The Sharpest Line in the World's Diets

The pig draws the clearest dietary boundary in world religion. Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 prohibit it because it has a cloven hoof but does not chew the cud, and the Quran prohibits it likewise, so that abstention from pork became a durable marker of Jewish and Muslim identity. Against that, the agricultural societies of China, Europe and the Pacific made the pig a central food and an emblem of prosperity and fertility, precisely because it converts scraps to meat so efficiently. Greek religion used the pig as the sacrificial animal of Demeter's mysteries at Eleusis. The Egyptian association of the pig with the disruptive god Set is attested but complicated by evidence that pigs were widely raised and eaten.

Chinese popular literature gives the pig its own trickster-adjacent character in Zhu Bajie, Pigsy, one of the pilgrims accompanying the monk Xuanzang in the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West alongside Sun Wukong the Monkey King; greedy, lazy and lecherous but ultimately loyal, Zhu Bajie is a comic figure whose faults are pig-associated gluttony and appetite rather than any of the positive prosperity symbolism the animal carries in the zodiac and in folk custom. The pig's wild ancestor, the wild boar, is now one of the most widely distributed large mammals on Earth, and feral pigs descended from escaped domestic stock have become a serious invasive species across the Americas and Australia, a modern ecological problem unconnected to either the biblical prohibition or the East Asian reverence recorded above.