PIG SINS
A Love Story
By Duncan Murrell
The Oxford American
Spring 2005
I CAME out to breakfast once while in junior high school and saw my father sharpening the small blade of his pocketknife. I asked him why he needed a sharp knife that morning. It was a silly question, really, since a man always required a sharp knife, and so he responded in kind: "Going to castrate hogs," he said, which he was in fact going off to do, but not with that knife, never with such an unsuitable instrument. A hog deserved better. Going to castrate hogs meant, in our language, Someday you'll have to quit being an ignorant git, son.
When my father took a job at the USDA studying diseases of hogs, our whole family experienced a brief period of pig madness. For my part, my father's job made him almost a farmer, and therefore I was almost the son of a farmer ¯ almost a farmer myself. The hog became a motif in our house, for a time dominating our collections of carvings and wind-up toys and paintings and trinkets, all totems of what it meant to be a Murrell. My mother bought an Advent candle holder in the shape of a long red pig, and though we were all non-practicing Unitarians, we never failed to light it.
I was twelve when my family went to Denmark, where hogs outnumber humans three-to-one, so that my father could consult with his fellow scientists about the parasites of pigs. (Trichinella murrelli, a parasitic worm closely related to the one that infects domestic hogs and humans, was named for my father. This is a source of family pride.) That week we made a trip into the Danish countryside to visit a hog farm and to have a meal with an old farming couple. I ate ham on dark buttered bread and watched the sun sinking behind the North Sea, and realized I'd never really known how good ham could be. What else was there to eat? What else was I missing? We returned with a photograph of a huge boar nuzzling my father out of what appears to be curiosity and love.
MY FIRST DATE with my wife took place at a restaurant most noticeable for the very large, sculpted pig that seems to be taking its life by leaping from the roof. Perhaps I suggested the smothered pork chop, or told her the greens were delicious because the chef didn't skimp on the fatback. The exact circumstances are unclear. What I know for sure is that she said these words, quietly: "I don't eat pork."
She was raised a Seventh-Day Adventist in Charlotte, and pork had been off-limits in her house, along with shellfish, liquor, cigarettes, swearing, and work on the Sabbath. When I went off to college, I got an alarm clock and warnings about alcohol and showing up for class on time. When my wife went off to college, her devout grandmother said only this: "Don't eat the pork."
In Leviticus, the pig is anathema because it doesn't chew its cud, which is another way of saying that it's not exclusively a vegetarian. A pig is an omnivore (it'll eat you if you lie still long enough), and the whole world of food is wide open to it. The pig is also adaptable. The pig will hunt truffles and fugitives, the pig can guide the blind, the pig can donate a heart valve. The pig is the smartest of all domestic livestock. Orwell did great harm to the reputation of the pig in Animal Farm, but can anyone doubt that only the hogs could have pulled off the revolution?
My wife's family has welcomed me into their lives with great affection, and when we get together we eat a lot. I've eaten many traditional Adventist vegetarian foods such as baked-cereal-reinterpreted-loosely-as-meatloaf (Special K Loaf), soy-product-as-fried-chicken (Fri-Chik), and the most depressing of all, canned fake sausage (Prosage). My mother-in-law, who laughs whenever I suggest throwing a ham bone in the green beans, recently gave me my very own bag of chicharron vegetal for Christmas. I asked some friends to translate, but none of them thought it made any sense. What kind of perversity are "vegetable pork rinds"? It means nothing; or worse, it suggests a thing that flouts the laws of nature.
One day when my wife was out of town I realized it had been a couple of years since I'd had a pork chop, and so I fixed one with some gravy and ate it by myself. M.F.K. Fisher wrote that when dining alone, "few men realize that they are dining with themselves." That night at the table, our wedding china dulled by pork grease, I dined with a boy who was going to be a farmer and a monk, a boy who craved the platters of prosciutto, Parma, spiced sausage, ribs, and pulled pork his father described after trips to Sarajevo, Copenhagen, Italy, Vietnam, and Chapel Hill. I also dined with a man who didn't like being by himself, and another man who had fallen in love. After that night, I cooked bacon every once in a while, but some time ago I quit that, too, and I haven't cooked another piece of pork since. I don't think this was a conscious decision, but the consequence of a choice to share my life.
I DO OWN some nineteen-year-old hot dogs, though, which have remained continuously frozen since my mother bought them for my high-school graduation party. It had comforted me, in my new porkless life, to have at least one pork product permanently installed in our household, even if it was at the back of the freezer behind the vegetarian meat crumbles. My wife never believed they were pork, just evidence of eccentricity ("Sad is what it is, Duncan"), and so I called my mother. "I got them from the Jewish deli," she said. "They were on a string."
"The Jewish deli."
"Yes."
"Not pork then."
"Oh, no," she said. "You had a lot of Jewish friends. It wouldn't have been respectful."
So, they aren't pork. I hadn't bothered to notice. I hadn't even thought to ask. All of creation lay before me upon graduation, when I began to leave home, and none of it, as far as I knew, required that I live as anything but an assemblage of my own desires. I'm reminded of this when I'm at the butcher's, ordering a chicken, when I let my eye wander over the meats. There they are, the pork loins. They're beautiful, but I no longer have the urge to snatch them up and run home with them. I miss the boy who might have had that urge, the certainty of the boy who loved pork and who never imagined he'd ever give anything up.
There is no certainty, the no-longer-ignorant git with the chicken says.
Copyright © 2005 Duncan Murrell
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