The Hog


Book Description




The Pig


Book Description
















Tracing the Domestic Pig


Book Description

The appearance of the domestic pig today is shaped mainly by the economic expectations of us, humans. Today’s pig has superior reproductive, fattening, and carcass traits compared to its ancient ancestors. This could not be achieved without the highly effective support of scientific research aimed at revealing the genetic basis underlying the important economic traits of pigs and the involvement of novel technologies in phenotyping these animals, both in vivo and post-mortem. Yet the research is spreading beyond the biological issues connected to the production of pigs and their products. The latest developments in computer science and informatics technology enable us to collect and store information from all stages in the production of food, leading back to its origin. Questions about the breed, the way the pigs were raised, how were they managed, and how they were processed into a wide palette of products can be answered by the use of methodologies developed by data scientists and those from the fields of different “omics.” All this information can be passed along the chain to consumers in a repeatable manner. The producers can use these data to manage such complex issues as meat or product quality. And this closes the circle. Tracing the domestic pig is an attempt to present the current knowledge about this valuable animal—its origin, composition, and the food that it gives us—and to predict or foresee what can happen to this species in the time to come.




Pig


Book Description

Known as much for their pink curly tails and pudgy snouts as their low-brow choice of diet and habitat, pigs are prevalent in popular culture—from the Three Little Pigs to Miss Piggy to Babe. Today there are more than one billion pigs on the planet, and there are countless representations of pigs and piggishness throughout the world’s cultures. In Pig, Brett Mizelle provides a richly illustrated and compelling look at the long, complicated relationship between humans and these highly intelligent, sociable animals. Mizelle traces the natural and cultural history of the pig, focusing on the contradictions between our imaginative representation of pigs and the real-world truth of the ways in which pigs are prized for their meat, used as subjects in medical research, and killed in order to make hundreds of consumer products. Pig begins with the evolution of the suidae, animals that were domesticated in multiple regions 9,000 years ago, and points toward a future where pigs and humans are even more closely intertwined as a result of biomedical breakthroughs. Pig both examines the widespread art, entertainment, and literature that imagines human kinship with pigs and the development of modern industrial pork production. In charting how humans have shaped the pig and how the pig has shaped us, Mizelle focuses on the unresolved contradictions between the fiction and the reality of our relations with pigs.