The Colonial Ham

David Shields, an important and innovative literary scholar based at the University of South Carolina, has a great essay on the history of American ham called "The Search for the Cure" in the current issue of Common-Place (here), an online journal of early American history sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass.

Shield's essay traces the various means of curing hams in the colonial period, tracing the histories of "two schools of ham production: the dry-cure sect, who would increasingly view themselves as purists and traditionalists, and the wet curists, who regarded themselves as experimentalists in taste, economy, and scientific agriculture, yet whose pork brined in a barrel was the staple of the common household." It's a great read, especially for those of you interested in the history of American foodways.

Today's image comes from an on-line article by Patricia Mitchell on the history of the Smithfield ham. The image is of a circa-1930 Baltimore newspaper advertisement that features a peanut-shaped hog and Smithfield cured meats. Mitchell's essay can be found here at foodhistory.com.

Anxieties About Hog-Farming Odors

Concern with the odor and filth that can surround hog farming operations is not limited to our own times, obviously. While you can find all sorts of ongoing conflict over concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), such as a debate this week over a permit for a 4,800 hog operation in Missouri (see the article here in the Marshall Democrat-News), it's nice to take a historical view too. The fine folks at Crooked Timber Books in Digby, Nova Scotia sent me a review of what looks like a wonderful book by Emily Cockayne entitled Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England (Yale University Press, 2007) that made a brief reference to Lewis Smart's piggery on Tottenham Court Road, whose noxious fumes "dirtied newly laundered linen and tarnished plate."

While pigs were ubiquitous in both urban and rural settings in early modern Europe, it is the scale and intensity of modern industrialized agriculture that bothers people these days. After all, more pigs means more waste and greater potential environmental impacts from hog-farming. For an overview of this conflict in one U.S. state, see Carolyn Johnsen's Raising a Stink: The Struggle over Factory Hog Farms in Nebraska (Bison Books, 2003).

Modern Trends in Swine Production (1961)

More from the Prelinger Archive. Modern Trends in Swine Production (1961), a Jam Handy Picture, charts the state of the art in hog farming in the early 1960s. At the time, the shift to farrowing crates was what was modern. Funny, then, that forty years later this confinement system is increasingly under attack. The film, however, does also show the now almost quaint "pasture system" in its effort to model the best practices of the time. Your host and narrator is Bernard Ebbing, a "swine specialist" at the Waterloo, Iowa, Swine Evaluation Station. The film is sponsored by United States Steel, which explains all the talk about the water tanks, self-feeders, farrowing crates, etc., which are all built out of steel. You can watch this excellent introduction to hog farming here. Remember, as Ebbing notes, "The job you do in breeding, farrowing, feeding and management is reflected in the tonnage and quality of pork you market!"