Pigs in the City

Most people know at this point that eating locally is nothing new, and much has been made of eating "the way your grandparents ate". Because of course it used to be that you couldn't not eat locally, since shipping food any distance at all was not really an option. The part people don't tend to think about is that when eating locally was that much a necessity, the food you ate was way more present in life than as just a plate on the table. Food was everywhere, and it shaped both how you lived and the place you lived in.

How different was it? One of my favorite local food stories is the history of the pig. New York City has a long and involved history with pigs. It started when colonists first came to America, bringing with them livestock and the notion of private property. Both were new to the Native Americans. As the colonists settled, they set about claiming property and trying to make the Native Americans conform to their ideas of ownership and boundaries. Fences and coercion (not to mention small pox) all helped the colonists make Native Americans see things their way, but it was the pigs that made the most convincing argument. The pigs brought over from Europe quickly made themselves at home in the New World, and roamed freely in large, aggressive packs, foraging for whatever food they could find. And what they found were the Native American's fields, with all the corn and other vegetables they could possibly want, all completely unprotected by fences. Needless to say, the pigs wreaked havoc, and the Native Americans were forced to put up fences, or else lose their entire crop. Once they put up fences, they had entered into the European system of private property, and were forced to live and interact with the colonists on their terms. New York, along with the rest of the Northeast, became land divided, a land of farms and fences and boundaries. The landscapes of today are the result of those first divisions, now multiplied and expanded into cities and developments as well as fields and farmland. There are even still some traces of those first boundaries: Wall Street really did used to be a wall, built by the settlers of what they called New Amsterdam. I even read somewhere that pigs were directly to blame for this wall too. Apparently the semi-wild herds of pigs could get pretty aggressive, and the wall was built to protect the settlement from rampaging pigs. This might not be true. The other explanation I've heard, which seems slightly more plausible, is that the wall was built to keep out hostile attackers of the human variety: Native Americans. But still, the pigs make a good story, and even if it's not strictly true, there's definitely some truth in there. It at least does go to show how important pork was to the building of fences.

But the story of pigs doesn't end there. In fact, it gets better. That's because the story of New York farms doesn't end with the start of New York City. Even after the city stopped looking like fields and started looking like buildings and streets, New York was still a farm. Talk about local: the meat that people (especially the poor) ate well into the 19th century didn't come from the country. It came from livestock the roamed the streets. Pigs were the most common of these animals, and possibly the most iconic. For a lot of people, they came to symbolize city life, not rural life, and they were seen as an image of the chaos and squalor of the poor and crowded areas of the city. Especially at the edges, where the city faded into destitute neighborhoods and shantytowns, you could find whole herds of pigs, roaming the streets and rummaging in alleyways.

In a time when trash was just dumped in the street or piled in the gutters, 19th century pigs gave a whole new meaning to using the whole animal. They acted as the only street cleaners or trash collectors New York had as they foraged for food, rooting through the heaps of garbage and disposing of anything edible. There was no real system in place for disposing of waste in the city, and it wasn't just garbage that collected in the streets. People also regularly tossed the contents of their chamber pots out the window, and when a carriage horse or a cow died, it was usually just left on the curb to rot or be eaten by other stray animals. So the pigs, doing their part to get rid of all this, were arguably some of the more sanitary residents of the city. They might even have been more important in their street-cleaner role than in their ham and pork role. That's not to say that these pigs were exactly a beloved fixture in the city. I think the hot dog probably receives a lot more love than they did. Even though they were helping keep the streets somewhat clean, the city was still filthy, and that the pigs lived off this filth made their presence emblematic of the unsanitary conditions that plagued the more destitute neighborhoods. Not to mention the fact that these herds of pigs could get pretty aggressive. Those rampaging pigs of the Wall Street story are no exaggeration: there are stories of semi-wild pigs menacing the residents of New York who got in their way, and even a few reported cases of children being attacked and even killed.

Pigs were a serious part of life in New York for a long time, and not just as food. We're getting back to local now, and we're doing a pretty good job. There are even a few chickens starting to show up in the city, as well as vegetables. But we've still got nothing on the local of the old New York. Then again, maybe that's not such a bad thing. I'm not sure I want to be looking out surly, semi-feral pigs on my way to work in the morning.

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