“We all naturally find it agreeable to get hold of new ideas easily… It is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh.”

– Aristotle, Rhetoric 3:10

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All the ingredients were there when the initial Hebrew pork prohibition dropped around the 7th century BCE. But this was still a narcissism of small differences and pork drew one line in the sand amongst many others. Then, just a few centuries later, people were willing to die instead of …

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“And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be cloven-footed, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.”

— Leviticus, Hebrew Bible 11:7

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“Just as a single pig gives birth to many piglets, let every single branch of this vineyard, like the pig, bear many grape clusters.”

— Hittite Benedictions for Labarna, 17th Century BCE

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“The basis of taboo is a forbidden action for which there exists a strong inclination in the unconscious…[the] prohibition is to be explained as the result of an emotional ambivalence.”

— Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud

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“ The World War has shown us that the stability of a nation can be undermined even more from the nutritional side than through military operations. From this fact, the enormous importance of the food industry has become clear with respect to National Socialism.”

– Richard Walther Darré, Das Schweinemord (1937)

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One of the biggest fallacies about the Nazis is that Germany’s lower middle class swept them to power. Aside from being opaque, it’s a huge oversimplification that doesn’t take into account regional and religious differences, the urban-rural split as well as the pivotal question of electoral momentum. The fringe parties once regarded as beyond the pale suddenly gaining a foothold, then using it to bash down subsequent barriers to office. Take Schleswig-Holstein, the first state where the Nazis obtained an absolute majority in 1932. Located at the base of the Jutland Peninsula with Denmark to the North, you might recognise its name because it lent the Holstein part to the world’s most famous dairy cow. What’s less evident though, is that from at least the late 19th century up until today, it’s raised vastly more swine than cattle. Then there’s the state with the second-highest proportion of Nazi votes in 1932, East Hanover, which was right next door and clocked in at 49.5%. On the eve of WWII, the surrounding area was home to more pigs than anywhere else in Germany.

These aren’t fringe cases. What does makes Holstein and Hanover unique is that they sit directly adjacent to Germany’s larger port, Hamburg. But remove that from the picture and they’re pronounced details in a much broader landscape. Like Oldenburg, Pomerania and Thuringia, these states were brimming with Protestant farmers sitting on small to medium-sized tracts of land between 5-20 hectares who voted for Nazis in droves earlier than anyone else. They were also brimming with swine. Now, it might sound obvious that supporters of the world’s most notoriously antisemitic party loved their pigs. But the general historical consensus is that anti-Jewish sentiment got more virulent the closer you got to the Austrian border. Lest we forget, Hitler was Austrian and Himmler, Bavarian.

Like so many other European romantic movements, the German Völkisch tradition the Nazis adored was born aloft by nostalgia for a pre-industrial past amid the vicissitudes of modern life. It took Germany by storm from the late 19th century onwards and while its ethnonationalism may have been particularly virulent and its chatter about Aryans, galling, its luminaries like Houston Neville Chamberlain and Paul de Lagarde cut and pasted many of their racial arguments wholesale from Arthur de Gobineau. The latter was French, de Lagarde was raised by a French aunt while the Chamberlain was decidedly British. Which is to say Hannover and Schleswig-Holstein weren’t some antisemitic aberration compared to the rest of the German world nor was Germany compared to the rest of Europe. They looked different because of their agriculture.

In the late 1920s, this peculiar smattering of small farms found itself overleveraged with debt and facing tumbling global pork prices. So they decided to try something new. Today, it’s obvious this was a Faustian pact but that wasn’t readily apparent at the time. To make sense of why the Nazi agricultural proposition was so compelling, we might as well turn to the guy who designed it.

After all, Richard Walther Darré knew his swine.

Out of the Forest and Into the Fields

Darré published The Pig as a Criterion for the Nordic Races and Semites in 1927 while completing his doctorate at the University of Halle. “Two races emerge from the darkness of antiquity who, in their attitude to the pig, are direct opposites,” he wrote, stressing the beast’s central importance to Nordic Sun God rituals and insisting that swine were the centrepiece of aryan agriculture. Basically, he argued pigs were lousy for crossing the desert and used vast quantities of water, hence the prohibition for nomadic peoples. Meanwhile, the Aryan predeliction for all things pork pointed indisputably towards their history as a sedentary lot that were ‘rooted in the soil,’ the latter’s fat providing succour against the cold. During the next decade, this binary of his metastasized into a sprawling ideological program that equated nomadism with Jewish cosmopolitanism and the capricious winds of international trade.

Germany is Europe’s largest pig producer today and in Darré’s time, pork accounted for two-thirds of the average citizen’s meat intake, but this wasn’t always the case. Despite the ubiquity in German food and iconography — Nordic gods, winter slaughters for feast days and the boar as a calling card for martial prowess + pigs as metaphors for its Jewish minorities, the clearing of forests imperilled Europe’s ancient system of panage. As more and more farms sprang up across Germany’s princely states, beef and above all, mutton was all the rage by the late 18th century.

The actual taste was besides the point because the European textile industry was spinning out reams of wool and making its kingpins rich. It’s not for nothing that Robert Bakewell’s first breeding experiments centred around Leicester sheep and as news of what he was doing at Dishley spread across Europe and beyond, German farmers hopped across the North Sea to see what he was doing and before long, Saxony was the centre of the global merino wool trade. By the turn of the 19th century, they busied themselves setting up guilds + academies to harness the powers of pedigree pure breeding. And by the middle of the 1800s, the ground was shifting beneath everyone’s feet.

With the 1840s came the railways, a customs union (Zollverein) picking up steam amongst Germany’s unruly splatter of princely states, a potato blight and then in 1848, revolution. Serfdom was abolished and with Germany fast industrialising, its inhabitants piled into cities looking for work in heavy industry. Agriculture became much more intensive to meet the surging demand and while the stonking Junker grain factories to the East largely remained intact, the same couldn’t be said of the vast tracts of grazing land that had buoyed the German textile industry for so long.

When the era of free trade descended across the continent in 1860, Saxon wool was suddenly competing with stuff from Britain’s colonies. As the aristocratic holdings to the west were carved up into hundreds of thousands of smaller peasant farms, sheep just weren’t the same economic proposition. The precise nature of this shift remains a tad hazy up until the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 and a newly minted German Empire emerged from Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors (!) in January of the next year. Amidst the groundswell of economic optimism, Germany’s children were hungry for meat. The numbers from here on out are staggering. Consumption ballooned from around 29 kg per person to over 53 kg on the eve of WWI with pork provisions increasing by 153.5 %. 13.5 million pigs were added to German herds between 1892 -1913 alone as beef consumption increased by around a third and mutton numbers folded in half. What we’re looking at here isn’t a trend a but a seismic shift.

Iron, Rye and Pork

Darré was right to observe that “pig-rearing in Germany only went into decline at the point when the advance of civilisation pushed into the forest.” But he frames this production glut in terms of his compatriots’ primordial hunger, ignoring that just like in the United States, the richer people got the more beef they ate. What’s more, the same parallel is true of Germany’s cattle farmers. Like their American counterparts, they may have rhapsodised about the milk yields of their spanking new shorthorns but they relied on swine to mop up dairy waste products. To have more pigs was to be more efficient, whether or not you called yourself a swine herd. Increasingly though, many did, especially small and medium-sized farmers who discovered urban price tags were a robust way of diversifying their income. They didn’t export their wares, instead opting to chase local markets and became much wealthier for it.

Still, while the story of Germany’s insatiable appetite for pork is one of nationalist fervour, its also avowedly internationalist in scope and you can see as much on a map too. In the second half of the 19th century, German swine herds in the north west gobbled up the market share of pig farmers everywhere else because they concentrated around the ports like Hamburg, ones which by the 1870s, were getting swamped with cheap American grain. The transcontinental railways had opened up the American interior from 1869 onwards and with maritime transport also turning to steam, Germany’s fledgling national economy suddenly found itself confronting something equally new. Globalisation.

Free trade may have been the midwife of the German state under the Zollverein customs union but this was different. The aristocratic Junkers who dominated the Conservative party and much of the country’s political class couldn’t compete with North America’s sprawling prairies. While the German economy was riding high for a brief spell, investing in America’s industries as the listings on the Frankfurt stock exchange ballooned, in 1873 came a financial crisis that left everyone exposed. What’s more, Bismarck’s chief banker and economic advisor at the time (Gerson von Bleichröder) was Jewish. Free trade advocates found themselves contending with an invisible hand of the market that gave but also took and they now had someone to blame for getting sour about it. So alongside heavy industry, both industrialists and agriculturalists started pushing for protectionist tariffs in what’s known as ‘The Marriage of Iron and Rye’.

In 1878, the German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck finally obliged and while the grain kept piling in to feed hungry urbanites and pigs alike, the Junkers had been thrown a lifeline by one of their own. Meanwhile, Bismarck had chanced upon a means of funding a cash-strapped German government. The thing is though, heavy industry benefited from cheaper food prices and German agriculture, from cheaper industrial equipment. It was an alliance standing atop stilts until the rise of Chicago started flooding Europe with American pork and the hundreds of thousands of German pig farmers started making a ruckus too.

We’ve already dealt with the Pork War from the American perspective. They were furious that health concerns were being used to advance a blatantly protectionist agenda. When the ban on US pork was lifted nine years later, the American consul in Leipzig reported that the ordeal had cost US producers some 250 million dollars and they weren’t out of the woods yet. While Bismarck was forced out in 1890 and the moratorium was lifted by his successor Leon Von Caprivi the next year, said Consul looked on with dismay as the German press descended into a “fierce crusade against the old enemy on the grounds of trichina infection.”

In the intervening years, hundreds of thousands of German pig farmers had joined forces with the Junkers to create one of the most influential blocs in the Reichstag. Caprivi looked to lower tariffs in order to spur industrial production, where Germany looked like it had a comparative advantage, famously insisting that “we either export goods or we export people.” Alas for Caprivi, Germany never stopped doing both. Darre’s parents were among the millions of emigres who departed via Hamburg for the New World. The Chancellor had grossly misjudged his constituents.

Bastard Sons of the Marriage of Iron and Rye

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“The rearing of domestic pigs is dependent on a fundamental condition, namely: that it can only be carried out by a sedentary populace. Nomadism and pig husbandry are mutually exclusive.”

– Richard Walther Darre, The Pig as a Criterio…

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“The students of heredity, especially, understand all of their subject except their subject…That is, they have studied everything but the question of what they are studying.”

—G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

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“When having lunch at Sweetings, you sit behind bar which a waiter is trapped, you order your smoked eel, they yell to a runner who delivers your eel over your shoulder to the waiter, who then places it under the counter and then in front of you as if they had it all along. Not an entirely pr…

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In the sludge-world of contemporary media, journalists traffic in puns as much as anything else. And while they’ve always loved a double entendre, the second Trump administration serves up material quicker and faster than anyone else in what’s basically the Kanye-Westification of politics. You’ll never know what is and what isn’t on purpose, but no one …

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“Through the otherwise unbroken forest, the Father of Waters had opened a passage for himself, forming a perfect arc, the hither shore of the middle of the curve being hidden under the crest of the cliff, and the two ends lost in the vast obscurity of the Great West. Overlooked from such an eminence, the size of the Mississippi can be realized.”

– Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, Vol. II (1861)

When New York City’s pigs were pitted against its parks, the American aspiration towards bourgeois respectability trumped the needs of its urban poor and their attempts towards subsistence outside of wage labour. The demise of urban farming in the late 1850s forced immigrants into the workforce as well as the increasingly fractious political infrastructure undergirding it. And so the construction of Central Park between 1856-1871 heralded the arrival of a new era in New York civic and economic life, one where jobs and ‘occupations’ took pride of place.

Not that this was always the intention. The plans for Central Park may have unabashedly taken their cue from British landscape designs, but its architects weren’t just looking to Wiltshire’s sprawling stately homes for inspiration. Seven years before the work commenced, the father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted embarked on a six-month European walking tour and found himself strolling through Birkenhead Park, a green oasis amidst the industrial sprawl of 19th-century Liverpool. “I was struck,” he wrote, “that in democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as comparable to this People’s Garden.” When he later drafted the plans for Central Park alongside the young English architect Calvert Vaux, it was this kind of democratic access that they both had in mind. But he was inspired by scenery closer to home too.

Olmsted’s egalitarian convictions extended beyond questions of space and class to encompass those of race too. Today, we regard New York City as a bastion of liberalism but when the American Civil War erupted in 1861, the City very nearly seceded from the Union due to its southern cotton ties, Mayor Fernando Wood advocating for the establishment of a Free City that could trade with both sides. That didn’t happen, but the proposal illustrates just how rife anti-Lincoln sentiment was throughout the city by 1861 as well as the fact that Olmsted’s abolitionism was by no means a given. He held fast all the same. “The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth,” he wrote during the 1850s, condemning the cruelties of slavery that he witnessed firsthand during his stint as a roving journalist for The New York Times.

He got a job there two years after returning from Liverpool and was promptly sent off on another walking tour, this time as an undercover travel correspondent documenting the system of slavery throughout the southern states. His observational style quickly became the talk of the town and was compiled into three books during the build-up to the Civil War, culminating in 1861’s Cotton Kingdom, which is still regarded as one of the definitive accounts of the Antebellum South. Olmsted’s subject matter wasn’t just chattel slavery itself but also the wider economic system that enabled and sustained it. And as a longtime New York resident, the spokes on which much of this economy turned must have been very familiar indeed.

One evening, as he made his meandering way back to New York City, he noticed an escarpment overlooking the town of Natchez, Mississippi and clambered up to take in the view. “Directly in front of me swung round the run, setting sun,” he recalled, watching as it chased and frazzled the “gleaming expanse of polished steel,” the principal artery of American commerce and “the greatest of rivers.” What followed was a baroque meditation on the American sublime and its varied topographies featured in the epigraph above. Plus or minus a few features that is, because as he went about making camp, seeking repose in the “infinite vision westward,” his reverie was promptly interrupted “by a hog which came grunting near me, rooting in the poor turf of this wonderful garden.”

We hear similar complaints about his “dirty persecutors” in Texas, Georgia, Virginia and Kentucky. And that’s because while you could do everything in your power to cull, confine or push them uptown, in 19th-century America, North, South, Town or Country, there was just no avoiding the pigs.

The Origins of BBQ

His frustrations weren’t unique. Well into the 19th century, the lion’s share of American pig husbandry was free range and extensive, taking its cue from the European system of pannage, where pigs were released into the surrounding forest to forage. The scale was much larger though and had its own name, ‘The Open Range.’ We’ve already seen the problems it caused between neighbours in the 17th-18th centuries, both indigenous and settler. But as the expansion of the American frontier saw the former supplant the latter, these complaints were increasingly lodged via parties with equal access to the courts. By Olmsted’s time, the New England press was awash with editorials on the subject, arguing that pigs in pens meant less nuisance and more pork, more efficiently because moving around less meant getting fatter quicker. As one writer from the 1830s put it, hogs “should never know what liberty is; but should be kept close all their lives, and as inactive as possible.”

While the practice increasingly picked up steam in the northern states, the Antebellum South was different. Their hogs roamed free and boasted their very own traditions that are mimicked the world over today. Particularly their autumnal pig slaughters, celebrations of the harvest bounty that recalled the South’s peculiar admixture of French, Spanish, African, Indigenous and Anglophone influences. In other words, BBQs. The english word first shows up in 1672, when a certain John Lederer was traipsing through Virgina and the Carolinas. But Barbecue’s origins trace back much further to the indigenous peoples of Hispaniola, who taught the Spanish Buccaneers to grill all those feral pigs on spits of green wood known as ‘barbacoa.’ Europeans adopting the word into their vernaculars was also probably helped by the fact that the Hausa people of West Africa who they enslaved used the term ‘babbake’ to describe food cooked over an open fire. But at least in North America, it was probably first observed by Hernando de Soto in 1540 when he collaborated with the local Chickasaw tribe to rustle up some pork over a spit.

The French lot in turn referred to this technique as a means of cooking the animal from their ‘barbe’ (beard/bristles) to their ‘queue’ (butt), hence the word ‘barbeque’ while the very term ‘buccaneer’ is just an anglicisation of the French ‘boucannier,’ ‘boucan’ being a bastardisation of ‘barbacoa’. All of which is to say that being a buccaneer is less about piracy than loving yourself a BBQ, something the South took to with aplomb.

With the exception of the Texas style, which uses beef, traditional American BBQs almost always meant smoke, wood and pork. Hence Olmsted’s banging on about a North Carolina dinner spread with “five different preparations of swine flesh,” then proceeding to Virginia where meagre fair meant four preparations while a bountiful Virginia showing meant seven, all sat beside “two of maize, wheat cakes, broiled quails, cold roast turkey, coffee, and tea.” BBQ was all the rage.

The Open Range and the American Meat Packers

Not all the stuff would have been fresh though. Pork was uniquely suited to preserving for the cold months due to its high fat content, so Northern and Southern farmers alike looked to slaughter their animals before winter and smoke the meat, cure it in salt or pack it barrels with brine and saltpetre. Some opted to do this at home while others transported their livestock from afar to specialist meat packers, where they could turn a healthy profit. Buffalo reigned supreme for a moment in the 1820s but when Cincinnati was incorporated as a city in 1819, it emerged as the nation’s commercial hub for meat packing by the 1830s. The city was promptly christened ‘Porkopolis.’

Sitting at the confluence of four rivers, pigs from across the country would arrive on foot in streaming droves of hundreds and sometimes thousands, swineherds trudging enormous lengths get their livestock to market before the snows set in. In 1836, this seasonal rush from Kentucky alone saw 82,000 pigs pass through North Carolina’s Cumberland gap, many of them on their way to ‘Porkopolis.’ Other animals came along too, but the volumes paled in comparison. In 1847, one of the Gap’s toll gates recorded 692 sheep, 898 cattle, 1,317 horses, and 51,753 hogs.

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I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, By the gazelles or by the does of the field, Do not stir up nor awaken love Until it pleases.

— Song of Solomon, 8:4 (King James Version)

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“[He] leads a roving, gentlemanly, vagabond kind of life, somewhat answering to that of our club-men at home…He is in every respect a republican pig, going wherever he pleases, and mingling with the best society, on an equal, if not superior footing, for every one makes way when he appears.”

— Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842)

There are many species of old-world snobbery and then there’s the definitive article, which is basically that Americans are vulgar.

Some forty years before Oscar Wilde quipped that “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between,” Charles Dickens settled upon New York’s roving bands of ‘city scavengers’ to make a similar point. “Ugly brutes they are,” he said of these “preternaturally knowing” citizens of New York. He was both disgusted and impressed. “Every pig knows where he lives, much better than anybody could tell him. At this hour, just as evening is closing in, you will see them roaming towards bed by scores, eating their way to the last,” Dickens observed. In their unceasing quest for profit, they still bore the hallmarks of the American temperament,“perfect self-possession and self-reliance, and immovable composure, being their foremost attributes.”

He was touching on a sensitive subject. For the past two decades, New York City had been plagued by pig troubles, some 20,000 swine making their home in the streets of Manhattan. In 1820, that worked out to about one hog for every five people which is more or less rate of car ownership in the city today. They weren’t just an invaluable source of food, they also worked as municipal garbagemen before the post existed, converting the city’s edible waste into meat, all the while brushing up against its silk-clad citizens. The latter weren’t fond of these passing interactions, Mayor Cadwalader Golden lamenting in 1818 how “our wives and daughters cannot walk abroad through the streets of the city without encountering the most disgusting spectacles of these animals indulging in the propensities of nature.”

New York was always fond of its pigs, the surrounding area containing not one but three islands named after them. The smallest was a sandbar that has since disappeared beneath the waves; the next, what’s now called Barnum island by the Rockaways, where the native Americans kept droves of them to trade with the Dutch. And then there’s Roosevelt Island. Before it assumed the name of an American political dynasty, it was called Varkens Eylandt, (varken=hog) because that was what the Dutch farmed there. Records indicate it was mostly slaves doing the the work, a prominent Dutch East India Company official complaining how he was ordered to “look to the hogs and to keep these from the fort which a negro could have easily done.”

Pork may have kept the settlements that would become New York City alive, but from the very beginning, its husbandry was associated with the lowest in society. As the bounds of the 13 colonies swelled, its older children grew fat and new wealth meant new anxieties. So in 1821, Mayor Cadwalader Golden launched the first set of proceedings against urban swine and their keepers. A decade later, the struggle took a new intensity upon the discovery of hog cholera, which was mistakenly linked to the human variety. Suddenly pigs and their keepers were accused not just of jeopardising both public morality but public health too. By the time Dickens showed up twenty years later, Manhattan had been rocked by five different sets of riots pitting the courts and a fledgling municipal law enforcement against the city’s urban poor.

The fight was about how New Yorkers should live, work and eat in this bastion of American modernity. And while efforts to rid the city of its swine were often couched in the affectations of a very familiar genteel tradition, it wasn’t just Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice they had in mind. As Oscar Wilde so intimately understood, there are things about an English inheritance that run much deeper.

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“In the middle of the North American continent the gods of geology made a wide expanse of land where the rock layers are nearly horizontal. The ice gods levelled the surface with their glaciers making it ready for the plow and making it rich. The rain god gives summer showers. The sun god gives summer heat. All this is nature's conspiracy to make man grow corn.”

— J. Russell Smith, North America (1925)

It's 2004. My mother is from London, she’s been living in the United States for almost two decades now and isn’t always well-disposed to the quirks of her adopted home. So when a raft of studies comes out that year saying High Fructose Corn Syrup is linked to obesity and wasn’t just in all those fizzy drinks we weren’t allowed but also our breakfast cereals, our yoghurt, even the bread, she picks a hill to die on and whips into action. The kitchen is purged and our various schools given a good finger-wagging. Meanwhile, visits to the supermarket become much longer affairs because everything in the trolley is subjected to an exacting process of textual hermeneutics. It all seemed a tad arbitrary to an eleven-year-old me but about a year later, Michael Pollan came out with The Omnivore’s Dilemma and she starts quoting blocks of text. Apparently the American government subsidised farmers to grow corn that no one actually ate, so corporations bought the stuff and melted it down to create a cheaper, sweeter product than sugar that they whacked in just about everything to get people hooked.

Which still has a conspiratorial ring to it but she was right. The rabbit hole goes much deeper too.

Like so many additives in highly processed foods, it began in the 1970s when sugar prices were exorbitantly high and corn ones, low as ever. Since the passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act back in 1933, the United States government has been pumping an average of 17.6 billion dollars into farmers' income through government subsidies, of which corn growers are by far the biggest recipients. The US is the largest corn producer in the world and with some 96,000,000 acres, it's by far and away the country’s biggest cereal crop. To give you an idea, American corn farmers have netted a whopping $120 billion + of government money between 1995 and today.

But the funny thing about corn is that while it grows fantastically well in the American Midwest and indigenous American peoples historically loved the stuff, those who supplanted them don’t eat much today nor did they during the preceding two hundred years. So why did American settlers start growing so much corn in the first place?

Livestock. And while another one of my mother’s pet peeves was how most American beef is corn-fed instead of the way they do it back in Blighty, with grass, maybe she should have directed her ire towards pigs instead. Because from the crop’s rise to ascendancy in the middle of the 19th century to the conclusion of World War II, the lion’s share of American maize went towards feeding swine, the country’s most profitable animal, and not cows. One of the reasons for the mix-up is that even all those strutting cattle ranchers from Montana usually kept an additional herd of swine to eat the scraps of corn left behind by cows at the trough and, well, their manure. It’s not just humans that have a tough time digesting corn, a fact that probably didn’t encourage the stetson wearing crowd from calling themselves swine herds.

Meanwhile, the bottom line remained the same. “The Hog is regarded as the most compact form in which the Indian corn crop of the States can be transported to market. Hence the corn is fed to the hog on the farm, and he is sent to Chicago as a package provided by nature for its utilization,” remarked a bewildered British journalist for The Times observed all the way back in 1887. American food, the American landscape, the economy and social and political life would change as a result.

It’s a crazy story with many zigzags but to understand the all-encompassing nature of its sweep, we need to scroll back to a much earlier date, the Florida of 1539.

The Early Days

That’s when Hernando de Soto arrived with seven ships for a three-year expedition. He got lost, stumbled all the way to North Carolina and while he was busy traipsing from the Everglades to the Blue Ridge mountains and back again, him and his men subsisted off their accompanying swine. He started the expedition with 13 and died on the banks of the Mississippi with hundreds. The Spanish had a prodigious appetite for pork but also saw the animal as a kind of insurance policy for those of its sons shipwrecked along the coast. They would lay anchor and release droves of swine into the brush so future cast-aways might procure a familiar source of food. A kind of starter pack for colonial enterprise, Sir Walter Raleigh took a page from their book upon trying his hand at the first North American settlement, Roanoke in 1585, picking up some Spanish hogs in Hispaniola on his way over. The colony was a disaster and was evacuated the next year but when the English tried again in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia, they followed the same script, carting three sows and a boar along with them. Within 18 months, they had more than 60 pigs and just a few years later, more than 600.

The population exploded from there, as did disputes about who owned what. While the English much preferred cows, they only bought the first ones over in 1623, three years after the Mayflower made landfall at Plymouth. Pigs multiplied faster, converted food to meat faster and were easier to preserve through salting or smoking. You didn’t have to worry about them either because farmers would just release swine into the surrounding brush to root and forage for themselves, then call them back like dogs. This led to a lot of confusion between the early settlers and even more with the local local tribes who found their unfenced crops pillaged by the four-footed newcomers, one account from 1643 recounting how the indigenous women “implored their husbands” help to roll the bodies of trees” over their underground stores lest they be despoiled by these “filthy cut throats” who could get through 30 bushels in one sitting.

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“It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs; it was the Great Butcher--it was the spirit of Capitalism made flesh.”

— Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

A Cross Examination On Capitol Hill

The United States Capitol building has seen its fair share of oddities over the years but the episode before 3 PM on Thursday, June 7th, 1906 might just take the cake. The exchange was during an Agricultural Committee hearing, it was between Colorado Congressman Franklin E. Brooks and Labor Commissioner Charles P. Neill and went something like this.

Brooks: How much of the hog went into the urinal?

Neill: Not very much…There might have been only that much [9-12 inches]

Brooks: Which end, the head or the foot?

Neil: The head end.

Brooks: The nose of the hog stuck in that hole?

Neill: I don’t remember if the head was on the carcass or not…

Brooks: The body of a hog wouldn’t have gone into a hole 7 inches high would it?

Neill: I say the man had stopped the hog for us to go by—

Brooks: Then you don’t know whether it went into the hole at all?

Neill: Yes, I do know it.

Brooks: Then how much went in?

You’d be forgiven for thinking this was the script to some grisly vaudeville act instead of a government hearing but then there’s Neill’s answer to that last question, which is basically C-SPAN’s most famous refrain. “I will be glad to tell you if you let me finish my answer,” he tersely replied. It had clearly been a long day. Unfortunately for him, this was just the opening salvo of a legislative counteroffensive that was six months in the making.

Muckracking at the Union Stockyards

Just back in November 1905, Upton Sinclair published of his second novel, The Jungle, which scandalized the American public with its lurid account of Chicago’s famous meatpacking district, the Union stockyards. ‘The hog butcher of the world’ processed some 400 million livestock between 1865-1900 and by the dawn of 20th century, was responsible for around 82 percent of the meat consumed in America. Big packing houses could kill and process between 1500-2500 thousand steers a day alongside another 6-7000 hogs. By the time Sinclair rolled into town, meatpacking was the USA’s largest industry by a country mile, tallying sales in excess of a billion dollars, which was bigger than the US federal government budget. As his fellow muckracker Charles Edward Russell put it that same year, the packers represented “a greater power than in the history of men has been exercised by king, emperor, or irresponsible oligarchy.”

Sinclair hadn’t pitted himself against any old adversary.

So he sent the ‘trust-busting’ Teddy Roosevelt a copy of the novel. It resonated — and while the President regarded the muckracker as a bit of a crackpot, he saw an opportunity to push through the country’s first mandatory health and safety standards. Dispatching a team headed by Charles Neill to investigate some of Sinclair’s more sensationalist claims, the stuff about workers being scalded to death in vats of lard didn’t pass muster. But Neill saw the above hog incident with his own eyes, grimly observing how the carcass was promptly “picked up by two employees, placed upon a truck, carried into the cooling room and hung up with other carcasses, no effort being made to clean it.”

Roosevelt was revolted by the findings but initially kept them under wraps, wary of baiting Chicago’s notoriously powerful ‘Beef Trust,’ which was in disarray anyways as Sinclair’s book toppled over a million sales. The Food and Drugs Act was quickly thrown together and sailed through the Senate in May without a single dissenting voice. But by the time it landed in the House of Representatives, the packers had got their act together, looking to discredit The Jungle in the newspapers while mobilizing their congressional pals to bend the legislation to their will. Sinclair fretted Roosevelt was moving too slowly and having spoken to Neill in DC a week prior, leaked their allegations to The New York Times, all of which forced the President’s hand to disclose a full report for congressional scrutiny.

C-SPAN Theatrics

Which is how one dizzyingly humid summer afternoon, the unsuspecting Commissioner was ambushed by the Beef Trust’s cronies. Representative Brooks kicked things off, the Chairman of the presiding Agricultural Committee, Senator Wadsworth, picked up the cross-examination next and then the ‘Blonde Boss’ of Chicago and former meatpacker, Representative William Lorimer entered the fray. They were all fixated on the hog incident, Lorimer holding forth as to why. “We have before us a report of generalities and no specific statements made about any case that I recall, except the case of the pig that fell into the closet,” he trumpeted from on high. They knew what they were doing. By fixating on the improbably, cartoonishly absurd (the animal most associated with filfth mired in its very definition) they hoped to consign Neill’s report to the realm of hysterical melodrama.

Neill protested this was ‘unfair’, that he felt like a “witness under cross examination whose testimony is trying to be broken down,” that he had been asked “questions of memory which no reasonable man could expect to be kept in mind” but he was met with intransigence on all sides. His opponents clapped back that they were merely looking for something concrete, Lorimer snarling “Do you object to members asking you questions about this report to find out what you base it on?” Still, the latter was the first to admit there was only so much their ‘fact-finding’ mission could accomplish given “everyone in the country has read that report.”

Neill emerged from it all battered, bruised and very much indignant while the packers secured a few concessions like ditching mandatory dating and getting the Treasury to foot the bill for inspection costs. But the Law passed the Lower House by the end of that month. Roosevelt was thrilled. “Thus in the Beef Packing business, I found that Sinclair was of real use. I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful,” he wrote in one of his letters. But in the final analysis, the President stressed, Sinclair proved a worthy instrument.

The latter gauged as much. “I had been made into a ‘celebrity’ not because the public cared anything about the sufferings of workers but simply because the public did not want to eat tuburcular beef,” he wrote over a decade later. An ardent socialist and a unionist to boot, his first book Manassas was about the depredations of chattel slavery and The Jungle was supposed to be a follow-up, demonstrating wage slavery was tantamount to the same thing. Instead, everyone latched onto what the commodification of animal flesh entailed for consumers on the other end. “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident, I hit it in the stomach,” he famously, bitterly quipped. The resulting legislation had to do with animals, with meat, drugs and additives but there was precious little regarding the appalling working conditions that degraded men and animals alike.

But monomaniac that he was, Sinclair had missed the woods from and trees.

The Jungle’s Legacy

What he documented during his seven weeks of undercover reporting at the Union Stockyard was unprecedented in human history and the culmination of agriculture up to that point. Animal flesh had been transformed into a truly global commodity that assumed its new vestments via the assembly line, an alchemy America perfected during the preceding century. Sinclair depicted it all like never before or since, and in thinking his effort fell short by the fruits thereof being confined to animals, he hadn’t grasped the bottom line. That the public’s focus on animals, on meat was always a focus on humans too. Not just vis a vis how we get our food but how we conceive of human difference across the board.

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To call my father a fussy eater is both too much and not enough. The guy has a shape-shifting list of dietary restrictions that leaves the most obliging of waiters staring cock-eyed at their feet, puzzling over whether the only thing they can whack on a plate are dressed leaves and a steamed carrot. Nightshades are out, so are onions some of the time, garlic others, definitely no meat, no dairy, sometimes no salt, no shellfish with the exception of shrimp, no tuna, no swordfish because mercury but cod is copasetic and trout even better. And then he comes to France and everything goes right out the window because some hills aren’t worth dying on, especially when the butter, cheese, garlic and all the rest of it are so damn good. And the chef-patrons so damn grumpy.

I’ll never forget taking him to Le Baratin in Paris for the first time. It was right after the pandemic and we hadn’t seen each other in almost two years. A chef friend of mine had raved about the food there, the wine too but cautioned that crossing the threshold was always a crapshoot because while the cook was a lovely woman in her late fifties, she was behind the stove and the person you’d be dealing with was her cantankerous, misanthrope of a husband. Arriving there is like ringing the door of your friend’s parents' house, walking in and realizing you’ve just truncated a conversation of some middling importance, maybe a medical one, and said friend isn’t about to arrive for another hour. So you take your seat in a climate of forbearance, hope the curmudgeon enjoyed his lunch that day and that your choice of wine was logically coherent and somehow, accorded the act of eating its proper significance.

Actually, choice is the wrong word, it’s more like ‘guess,’ because there’s very definitely a right and a wrong answer. We fudged the wine order on the first merry-go-round, then suggested a Jura and received the ever-so-slightest hat tip of a nod and as our bespectacled patron traipsed off, my father muttered “I think he likes us.” I wasn’t so sure but we got through the meal without any barbs thrown our way, something he’s notorious for, alongside ignoring his diners if they gesticulate the wrong way. The food was beautifully understated and despite the hushed tones, we got more across to each other that evening than any other meal before or since.

My dad is a health freak in his 70s. He likes litigating the fine print of a menu and a wine list to just about anyone who will listen. But he likes getting away with something even more. The sense of complicity helps him relax, as does not having to think about endless choices. That’s the thing about grumpy patrons. They may be set in their ways but they’re very much at home in their worlds and nothing is quite so relaxing as a home-cooked meal.

Which makes me think of The Yellow Bittern. A boozy lunch spot helmed by Irish chef Hugh Corcoran, Luncheon editor Frances Armstrong-Jones and bookseller Oisìn Davies, it’s only open for two sittings between 12-2 on Mondays to Friday and takes its name from an Gaelic poem about a bird that dies of thirst. Since opening last September, The New York Times has called it “the most controversial restaurant in London,” Vittles, “the restaurant that rattled everyone” while The Standard’s Mike Daw dismissed it an “18-seat piece of performance art within which diners are unsuspecting subjects of a dining diktat delivered with all the fiscal charm of Ebenezer Scrooge.” The reason? Corcoran taking to Instagram to fulminate about some particularly lousy customers. “When you come to a restaurant, it is expected that you are there to eat and drink with some sort of abandon,” he said. “Restaurants are not public benches, you are there to spend some money. And in the case that a plate of radishes is enough for you and your three friends…” Etc etc, you get the drift.

The British tabloids and broadsheets alike being, well, British, it’s not surprising a media shitstorm ensued. And while I’m around nine months late to the party, having spent last Monday evening drinking there for Madeleine’s Offcuts (the kidney edition) opening party and then the next day, drinking some more while staring down at a slice of pork with the largest surface area plated that day in London, I’ve got thoughts. But just in case your time is limited, I’ll say it here and now. Go and order a bottle of wine. The haters are wrong. This is very, very special place and what they’re doing is important.

Corcoran and Co.

People have been talking about Hugh Corcoran’s food in hushed tones for a few years now. He did a series of residencies at some of Paris’s more famous natural wine haunts (Delicatessen) and while everyone else was invariably churning out small plates with bright colours, here was an Irishman slinging salt beef, braised turnips and all manner of neutral-hued foods in generous portions while sporting Samuel Beckett’s wiry glasses. Then it was back to London for a stint at Italo before setting up shop permanently at the bottom of Caledonian Road, just a stone's throw from Kings Cross.

Doubling as both restaurant and bookshop within a staid bric-a-brac interior set against welsh terracotta tiles, it’s cash only and there’s no wine list, just two or three suggestions scrawled on a blackboard because the rest is in Corcoran’s head. The walls are adorned with pictures of Beckett, Joyce and other literary boozers, some Peter Doig paintings alongside others by Anthony Fry, Oliver Messel and a portrait of the big man himself, Vladimir Lenin. Apparently it belonged to Corcoran’s Mum.

Amidst all the decluttered clutter and wildflower arrangements, the place has a pastoral sensibility that feels like a giant nod to the Arts and Crafts Movement. People have compared it to St. JOHN and Café Deco, which is correct ( I’d also add Andrew Edmunds, French House, the Cow and the Eagle to that mix…) because like Fergus Henderson and Anna Tobias, Corcoran and co are literary chefs whose cooking takes their queue from Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and MFK Fisher just as much as any other professional big whig.

But where St. JOHN’s interiors and food plating always had a design-y, architectural feel to them, the Yellow Bittern is painting all the way through. Almost everything in that restaurant looks self-consciously Vermeer adjacent or like a still life. They’re all domestic scenes grasping towards a singular impression that’s sensory, indulgent but also vaguely austere. I know it sounds like I’m constructing sandcastles out of thin air but trust me, the food is like that and there’s a lot more going on than just boho-bonhomie, earthenware dishes and some stray flecks of pollen.

Madeleine and I arrived to set up for her event at 5 PM on the dot and saw the three patrons enjoying a late lunch next door to a pair of diners dug in from the 2 PM seating and feeling tentative about disrupting the composition, thought best to leave them to it. So we popped round to the only pub in London serving Tenants lager, a spot that used to be called the Flying Scotsman that Madeleine’s grandfather, a train manager on the Glasgow-London route, used to unwind with the Virgin train crew.

Half an hour later, we returned and they were still seated, this time perched over a quadruple-tier victoria sponge with raspberries and a Venetian dessert wine. We asked if they minded us making canapés in the corner. They didn’t, so we got to work amidst the various bowls of fuzzy peaches and an enormous roast pork centrepiece sat at the bow of the restaurant. Friends and family wafted round, everyone was getting on and by the end of the evening, we had migrated back to the pub for more Tenants, various rants about the nature of hospitality (largely on my part) and by 10 PM or so Hugh and Madeleine were crooning ‘Ohnnn tha Bonniieee Bonniiee Banks of Lochh Lomahnd!!!’

With the restaurant choc-a-bloc since the radishes incident, I thought this was as good a time as any to try and land a table and Hugh obliged.

The next day, we showed up 20 minutes late and hungover, Hugh lamented his similar state and we got down to business. The roast pork centrepiece at the bow of the restaurant was there again, this time sat beside a pile of freckled lobsters and another pile of all those fuzzy peaches, which definitely weren’t on the menu but (who knows, maybe they came with the cheese plate) but looked fab all the same. Madeleine and I started things off with half a dozen Connemara oysters, some dressed crab and artichokes in vinaigrette. It was all dead simple, delicious and, well, watery. I’ve never had oysters that were so watery before (not the same thing as watered down), the artichokes were gorgeously astringent and wet, tossed in lots of chervil and then the dressed crab, which was wet too. Which wasn’t disconcerting because it was delicious, but it was noticeable. Then we ordered some wheaten bread and everything came together gorgeously.

They bake it there in tin loaves and it's dense, dry, sweet and serve it with unsalted butter, all of which provided a warm cushion against the different brines, salts and vinegars. When you’re washing everything down with the best Riesling you’ve ever drunk (I know I’m fond of superlatives, but it was the case and it was from Domaine Bohn), well, it was like someone took a highlighter to insist ‘no, it’s all here. Right here, look again.’ Then we had roast chicken and stewed turnips and potatoes with a couple thumbs of garlic, the most enormous slab of that cold roast pork that looked like it had been plucked from a cartoon and served beside radishes dressed in a little lemon and some more chervil. Washed down with more of that Riesling. And then the cake with the Venetian dessert wine I was talking about, also dead cold, smooth as water with a marmaladey and honey finish.

For all the talk of gouty lunches, The Yellow Bittern’s food was devoid of frills and surprisingly light. It’s the day drinking that calls for a nap later. And as I nodded in and out of consciousness on the train ride home, I found myself mulling over ‘radish-gate.’

Lost In Translation

I’m not convinced the surrounding controversy is a question of elitism or steep prices, because it’s a London restaurant of a particular stripe and hardly the most expensive one. And while Corcoran’s rudeness certainly ruffled some feathers, I’m not sure it’s reducible to that either. His critics say it’s the ‘blithe indifference’, the ‘lack of self-awareness’ but what they’re really talking about is that the Yellow Bittern is decidedly not English. That might sound obvious given two out of three of the owners have Irish names but the real point is it’s far too personal and moreover, sincere to be English. That’s what sent everything so stratospheric with that radish+butter comment. With Corcoran a life-long communist and Armstrong-Jones the daughter of an aristocrat and editor of an arts magazine (the aptly named Luncheon), the notion they could fall in love and open a spot expressing both of their preoccupations sent everyone flying to the battlements of the UK’s favourite pastime. You know, mudslinging about class.

Amidst all the screeds about champagne socialism, you can still make out the same familiar ring. “Stay in your lane.”

Thankfully, it looks like they’ve spent too much time in France for that. This is a nation great at sarcasm, even better at snark and terrible at irony because contradiction isn’t a vice, it’s a sign you're probably doing things right. Hence the world’s most stiflingly technocratic country is also the one that invented the revolutionary hamster wheel, its accompanying theatrics and the very word bourgeoisie. Hence the guy (Joris Karl Huysmans) who furnished us with the whole notion of scandalising that very same class (‘Épater le bourgeoisie!’) enjoyed a forty year career at one of the cushiest jobs in the world’s cushiest civil services. Hence all those members of the CGT drinking red wine at the strike. No one bats an eyelid because these contradictions aren’t stumbling blocs, they’re texture. So while the British love mocking the French for being temperamental pleasure seekers, the French return the favour by gesturing towards a litany of Hugh Grant impressions, apologetically tumbling over their words to say what they’d actually like.

If you were to translate the expression ‘champagne socialist’ into French, the word you’d get is ‘bobo’, short for ‘bourgeois bohemian.’ It’s used just as contemptuously but it also happens to be literally and sociologically correct, not to mention a story as old as time. That’s why they don’t prang-out about shaking the label off. Everyone has their contradictions, their context and pointing out is less a punchline than a description, even if it is a stereotypical one.

While the faintest hypocrisy may titillate British class anxieties, the allegation of champagne socialism (unless it’s paired with something actually harmful) usually rings a tad hollow because while it sounds like an argument, it’s usually just window dressing. Boring old ad-hominem. Chuck that barb at a French bobo and they’d probably clap back that the UK is shit at wine and even worse at socialism. So best to try your hand at another mike-drop and in the meantime, live a little.

Look Forwards Instead of Down

The Yellow Bittern’s critics got one thing right. It is out of step. They’re just wrong about that being a bad thing. We’re flirting with the digital singularity with restaurants right now and I’m not just talking about the mind-numbing stodge we’re all subjected to by influencers like TopJaw. So much of what we eat are foods that a mere fifty years ago, you’d only see at a religious festival, a wedding or a banquet. Now we pick ‘n mix them in an ungainly, completely decontextualised game of hopscotch over the course of a month, pitching up to an area, opening Google Maps and scouring every establishment in a 500-meter radius for ratings upwards of 4.4, then cross-referencing it with the pangs of a particular craving for spice one day and something bloody another.

We collect this infinite raft of choices, compare them with other spots doing something vaguely similar and then systematise them into lists we share with friends. It’s less about sustenance than a steady dopamine drip that’s for collecting first and then talking about second. The Yellow Bittern is an antidote because while it’s all about talking too, the food takes the backseat, gradually making itself known as your busy ranting about something else. It’s an encouragement to look forward instead of down.

For all of Corcoran’s stuff about restaurants not being park benches, all I can say is we were at our table for around three and a half hours and weren’t alone doing so. You're not a client there, you're a guest and that always comes with its own complicity, responsibilities and constraints, choice among them. Sure, a gut punch does comes with the wine bill, which if you plan on drinking at all (and I’ll repeat myself, you should), you won’t have much control over. Console yourself with the idea that nothing screams ‘getting away with it’ like drinking a bottle of wine during the working week.

The dirty secret about St. JOHN is that the wine is overpriced and really not that good. The wine at the Yellow Bittern is fantastically good and used like a fancy picture frame or a neon highlighter. It’s a ballsy move, forcing everyone’s hand, but the sum total is making you look again at simple, unadulterated food prepared with care and realise that actually, that’s all you need. Everyone knows what they’re getting themselves into after Corcoran’s Instagram kerfuffle, so with a dent in the finances fast approaching, best to dig in and enjoy.

That used to be the promise of Chez Panisse. Opened by Alice Waters and her coterie of Berkeley Hippies back in 1971 when my dad was a Graduate student there, the restaurant quickly became the standard bearer not just for different kinds of French cooking in American life (Provençal and lighter, simpler southern varieties instead of the butter-drenched Lyonnaise and Parisian varieties) but also a different approach to food across the board. It was about provenance, seasonality and simplicity, some people adored it and others resented what they saw as elitist, francophile bluster used to rationalise paying twenty-five dollars for some grilled nectarines, grassy olive oil and a nob of goat’s curd. Waters, now in her eighties, is no longer there most of the time and the food has gone downhill. While my dad was never that convinced, he’s a particular kind of guy and who knows, maybe the service was too obliging. With an operation as small and as tight as the Yellow Bittern, it’s heartening to know someone is carrying that same message forward.

Even if the delivery is gruffer.

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The 3:30 changeover between the lunch and dinner shift at the River Cafe is notorious in London hospitality circles as a bungled soup of Master Chef freneticism and a Midtown Manhattan traffic pile-up. While the restaurant is famous for having the ‘nicest’ kitchen churning out some of most expensive food in London, all bets are off during this half-hour frenzy. Elbows, spoons and spittle crash up and down the stainless steel interiors of Ruthie Rogers’ sun-drenched temple of Italian cooking that churned out the likes of Jamie Oliver, Anna Tobias and as I only learnt about a year ago, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall.

The first name in that list needs no introduction, Tobias is a more recent darling of the British food scene and personally, I think her Café Deco is currently slinging out the most elegant menu in London. Hugh is a little different. A lifestyle apologist for tweeds, scraggly hair and lashings of beef dripping on just about everything, the guy had gusto, lacked street cred and knew as much, which probably why he actively disavowed the chef title. It’s also probably why I never thought about him despite his ubiquitous presence on the kitchen bookshelves of just about every house I ever visited for Sunday Lunch growing up.

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“Every painter paints himself,” Michelangelo once quipped and the saying couldn’t be more appropriate if you look up at a very particular section of the Sistine Chapel. Bedeviled with maladies throughout his adult life, Michelangelo’s personal correspondences, his poetry, even his housekeeper all talk about the ‘gravel in …

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The Persistence Of Sheep

If pigs are the most uncanny of the farm animals, then sheep are certainly the peskiest. Like stubborn adolescents hellbent on dying on the hill of some as yet inarti…

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