Hog Ties: Pigs, Manure and Mortality in American Culture - Tapa dura

From Arnold Ziffel to Porky Pig, from Charlotte's Web to A Day No Pigs Would Die, Americans are fascinated, even obsessed by pigs. But, why? In Hog Ties, Richard Horwitz looks at this obsession, its relation to the basis of American culture and the way in which archetypal themes of life and death are played out in the care, feeding, slaughtering and eating of pigs. Horwitz, Professor of American Studies at the University of Iowa, worked part-time as a farm hand on a large Iowa pig farm. He grew up in a rural, Reformed Jewish household in the Northeast where his father was a dentist who still made house calls. As much a memoir of gentle rural life as it is an engaging work of cultural commentary, Hog Ties looks at the current business of pig farming, its roots in the family farms of the Midwest and its future in the large conglomerates that take over small farms and increasingly separate the farm family from their land. In the lives and trials of pigs and their caretakers, Horwitz sees a mirror image of our own lives, our fight against myriad diseases, our ultimate death, possible redemption and therein discovers the Tao of pig. Hog Ties is a fascinating book that readers will ponder and think about long after the last page has been turned.