Steps to Life by
Taken from Good Health Publishing Company, Battle Creek, Michigan, 1897. Retypeset from the original 1897 edition.
Pork-raising has come to be one of the great industries of this country, and since the supply is wholly regulated by the demand, it may be taken as a proper index of the prodigious quantities of swine’s flesh which are daily required to satisfy the gustatory demands of the American people. No other kind of animal food is so largely used as pork in its various forms of preparation. …
In the case of no other animal is so large a portion of the dead carcass utilized as food. It seems to be considered that pork is such a delicacy that not a particle should be wasted. The fat and lean portions are eaten fresh, or carefully preserved by salting or smoking or both. The tail is roasted; the snout, ears, and feet are pickled and eaten as souse; the intestine and lungs are eaten as tripe or made into sausages; black pudding is made of the blood; the liver, spleen, and kidneys are also prized; the pancreas and other glands are considered great delicacies; while even the skin is made into jelly. In fact, nothing is left of the beast, not even the bristles, which the shoemaker claims. Surely it must be quite an important matter, and one well deserving attention, if it can be shown that an animal which is thus literally devoured, and that in such immense quantities, is not only unfit for food, but one of the prime causes of many loathsome and painful maladies. …
A Live Hog Examined
Straighten out his fore legs. Now observe closely. Do you see the open sore or issue, a few inches above his foot on the inner side? Do you say it is a mere accidental abrasion? Find the same on the other leg; it is rather a wise and wonderful provision of nature. Grasp the leg high up and press downward. Now you see its utility, as a mass of corruption pours out. That opening is the outlet of a sewer. With the offensive matter which discharges from it, you can be able to trace all through the body of the animal.
What must be the condition of the body of an animal so foul as to require a regular system of drainage to convey away its teeming filth? Sometimes the outlet gets closed by the accumulation of external filth. Then this sewer stream ceases to flow, and the animal quickly sickens and dies unless the owner cleanses the parts, and so opens anew the feculent fountain, and allows the festering poison to escape.
What dainty morsels those same feet and legs make—pickled pig’s feet! Do you suppose the corruption with which they are saturated has any influence upon their taste and healthfulness?
A Dead Hog Examined
Do you imagine that the repulsiveness of this loathsome creature is only on the outside? That within everything is pure and wholesome? Just as sickening and disgusting, as is the exterior, it is, in comparison with what it covers, a fair cloak, hiding a mass of disease and rottenness which grows filthier as we penetrate deeper and deeper beneath the skin.
What Is Lard?
Just under the foul and putrid skin we find a mass of fat from two to six inches in thickness, covering a large portion of the body. Some say lard is animal oil; an excellent thing for consumptives; a very necessary kind of food in cold weather. Lard, animal oil, very truly; and, we will add a synonym for disease, scrofula, torpid liver. Where did all that fat come from, or how happened it to be so heaped up around that poor hog? Surely it is not natural; for fat is only deposited in large quantities for the purpose of keeping the body warm in winter. This fat is much more than is necessary for such a purpose, and is much greater in amount than ever exists upon the animal in a state of nature. It is evidently the result of disease. So gross have been the habits of the animal, so great has been the foulness of its body, that its excretory organs—its liver, lungs, kidneys, skin, and intestines—have been entirely unable to carry away the impurities which the animal has been all its life accumulating. And even the extensive system of sewerage with its constant stream, which we have already described, was insufficient to the task of purging so vile a body of the debris which abounded in every organ and saturated every tissue. Consequently this great flood of disease made its way through the veins and arteries into the tissues, and there accumulated as fat! Delectable morsel, a slice of fat pork, isn’t it? Concentrated, consolidated filth!
Then the fatter the hog, the more diseased he is? Certainly. A few years ago, there were on exhibition at the great cattle show in England a couple of hogs which had been stuffed with oil cake until they were the greatest monsters of obesity ever exhibited. Of course they took the first premium; and if a premium had been awarded to the animals which were capable of producing the most disease, it is quite probable that they would have headed the list still.
Lard, then, obtained from the flesh of the hog by heating, is nothing more than extract of a diseased carcass! Who that knows its character would dare to defile himself with this “broth of abominable things”?
Disgusting Developments
Now let us take a little deeper look, prepared to find disease and corruption more abundant the deeper we go. Observe the glands which lie about the neck. Instead of being of their ordinary size, and composed of ordinary gland structure, we find them surrounded by large masses of scrofulous (rod-shaped bacteria that produce spores) tissue. Perhaps tuberculosis degeneration had already taken place. If so, the soft, cheesy, infectious mass is ready to sow broadcast the seeds of consumption and premature death. …
Now take a deeper look still and examine the lungs of this much-prized animal. If he is more than a few months old, you will be likely to find large numbers of tubercles (bacteria). If he is much more than a year old, you will be more likely than not to find a portion of the lung completely consolidated. Yet all of this filthy, diseased mass is cooked as a delicious morsel. If the animal had escaped the butcher’s knife a few years, he would have died of tuberculosis consumption…
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