| Hog Ties: Pigs, Manure, and Morality in American Culture |
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Hog Ties: Pigs, Manure, and Morality in American Culture. By Richard P. Horwitz. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 306. Index. $27.95 cloth. As Horwitz claims in his thesis, "this is a book about farming, pigs, and disease in American Culture." What Horwitz does not give away in his early chapters is that this book is deeply about the human frailties and strengths that make raising animals for slaughter such an emotional investment. From the onset, Horwitz attempts to locate hog raising in America as a phenomena uniquely American in its development, decline, and desperation. While cultures around the world have tended hogs at one time or another, Horwitz proves that from the Jeffersonian peasant ideal to the mega-farm corporate operations, American pork production is a unique response to history. Perhaps the gruesome metaphor of porcine disease and the human response to it give this book its utter realism and greatest impact. Hog Ties is an accessible book--reachable and useful on a hundred different levels. Food scholars, Americanists, economists, folklorists, agri-science and agri-business practitioners, microbiologists, and veterinarians alike can find themselves in these pages--often on both sides of the issues and dilemmas raised by Horwitz. For those not fluent in virology or microbiology, parts of the middle chapters may prove a rough plod-but this difficulty is telling: the objective, scientific perspective of these chapters (the party line followed by American policy-makers for decades) is a painful counterpoint to the hog farmer with shovel in hand. Horwitz cleverly asserts that consumers want their meat to come from happy people raising happy animals, with none of the grubby reality of birth and death and disease intruding on their suppertime thoughts. His gift here is the absolute reality of pork production: the lakes of manure and urine, the diseases that can wipe out a family farm overnight, the politics and economics of consumption and production. He makes the human truth of the porcine world ours for a few hundred pages, and he pulls no punches. His prose is at times brutal and at times lilting as he blends the best of American pig literature with the worst of American arrogance. In short, he locates the pig within the human and reports on the responses from all involved. One particularly telling passage treats the imagery humans associate with cattle folk v. hog folk. American cattle culture has produced cowboys, big hats, six guns, and dozens of John Wayne movies--in short, an iconography that is uniquely American. But what has the hog industry produced? The "other white meat"? It is a distinction based not only upon scale, but upon distance and familiarity. The hog remains as cute and personable as Wilbur from Charlotte's Web, Miss Piggy, or Arnold Ziffel from "Green Acres." Cattle are evidently just not as cuddly and pink and anthropomorphic as hogs are to Americans. Distinctions in this book are drawn according to distance: distance between lab-coated bench scientists and shit-shovelling hired hands; between coat and tie executives and fifth-generation family farmers trying to convert a corn crop into cash on the hoof; between publicity and grantseeking academics and ethnographers actually listening to their informants. Horwitz writes about people brought together by pigs, and he does a wonderfully honest job of presenting all sides and opinions. He brings "pig stuff" to the reader's eyes, ears, nose, and heart, and the distances he bridges are experiential, emotional, financial, and enormously physical. In addition, Horowitz admits his own fallibility up front; the reader experiences his anger, his doubt, and his essential humanity as he goes from manure pile to board room to veterinary clinic to processing plant to academic ivory tower. In Hog Ties, Horowitz asserts the utter extremes of humanity required by the hog business, and he does it well. J. Rhett Rushing |
