ON GRANARIES - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 131

because if the commodity is animal feed it can at least be used to feed humans in an emer-
gency, given the political will.
The Rumbim Tree
Throughout human history, meat consumption has not often threatened food security;
on the contrary a main role of animal husbandry has been to provide food security: 'The
purpose of domestication was to secure animal protein reserves and to have animals serve
as living food conserves'. 12 Animals, fattened on rich summer grasses, and lured into do-
mestication by titbits, could be kept ticking over on hay as store animals until the back end
of winter, when there was nothing else left. Nomads' herds of cattle or sheep are walk-
ing rat-proof larders, full of high value protein and carbohydrates, which serve as a buffer
against famine when the rains fail or times get hard.
In the early 1960s anthropologist Roy Rapaport examined a particularly sophisticated
use of animals as a buffer against starvation amongst the Maring of New Guinea (though
a similar pattern has been observed in a number of other New Guinea populations). 13 In
the following section I examine this rather unusual strategy in some detail, partly because
it shows that humans are capable of taking a very different approach towards meat-eating
from our own, and partly because it offers a parable for the dilemma which humanity now
faces. In no way am I advocating that we should adopt their system.
Within this tribal group, each clan of about 200 members lives off slash and burn - clear-
ing areas in the forest, farming them for a year or two, and then moving further afield. Any
surplus food they grow is fed to pigs who also derive a portion of their food by roaming
the forest floor. The young pigs are raised in the household by the women who treat them
as pets, scratching and cossetting them like puppies. They are given names: Jokai, Kikia,
Kombom or Prim. When they are tiny they are carried out to the gardens where the women
work, then walked out on a leash tied to their front leg, and soon they learn to trot along
behind, just like a dog. When they are a few months old, they are encouraged to go off into
the bush during the day to forage, but in the evening they return of their own accord to the
household for an evening meal of manioc and sweet potato.
But instead of maintaining a stable population of pigs by eating them at a constant rate,
the Maring refuse to kill them and allow the population to build up, and up, until the pigs
are eating them out of house and home - breaking into their gardens and consuming so
much of the produce that the soil becomes exhausted. As long as the population of pigs
remains low, and a woman has perhaps just one pig to care for, then they can be fairly eas-
ily fed on waste and surplus produce from nearby gardens. But adult pigs eat as much as a
human. When each household has to support four or five of them it becomes a huge burden
upon the economy. As the gardens near to the village become exhausted, new gardens have