Shezza 🇺🇸

Last week, I wrote about how the average cotton farmer got most of his calories from a corn and molasses diet. This week, I figured I’d cover the other cornerstone of his diet, pork. Pork provided the average cotton state Southerner with most of his proteins and fats, and it could be eaten year around without refrigeration. The pig was one of the few domesticated animals that could survive the pine forests, hot and humid climate, and parasites of the American South before the modern era. Survival is an understatement. Pigs thrive in the South. Owing to their omnivorous nature, they can make a meal out of nearly anything from roots, tubers, berries, mushrooms, nuts, seeds, grasses, worms, grubs, insects, lizards, snakes, rodents, frogs, birds, eggs, and baby larger mammals. They have no qualms about scavenging dead animals, even in advanced states of decay. Even in the Colonial Era, the deep South had few natural predators, and almost none that would chance a fight with a healthy adult. Our swamps, coastal plains, sprawling pine forests, and mountain hollers provided the pig with a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet. Their only major weakness as a domesticated animal in the premodern era is a susceptibility, especially for young pigs, to extreme cold. But the winters in the South are mild and even the coldest of cold snaps are short lived. The Conquistadors may have been the ones looking for paradise, but the pigs that came to America in the holds of those Spanish galleons are the ones that actually found it.    Wheeler, you may ask, why didn’t the South try raising other animals? Why not cows? Cows require that the land be converted first to pasture, and any plot of land large enough to sustain cows would be far more valuable as a cotton field. Spanish Goats do well in the American South, why didn’t the South raise more goats? There were some goats, but goats before the advent of barbed wire and electric fences are notoriously difficult to contain. A half Chinese, half black homosexual Jewish prostitute would receive a warmer welcome in a community of cotton planters than a largescale goat herder. Goats had plenty of natural predators in the South, even once they reach maturity. More importantly, goats reproduce slower and grow slower than pigs. A goat’s gestation period is roughly 150 days. A pigs gestation period is 114 days. A Spanish goat will usually have 1-2 babies. A pig will litter 8-12 babies. A goat struggles to give birth twice a year. A pig can reliably do 2.3-2.5 litters a year. A one-year-old pig will weigh 200-300 pounds. A goat will only get to 60-100 pounds during the same time period. Why wasn’t the chicken the cornerstone of the premodern Southerner’s diet? Before chicken wire, it was incredibly difficult to protect chickens from predators. The South was full of hawks, opossums, snakes, foxes, owls, skunks, bobcats, and raccoons looking for a nice chicken or egg dinner. More importantly, a chicken cannot reliably forage its diet like a pig can. You’d be planting crops that have only a third of the value of cotton to input into a chicken operation that won’t produce as much meat as pigs. And before refrigeration, the only reliable way to preserve a significant quantity of chicken was canning. Self-sealing canning jars were not invented until 1915. Sheep? I’ll let you come to the conclusion why an extremely humid climate that has average summer highs in the 90’s won’t be ideal for sheep. There were some around the coasts, but it was never more than a cottage industry. So fellow Southerner, you are what you ate, and what you ate was pork. Lots of it. More than any other animal until the 1960’s. Soon, I’ll explain the process of turning live pigs into shelf stable meat before refrigeration or electricity. Until next time, Deo vindice friends.

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