SEDENTARY PIGS, NOMADIC COWS, URBAN CHICKENS - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 9

plex to the shores of America in the 16th century. The Spanish conquerors of the New
World bore a striking resemblance to the fierce nomadic tribesmen of the Eurasian
steppes who had set out to conquer Europe over 5,000 years earlier. 6
Columbus, Rifkin notes, on his second voyage, unloaded in Haiti '24 stallions, ten mares
and an unknown number of cattle', and Cortes introduced longhorn cattle to Mexico, as
if that was an indication of what was to follow. But Rifkin neglects to mention that on
the same voyage, Columbus also brought 'eight sturdy Iberian pigs', while Cortes entered
Mexico City at the head of a cavalcade which included a drove of Spanish swine. 7 The
Plymouth Brethren arrived without cows, but with six goats, 50 pigs, and many hens - not
surprising, since they were arriving on a well-wooded seaboard. Cattle didn't arrive un-
til the following year. Ten years later, the Massachusetts Bay colony boasted '1500 cattle,
4000 goats and innumerable swine'. Imported pigs were allowed to run loose over most of
northern Manhattan Island, and the stockade which kept them away from the farms later
gave its name to Wall Street. 8
Cattle spread up through the drylands of Mexico, but the predominance of pigs over
cattle was to persist on the East coast, while the Southern states, from Virginia to Louisiana,
became famous for their hams and fatback. A Southern physician called Dr John Wilson
complained that people in the USA ate three times as much pork as Europeans: 'The United
States of America might properly called the great Hog-eating Confederacy, or the Repub-
lic of Porkdom.' 9 By the second half of the 18th century, the eastern states were salting
surplus pork and shipping it to Europe, a century before chilled beef was able to make the
same journey. In the early 19th century, up to half a million pigs a year were driven from
as far away as the Ohio river to New York and Philadelphia, along 'well-worn hog trails as
clearly marked and as famous as the cattle trails of the Southwest' 10 - although Hollywood
has yet to come up with a hogman movie. Even during the cattle bonanza years of the late
19th century, the pig industry held its own: 'It was the runaway success of homesteaders'
hogs that stopped them from dreaming about ranches in Oklahoma or gold in California'. 11
Eventually, as the midwest began producing increasing surpluses of corn, the hog frontier
and the salt-pork barrelling industry advanced to Cincinnati and finally Chicago. In the Un-
ited States, just as in the Old World, the folks who settled in the east stuck with pigs, and
they outnumbered the pioneers who moved west with their cattle.
Right up until the 1950s, US citizens ate more pork than they ate beef, though you would
never have guessed this from reading Rifkin. The two factors that finally tipped the balance
in favour of beef had nothing to do with land use, still less a macho cow cult, but reflected
the needs of the meat packing industry. The first was the introduction of refrigeration which
allowed cattle carcases to be trimmed and packed in Chicago slaughterhouses, rather than
having to be distributed on the hoof in cattle trucks to butchers in the East. Refrigeration