PIGS BY THE TIGRIS
A MAN CROUCHES behind a rock and raises his arm silently. He has a spear clutched firmly in his right hand, tipped with the sharpest stone he could find. In the clearing before him a pig is grunting with pleasure, burrowing eagerly into some promising roots. It’s lost in the task, paying no heed to its surroundings.
The hunter rises to his feet to get enough power behind the throw, lifting himself into a standing position as slowly, as carefully, as he can. The moment has come.
It happens fast. He tenses his body, hurling the spear with all the strength he can muster. The pig senses something is wrong the moment the spear leaves the hunter’s hand. It suddenly stops digging and turns its head to face the hunter, their eyes meeting for a fraction of a second. Moving by reflex alone, the pig leaps forward, escaping the deadly projectile by millimetres. It squeals loudly and within seconds it disappears into the bushes, out of sight. The hunter listens as it escapes into the forest. The proud hunter slouches home, tired, hungry and frustrated. He knows that his children are even hungrier than he is. ‘Story of my life,’ he mutters to himself. ‘It’s bad for me and it’s worse for the kids.’ It’s been days since he brought home any meat.
The next morning, he wakes feeling strangely determined. He’s had enough. He’s sick of chasing his prey through the woods. The pigs are fast and persistent and nigh-impossible to outwit. They can literally smell him coming, long before he can so much as lay eyes on them. There must be a smarter way to do this. There must be some way to avoid this constant need to hunt, while still getting to have as much meat as he wants.
This weary, frustrated man lived by the river Tigris, and it’s him we have to thank for bacon. It may have taken another 1,000 years or more before we were tucking into rashers of thin bacon for breakfast, but without pigs, there would be no bacon.
«You can salt and smoke rashers of beef, mutton, goat, reindeer, moose or rabbit, as much as you like, but they’ll never be bacon.»
PHOTO: THINKSTOCK.COM
Bacon is made from pork. End of story. You can’t make bacon from anything else. You can salt and smoke rashers of beef, mutton, goat, reindeer, moose or rabbit as much as you like, but they’ll never be bacon. That frustrated hunter from the Tigris was the first to successfully domesticate pigs and that’s why we owe him so much. He was the first to truly make pigs his own.
DOMESTICATION
Taming a pig is a bit like taming a cat. Harder than taming a sheep, but a little easier than taming a horse, which needs to be ridden before it can be brought under control. That, at least, is unnecessary with a pig. The animal’s trust needs to be won slowly but steadily, with food, treats and warm scratches behind the ears. Eventually, a friendship between man and pig develops. It’s a special bond, characterised by affection, kindness and regular meals. But, eventually, the free board and lodgings hold a price for the pig.
We don’t know exactly when pigs started to become household animals – it seems to have developed at different times in both Europe and Asia. But we know that it was a very long time ago. Archaeological discoveries in modern Germany suggest that humans have been keeping pigs for more than 11,000 years and it seems to have developed independently in numerous other societies, all over the world.
Pigs weren’t the first animals to be domesticated – unlike sheep, they can’t subsist on grass and leaves alone. They require a more varied diet. It was only after we figured out how to feed pigs that we could domesticate them and estimates of when this happened vary wildly. Some sources suggest that it was as long as 13,000 years ago. We’ve found evidence of pigs dating back 11,400 years on Cyprus, and it’s safe to say that they didn’t get there by themselves. In China, we know that pig-keeping was commonplace at least 8,000 years ago. Pigs have also lived in close proximity to humans for many years. The history of man’s relationship with pigs is the beginning of the story of bacon.
SALTING MEAT
The story of bacon begins, naturally enough, with pigs. But it takes more than pork to make bacon. We need salt, and we need smoke. The oldest sources we have concerning salt production are from China. It’s not certain if the Chinese were the first to extract salt, but they certainly appear to have been the first to write about it. Unsurprising, perhaps, given that Chinese is the oldest written culture still alive today. The first record of salt production we have is a document from approximately 800 BC describing the salt production and trade taking place at least 1,000 years earlier, during the Xia dynasty. Salt was produced by boiling salt water in earthenware pots until salt crystals formed on the base. Yi Dun is, so far as we can tell, the first person to have begun boiling salt water to produce salt in iron pots, in approximately 450 BC – a far more effective technique than using earthenware pots.
It’s unlikely that the Chinese discovered how to salt meat. Salt was expensive and sprinkling large amounts of it on pork must have seemed like a colossal waste of time and resources. Salt was used to make fish sauce, by fermenting small fish in salt. This sauce, known as ‘jiang’, was used as seasoning. Eventually, someone discovered that you can mix soya beans with the fish, and eventually the fish was dropped completely, giving us ‘jiangyou’: soy sauce.
Of course, we can’t rule out the possibility that some other Chinese people, some other time, took something like pork belly and salted, sliced, fried and ate it. But, if so, it never became a hit.
«We’ve found evidence of pigs dating back 11,400 years on Cyprus, and it’s safe to say that they didn’t get there by themselves.»
«Remember, the next time you look at the pyramids, that they couldn’t have been built without the help of bacon. Makes you think, doesn’t it?»
DID THE EGYPTIANS MAKE BACON?
The Egyptians could have been the first. They’d certainly mastered the art of domesticating pigs – and ducks, pelicans, geese and quail, for that matter – and they made valiant, if unsuccessful, efforts to tame antelopes and various types of gazelle. You certainly can’t say they didn’t try. But it wasn’t just domestication – they had salt, too. Lots of salt. They used a different method from the Chinese boiling – as a desert people, they knew how to use the sun’s energy to evaporate the salt water of the Nile Delta.
There were a lot of domesticated pigs in ancient Egypt, and they left plenty of archaeological evidence behind. The oldest finds date back to 5,000 BC, and pig farming would appear to have continued more or less continuously throughout the classical era. The bulk of these archaeological discoveries has been found in the graves of the lower classes, indicating that pork may have been primarily a poor man’s food – possibly for builders, even slaves.
The first pyramids were constructed using vast numbers of people, whose diet, archaeological evidence suggests, was primarily meat-based. Archaeologists have dug up the bones of cows, sheep, goats … and pigs. Fewer pigs than the other animals, admittedly – it may be that some of the lower classes ate salted pork. Which brings us closer to bacon – so remember, the next time you look at the pyramids, that they couldn’t have been built without the help of bacon. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
We know for certain that the Egyptians understood the art of preserving meat and fish with salt, so it wasn’t a lack of knowledge that held them back from discovering bacon. There was, however, an aversion to pork among the upper classes. It is believed that the reasons for this may have been religious, as well as cultural, but either way there’s still no reason why the Egyptians couldn’t have been the first. But they weren’t. Even back in the time of the pharaohs, it seems that pigs weren’t regarded well in the Middle East.
The Chinese eventually discovered other ways of