Pigs eat almost anything. Put them on a pasture and they’ll eat the grasses, then dig up the ground to eat the roots. Some of my fellow pastured pig farmers claim their pigs will even eat lawn clippings, but mine have always turned up their snouts at that.
Pigs may eat grass, but it’s my understanding that they can’t digest cellulose --like humans, they don’t have the gut flora that cows and other ruminants have. So they get no nutritional value from chomping down grass. Pigs will eat a lot of plants – nuts, roots, seeds, fungi (this is why they use pigs to hunt for truffles), but an awful lot of it is stuff people can eat. Anthropologist Marvin Harris made the claim that taboos on eating pig in the Middle East (not only Muslims and Jews proscribed pig – so did the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians) were rooted in the fact that pigs and people competed for the same food.
Pigs, being omnivores (again, like people), will apparently gladly eat meat, too.
Bolding mine.
I was showing a potential customer around our farm a few years ago and we walked down to the pig pasture. As we stood there looking at the pigs, a couple of baby barn swallows fell or jumped out of their nest. One of the sows immediately spun around and gobbled them up. We could hear the little bones crunching and see feathers sticking out of her mouth. My customer turned a little green, but he did end up ordering half a pig from us!
We all saw Hannibal too. :eek:
Lactose intolerance will produce foul smelling gas. I had a bowl of smoked salmon chowder last night and paid the price.
After seeing the thread title, I was really disappointed that Freddie the Pig wasn’t the OP.
