We should be more pigheaded about pork

WINSTON Churchill said that they “look us straight in the eye and see an equal”. GK Chesterton thought that their “actual lines… are amongst the loveliest and most luxuriant in nature… the same great curves, swift yet heavy, which we see in rushing water and rolling cloud”. There was even a Celtic god, Moccus, in their honour

Pigs. Fat, snuffly, pink and brown and clever, yet undervalued other than as something to stick in a sandwich. (Unless you’re David Cameron, but let’s not even go there.) We all know that pigs are more intelligent than dogs. That they are highly sociable, fertile and nimble, and love a good game of football. That they can solve puzzles like a monkey, given the chance. That they love trundling around outdoors, rootling and grunting and being alive.

Yet we still don’t regard them highly. Telling someone they are swinish and pig-headed and living in a pigsty is to insult them in three different ways; pigs are synonymous with the double negatives of dirty and greedy. We don’t put bells on them, as we do with cows, or write poems about them gambolling in spring meadows, like we do with lambs. We don’t revere and admire them like we do horses, or anthropomorphise them the way we do with dogs and cats.

No, we just factory farm them in conditions of confinement, cruelty and squalor — which, as clever sentient beings, they remain appalling aware — and then we hack them up, process them with all kinds of chemicals, and serve them with fried eggs and baked beans.

It would seem, however, that the pigs are getting their own back. All those caged, slaughtered, processed porkers are wreaking a kind of piggy revenge from beyond the piggy grave. Because, yes, it transpires that pork may well be an anagram of plutonium, that bacon has more in common with arsenic than is ever sensible, and that you might as well fry your sausages in asbestos gravy.

Wait. What’s that distant echo? The sound of millions of vegetarians cackling “We told you so”? The howls of vegan laughter? Not at all. Such crowing would be counterproductive. It might annoy people. It might confirm omnivorous suspicions that meat avoidants are smugly brandishing their tofu sausages in the air, fearless of pig induced cancer.

Instead, let us turn to Prof Colin Campbell, a senior biochemist who a decade ago published the definitive link between eating animal protein and developing cancer. His book, The China Study, is described by The New York Times as “the Grand Prix of epidemiology”. Nobody much listened to him then, but now the World Health Organisation is saying the same thing and we have little choice but to listen.

Except we don’t want to. We don’t want to hear about it. We would rather risk cancer than address our meat cravings. We were the same with ciggies as we are now with piggies — hooked, resistant, in denial. Many more will die — human and porcine — but maybe one day we will wake up and smell the vege-bacon.