The Pig and I: The Tale of Our Relationship with a Beast We Eat

The empathetic and entertaining debut from journalist Endresen draws on the six months he spent working on a pig farm to survey humanity’s complex relationship with the animal. Interspersing descriptions of mucking stalls and inseminating sows with a porcine history lesson that begins 45,000 years ago, Endresen notes that “humanity’s first known figurative drawing is a sketch of a pig.” Domesticated in China and brought to Europe as a food source, the pig soon became a despised and demonized animal in the West. As omnivores willing to eat anything—feces, each other, dead bodies, and even small children—the pig was banished from Roman cities, an attitude that persisted through the Middle Ages. In the 1800s, scientists uncovered anatomical similarities between pigs and humans; in the 1970s, studies revealed the pig’s high level of intelligence. Both discoveries raised ethical questions about the factory farming of pigs, even as a massive and “utterly invisible” globe-spanning pork production industry arose (“Over the past half century, no animal has been more widely eaten in the world than the pig,” Endresen writes). Refreshingly honest in his self-appraisal, Endresen concludes by reflecting (as he transports the pigs he raised on the farm to slaughter) on how he will continue to eat pork, even as he despairs over the mass carnage. This is an enlightening meditation on a troubling moral issue. (Oct.)