/ck/ - Food & Cooking

I've read a few books on culture and cuisine. This is a popular question for everyone, I'll tell you what I've heard.

Pigs are pretty awesome as far as domesticated animals go, but the Middle East was smack dab between everything; if it wasn't there in the first place, trade would bring it. They had chickens and other small fowl, cows, goats, sheep, along with plenty of animals that commonly left uneaten.

Pigs eat the same things humans do, and have a diet more akin to ours than to a cow or goat. They eat vegetables and roots and berries, not grass. You can feed a zebu cow (the hardy ones native to india) rice husks and grass stalks- completely inedible even to the hungriest peasant. Feeding a cow is only adding to your food supply, not diminishing it. Feeding a pig IS diminishing your food supply.

Pigs also cannot lose heat by panting or sweating, which causes them to seek water or watery puddles to wallow in to cool down; like a hippo or elephant. More times than not in the desert, that pile was shit. So your pig smelled like shit and still died of heatstroke after eating half your food.

Pigs historically were more prone to trichinosis as well, something we've meticulously worked on eliminating from our farm raised swine since we've found out about it.

Food stealing, shit smelling, overheating pain in your ass bacon that gave you parasites...

OR

That fuzzy, rock jumping motherfucker who you can milk and shear and make cheese and clothes from without even killing the stupid thing?

New Guinea appreciated their pigs, they went to war over the fucking things. If you have a forest, you can let your pig loose and it will scavenge for its own food. If you don't, you better have a small plot of garden just for its food.

>>4790822
>tfw bacon will never be that thick