Ubiquitous Medieval Pigs | Hacker News Reader

Ubiquitous Medieval Pigs

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Irish farmers called pigs, "the gentleman who always pays his rent" [0]. Raising pig or two was a reliable way for even poor families to fertilize soil and make a bit of money.

[0] https://www.irishamericanmom.com/the-irish-pig-a-k-a-the-gen...

On the topic of pigs and pork I enjoyed this recent Adam Ragusea video about why we don't have a good explanation for decrees against eating pork:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sew4rctKghY

Like most of his work he tries to research and source everything he says.

I can't recall if it was in the video or a comment, but one idea is that chickens just do it better. They convert garbage to food (and eggs!) more quickly and efficiently. You can eat one chicken but can't eat a similar sized part of a pig, which is important before refrigeration. They don't make lard which was a major use of pigs (apparently they were often grown fat on purpose for lard, not meat) but warmer climes had access to and preferred olive oil anyway, since it kept better.

He doesn't analyze why Rabbit is also prohibited by the Torah. All his theories for why Pig is prohibited should also be compared to rabbits. (They are dirty, or compete with humans for food, or small so you can eat the whole thing.)

Yet, they aren't.

His final conclusion: There is no reason, is probably the right one. Jews don't eat pig, or rabbit, because God said not to, and that's about it.

"Protein poisoning (also referred to colloquially as rabbit starvation, mal de caribou, or fat starvation) refers to an unverified acute form of malnutrition that some have speculated may be caused by a diet deficient in fat, where excessive lean meat is consumed", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation

This sounds like confirmation bias, though (you can find a reason not to eat anything if you look closely enough). It is also highly speculative.

I think from an ethnographic point of view, cultural reasons are perfectly plausible, in the same way some people now refuse to eat horse, veal, or indeed rabbit.

Perhaps God's prophet was a chicken farmer.

That's almost certainly correct. Another way to view it is as a matter of community: "We are the people who don't eat X (or wear X, or do X)". Much as Americans view people who eat dogs as repulsive, having a set of proscribed behaviors defines who you're not and thus who you are.

When it comes to eating dog, the prohibition feels nearly as strong as if it came from God. It would take only a little nudge for somebody's existing dietary preferences to become scripture.

That preference might have had some other kind of more immediate necessity as well, but a lot of such cultural dictates are either arbitrary or become arbitrary as circumstances change. That just makes the cultural marker even more imperative. It would be easy to avoid pigs, say, if they were actually bad for you. Avoiding them even when everybody else is consuming them successfully shows a real determination.

The cultural angle is covered near the end of the video (around 11 minutes). Apparently there is some evidence northern Israelites were still eating pork and the rules became a way to bind everyone together culturally, though like all other reasons there's no hard evidence.

I love pigs and dread the thought of butchering mine. Where I live wild pigs are not a problem, but in the Southern states of the USA there are literally millions. They are the most invasive of species, descendants of those imported from Europe or maybe Russia in the 19th century. Some get to be enormous. They destroy property and they're tearing up hundreds of thousands of acres of land. They're smart and dangerous. The right solution is of course to shoot them en masse, but the optics aren't so good on that solution.

Around 600000 are shot per year in Germany, as a point of reference.

Wow! I somehow decided that Germany was densely populated enough that the numbers wouldn't be nearly so high.

Aren't those boars though? Or are those the boars and pigs same animal just that one is feral? My knowledge of boars is entirely from Asterix and Obelix so take anything I say with a grain of salt. Though if the comics (from 1950) are to be believed, they were also aplenty in Gaul 2000 years ago.

Not many people know that if you take the standard domesticated pig we’re all used to and let it roam free, it will change physically and behaviorally pretty quickly and resemble a boar. Pretty “wild” stuff.

https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/31104/202...

It's not entirely clear how many generations this take and whether breeding with the wild population is involved though. This would be extremely fascinating if we knew this to be entirely epigenetic...

It happens in Australia and New Zealand, which don't have wild pigs.

The boars they eat in Astérix are Sus Scrofa. The pigs we eat nowadays are originally the same species, now slightly altered by domestication and selection. They are sometimes considered as a subspecies Sus Scrofa Domesticus, and sometimes their own species Sus Domesticus. In any case, they are very close to each other, and I am not sure the difference between a feral Sus Domesticus and a proper Sus Scrofa would be significant. They still can mate.

There were indeed plenty of boars in medieval Europe, and there still are plenty of them now.

One may recall the "30 to 50 feral hogs" tweet that got turned into somewhat of a joke/meme a year ago. Here's an article that delves into the realism a bit...

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/8/6/20756162/30-to-5...

Trapping an entire sounder of feral hogs is apparently a better choice than trying to shoot a few of them, as any hogs not killed will repopulate quickly: https://www.uaex.edu/publications/pdf/MP534.pdf

In the Balkans, people tended to grow pigs because they weren't taxed or at least so the legend goes. Due to the Ottoman empire being muslim and all, turks didn't want to have anything to do with pigs. I haven't checked if pigs are mentioned in the tax archives though.

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