helped address the problem of illness in confined pigs, but another trouble remained: labor costs. Pigs on pasture harvested their own food and deposited their manure broadly across the ground. Once pigs were confined to a barn, workers had to deliver food and remove waste. Farmhands, though, were scarce in the 1950s and 1960s, when a humming national economy attracted rural labor to the city. Farmers, who were smart businessmen, knew what to do. When labor is scarce, substitute capital. If you can’t hire men to scrape stalls and haul feed, then buy machines to do it. Turn your farm into a factory.

  In the shift to mechanized production, pigs followed the lead of poultry. As a seasonal, highly perishable crop raised outdoors on a small scale, chickens had historically been expensive. Birds raised indoors suffered from “leg weakness,” later identified as rickets. Scientists learned, however, that adding vitamin D to feed solved this problem, and by the 1930s chickens were being raised indoors year-round. As electrical lines stretched into rural areas, farmers bought electric brooders, automatic feeders, and other labor-saving devices. Like pigs, chickens ate a corn-soy blend laced with antibiotics to speed growth. Scientists at agricultural colleges got to work on breeding, producing varieties that tolerated indoor life and quickly gained weight. Compared to its ancestor in the 1930s, a broiler chicken in the 1990s grew to twice the size in less than half the time. Once reserved for special occasions, chicken became affordable enough for everyday eating. Thanks to low prices and a healthy image, poultry consumption tripled between the 1940s and the 1990s, then kept growing.

  Pigs and chickens have much in common: they eat similar diets (chickens, like pigs, are omnivorous) and grow to slaughter weight quickly—in less than two months for chickens and less than six months for pigs. Unlike cattle, which require many leisurely months on pasture, chickens and pigs can be stuffed with feed and turned into meat in short order. Unsurprisingly, then, the agricultural methods developed for one also worked well for the other.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, American farmers started raising hogs like chickens. Feed, augered into the hog barns from nearby silos, was deposited in automatic feeders. Heaters and fans controlled the temperature, eliminating the need to open and close windows or haul straw for bedding. The most important innovation was low-tech: slatted floors. Used first in Norway in 1951 and adopted in the United States a decade later, the floors had long, narrow gaps that allowed urine and manure to fall into gutters below, where it could be flushed out with water. “The use of slotted floors has probably accelerated the trend toward confinement more than any other single development,” an expert wrote in 1972.

  Slatted floors started a cascade of other changes in pig husbandry. Straw bedding, formerly needed to absorb urine and provide warmth, could be eliminated in favor of bare floors. There was no need for a separate dunging area, so more pigs could be packed into pens where they slept, ate, and relieved themselves. For each pig weighing 150 to 250 pounds, industry guidelines in the 1980s called for allotting eight square feet of pen space, a dramatic reduction for animals that had historically been given free range of the woods or, at least, a pasture or sty. In such close quarters, pigs kept each other warm, requiring less artificial heat, and gained weight more quickly because they didn’t burn calories exercising. Crowded together, they shuffled around more, trampling manure through the slots and keeping the pen cleaner.

  Slatted floors made the farmer’s life easier, eliminating what one industry publication called the “tedious and disagreeable” task of scraping manure from stalls. Once a solid that needed to be shoveled, manure became a liquid that could be sluiced away. The “comfort and convenience” of the farmer, an industrial manual reported, “may well be the most important” reason to move hogs into confinement. The comfort and convenience of the pigs was left unmentioned.

  By the 1980s the most advanced farms practiced “life-cycle housing,” which meant pigs never felt mud beneath their hooves. In a celebratory cover story in Scientific American, a university expert explained that the modern pig “lives indoors for its entire brief life: born and suckled in a farrowing unit and raised to slaughter weight in a nursery and later in a growing-feeding unit. It is fed a computer-formulated diet based on cornmeal and soybean meal with supplements of protein, minerals and vitamins. . . . It is sent to market at five or six months of age, having reached the slaughter weight of 220 pounds or more from its birth weight of two pounds.”

  The hog confinement building had become standardized by the 1990s. Roughly three hundred feet long, sixty feet wide, and made of metal, it sat on concrete foundations. The slatted floors, usually made of cast concrete but occasionally of metal or plastic, were kept bare, with no straw or other bedding. Waste fell to gutters below that drained into adjacent ponds, known as “manure lagoons.” The buildings had no windows, instead relying on ventilation systems that operated automatically in response to temperature and humidity levels. Lights were kept off to save on electricity, except on the rare occasions when a worker was in the barn. Video systems allowed remote monitoring of the facilities.

  Breeding became tightly controlled. By 2000, three-quarters of sows in the United States became pregnant through artificial insemination. The companies that sold boar semen—and the university researchers who collaborated with them—relied on advanced population genetics and performance testing of offspring. Breeding stock tended to be purebreds—primarily Berkshire, Chester White, Duroc, Hampshire, Poland China, Spot, and Yorkshire—that were interbred to create fast-growing hybrids.

  Sows, rather than being kept together in group pens, spent their lives in “gestation crates,” metal pens about seven feet long and two feet wide. This, the industry said, prevented them from fighting each other and kept dominant sows from monopolizing the food supply. When the four-month gestation period was nearly over, the sows
were moved to “farrowing crates,” about the same size but with a “creep rail”: the lowest bar on one or both sides of the crate was missing so that piglets could enter the mother’s pen to nurse but could also escape into a narrow area alongside that the sow couldn’t enter. This alleviated a problem called “overlaying,” in which the sow accidentally crushed her piglets. In a farrowing crate, the mother could stand up and lie down, but she couldn’t turn around or roll over, lessening the chances of crushing. “If a sow has a litter of twelve and rolls on three, right there you’ve lost about a hundred dollars,” one farmer explained in the 1980s. The piglets were weaned after two to four weeks, and the sow returned to the gestation barn to receive a fresh tube of semen. Some sows produced five litters in two years.

  Most piglets had the tips of their daggerlike “needle teeth,” or incisors, clipped to prevent injuries to the sow or to other piglets. They got an injection of iron and had their ears notched for identification. Their tails were docked because confinement hogs had a tendency to chew the tails of other pigs, perhaps out of boredom or anxiety. Male pigs were castrated during the first couple of weeks of life to prevent “boar taint,” an off-flavor, caused in part by a pheromone, that sometimes appears in the meat of male pigs that reach sexual maturity before slaughter.

  After weaning, the piglets started eating a carefully formulated feed. In the 1930s, pigs gained a pound of weight for every four pounds of feed they ate. In the 1980s, that pound of gain required three and a half pounds of feed. Today, it takes less than three pounds. As one animal scientist explained, “The wonders of genetic selection, improvements in animal health products, a better understanding of nutrition, and use of environmentally controlled barns has allowed animal scientists, veterinarians, and engineers to create these improvements.”