There is a funny story of a farmer who gave his pigs all they could eat one day and starved them the next, in order to have his bacon nicely streaked with alternate layers of fat and lean. In England they seem to have a number of these ingenious farmers; at any rate, in Wiltshire bacon there is always plenty of lean meat. And how delicious it tastes when grilled, or baked in a roasting pan on a wire rack from which the fat drips to the bottom of the pan!
When the bacon is too fat to suit the native connoisseur it is apparently exported to America and sold at fancy prices to people who have more money than knowledge.
Gastronomic demands suggest many opportunities to get rich, particularly along this line. Spencer speaks of the "marvelous increase in the proportion of the inhabitants of the British Isles who now eat pork." Ireland exported nearly $17,500,000 worth of pork products in 1909. The slaughter houses of Denmark deal with over a million pigs a year, largely for export to the United Kingdom, which, in 1911, imported altogether nearly $100,000,000 worth of bacon and other pork products.
In epicurean France pork gains rapidly on other meats and the Germans eat nearly twice as much pork as they do beef. The figures, in pounds, of the per capita consumption in the Empire for the first three months of 1912 stood in this ratio: Mutton 0.33; veal, 1.54; beef, 7.87; pork, 14.55.
FAIR PLAY FOR PIGS.
In the United States, also, the demand for pork products is growing. It would grow very much more rapidly were it not for three drawbacks: the custom of denaturing hams and bacon and of marketing the tough meat of old lard-pigs, and the impudent sale to the public of the products of swill-fed hogs that are not fit to eat.
It is impossible to place too much emphasis on the fact that no matter of how fine a breed the pig may be, its meat is spoiled if the feed given it is of an offensive nature. Farm-kitchen refuse is harmless when mixed with milk and greens, but porkers fed on city swill and garbage do not yield palatable meat.
Pigs seldom have fair play. Most farmers lower the value of the pork they raise by not giving the animals fresh air, sunshine, some exercise, and clean sties. In these respects we are not the only sinners. From an admirable editorial article in the London "Times" of June 27, 1912, I cite the following:
"The pig is generally kept in conditions of a grossly unsanitary kind. He is quite a cleanly animal if left to himself, but he is kept in sties which compel him to wallow in filth all day and to sleep in a horribly confined and polluted atmosphere when he seeks shelter. Nature did not construct him for such conditions, but for an open-air life, and it is not really surprising that he develops swine-fever, which, by the way, is remarkably like the fevers that afflict overcrowded, filthy, and unventilated human dwellings. Cowhouses are regulated, but pigsties are not. Their position, however, is regulated in a way that presses very hardly upon cottagers. It is calmly assumed that pigsties must be dirty and offensive, so instead of insisting that they shall be clean, legislation decrees that they shall be at a distance from dwellings which makes it impossible for a cottager to pay his rent with cheaply raised bacon."
Pigs that are overfed and denied fresh air, sunshine, exercise, and a clean bed cannot possibly yield meat with a tempting Flavor, for such animals are really diseased—as unhealthy as the slum-dwellers in our large cities, whom no cannibal would touch.