What meat will eat people?

Of all the animals commonly eaten by humans, the pig is the only one that will return the favor.

Mark Essig, Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (New York: Basic Books, 2015), Prologue

Pigs make piglets!

The same quality that makes feral pigs a problem—prodigious fecundity—has delighted farmers. Cows, goats, and sheep provide milk, a bountiful and consistent source of protein. Oxen pull plows and carts, and sheep are shorn for wool. Pigs do not pull plows; they give no milk and grow no wool. Pigs produce only one thing: more pigs. Many, many more pigs.

Mark Essig, Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (New York: Basic Books, 2015), Prologue

People have valued meat through history . . .

Nearly every society has placed a high value on meat. . . . Although humans can satisfy all their nutritional needs by eating plants, most of us prefer not to. Instead, we feed plants to animals and then eat the animals, and we do not seem to mind that this process is costly and complicated. People have fought wars, conquered lands, destroyed landscapes, and exchanged great wealth to satisfy their deep hunger for meat. When it is scarce—and in large societies meat has been scarce until recent times—only the wealthiest eat it. When poor people begin to earn a bit more money, they spend it on meat. "Those who could, gorged themselves," one historian has written of early modern Europe. "Those who couldn't, aimed to."

Mark Essig, Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (New York: Basic Books, 2015), Prologue (quoting Eugen Weber, A Modern History of Europe (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 202)

Snacks!

Bernie came out [of the gas station], and I didn't spot Slim Jims or bacon bits, just a big bottle of water. That meant he still wasn't hungry, what with our little session at Max's Memphis Ribs . . . and maybe I wasn't hungry, either, but snacks often happened when we were gassing up. Snacks taste better when you're hungry, but do they ever actually taste bad? I ask you.

Spencer Quinn, Dog on It: A Chet and Bernie Mystery (New York: Atria, 2009), p. 212. (Chet, the narrator, is a dog, by the way.)

Why write about food and drink?

"When asked why she had devoted herself to writing about food and drink instead of weightier subjects, such as serious world issues or even love, [M. F. K.] Fisher replied, ‘The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.'"

Clifton Fadiman & André Bernard, eds., Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes (1st rev. ed.) (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 2000), p. 204.