pigletter #1
self-introduction
hello human.
it’s pig.
pig is here to share some world history from a pig perspective.
what can pig know of man’s world?
as it turns out, quite a bit.
we follow you, and you follow us, everywhere.
science guys guess that 95% of mammal mass consists of humans and their food animals, half of which is man and pig.1
farm guys claim that pound for pound, pig makes up the largest part of man’s meat market.2
if you ask pig, body weight is a weird, dull, and grisly way of capturing our complicated coexistence. but pig brings up these facts of yours to make the simple point: if one is what one eats, or the company one keeps, man is pig.
well that’s enough for today. pig wants to root and nap.
hear from pig again this time next week.
( o o )
Lander, Brian, Mindi Schneider, and Katherine Brunson. “A History of Pigs in China: From Curious Omnivores to Industrial Pork.” The Journal of Asian Studies 79, no. 4 (2020): 866, citing this Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) article from 2017.
USDA data as cited in Pork Checkoff’s Quick Facts (2011)