bookworm

The pig was never banned for the worm. The worm was found in London in 1835. Sit on the throne of a small kingdom in the hills of the Near East around 900 BC and you will find the pig was banned for something you could see from the palace roof. Your treasury is counted in sheep. The temple's ledgers count them by the ten thousand, and every one of them is a tax you can see walking. A sheep grows a fleece you shear every spring. A sheep gives milk, a sheep gives a lamb, and a sheep goes where the shepherd drives it, in a flock, to the altar, to the army, to the tithe barn, over the hills to the market you own. A sheep needs pasture, and pasture has an owner, and the owner answers to you. The cow is better still. The ox pulls the plough that grows the grain you tax. The cow gives milk every day and a calf every year, and a bull on the altar is the prestige of the house that offered it. Cattle need land, wide land, the kind only a great house holds, so a man with cattle is a man with a landlord, and his landlord has you. And then there is the thing in the yard behind every hovel in your kingdom. It has no wool. It gives no milk you would drink. It will not pull anything. You cannot drive it to the temple in a flock, because it will not be driven, and nobody in your army wants to march to war behind it. It needs no pasture at all. It lives on the household's peelings, the acorns in the wood, the waste behind the house, and it turns the lot into fat. A sow throws ten piglets, twice a year, and they are bacon in six months. A family with a pig behind the house has meat and lard through the winter and has asked nothing of you, your priests, your pasture or your landlords to get it. That is the problem. The pig is a democratic animal. It is the one source of meat in your kingdom that the ledger cannot see, and a man who can feed himself can afford to be rude. So you want it gone, and you cannot simply take it, because there are thousands of them and they are in every yard. You need the people to give it up themselves, gladly, and look down on the neighbours who do not. Which brings you to the second thing you can see from the roof. Down on the coast are the Philistines, the richer people, the ones with the iron and the ports, and they eat pork like Greeks. Their rubbish is a fifth pig bone. Yours is almost none. You did not plan that; the hills were always sheep and goat country. But it is a gift, because the easiest way to make a people is to tell them what they do not eat. Draw the line at the pig and every man in your hills is on your side of it and every man on the coast is on the other. Identity is cheaper than a garrison and it never mutinies. You still need a reason, because people like a reason. Do not say the pig makes a poor man independent. Say it is unclean. Say the god finds it filthy. Do not explain why the cow, which stands in its own dung and carries a tapeworm of its own, is clean; nobody will ask, because the cow belongs to their betters and they already know better things are cleaner. Write it into the law with the hoof and the cud so it sounds like zoology. Your priests will enforce it for free, because it enlarges them, and in three generations nobody will remember it was ever a decision. That is how the thing is done, and it was done again and again. In Egypt the swineherds were the one class in the country barred from every temple, and the workmen's villages behind the great building sites are knee-deep in pig bone, because the ledger never fed the men who cut the stone and the pig did. Every state that wanted its people dependent has found the same animal in the same yard and reached the same verdict. The reason the modern reader has been given is the worm. Trichinella was first seen by a medical student with a microscope at St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1835, two and a half thousand years after the law was written. It is killed by cooking. Beef carries its own worm and was never banned. Goat carries brucellosis and sat on every altar. The hygiene story is a Victorian explanation bolted onto a Bronze Age tax policy, and it has lasted because it is flattering: it makes the ancient lawgiver a sanitary inspector rather than a man who had counted the sheep and could not count the pigs. From the roof it was never about what the pig carried. It was about what the pig gave, to whom, without asking you first.

Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring with breast cancer eating through her, hid it from everyone but her closest friends so the chemical industry could not use it against the book, and testified to the Senate in a wig because the radiation had taken her hair. She was a government biologist who wrote pamphlets about fish for the Fish and Wildlife Service and sat up at night writing about the sea. Her first book came out a few weeks before Pearl Harbor and sold almost nothing. Her second, in 1951, sat on the bestseller list for 86 weeks and bought her out of the civil service. She never married. She buried her father, her sister and then her mother, and at 50 she adopted her orphaned great-nephew, Roger, aged five, and raised him alone. In 1958 a friend wrote to her about the birds dropping dead in her garden after the mosquito spraying. Carson had been collecting the evidence on DDT since 1945, when the magazines turned her down. She started the book that winter. In the spring of 1960, with the manuscript half written, the surgeon took her left breast off and told her it was benign. It was not. The tumour had spread, and she found out months later, from another doctor, that the first one had decided not to tell her. She wrote the rest of Silent Spring between radiation sessions, through nausea and a crumbling spine, with her hair falling out and an arthritic grip on the pen, and she told almost nobody. If the industry learned the author had cancer, the book would be read as a dying woman's grievance rather than a case. The book came out in September 1962. The industry spent an estimated quarter of a million dollars answering it. Velsicol, which made two of the pesticides she named, wrote to her publisher threatening to sue and suggesting sinister influences wanted American farming reduced to Soviet levels. Monsanto printed a parody called The Desolate Year, in which the insects inherit the earth, and sent out 5,000 copies. A former Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, was reported to have asked why a spinster with no children was so worried about genetics, and to have concluded she was probably a communist. In April 1963 she went on CBS to face the industry's man, Robert White-Stevens of American Cyanamid, who told 10 million viewers that if mankind followed Miss Carson it would return to the Dark Ages. Two of the programme's sponsors had pulled out. Carson, upright in a wig, quietly took him apart. A month later President Kennedy's own science advisers reported that she had been right. In June she sat before a Senate committee, barely able to walk to the chair, and the chairman greeted her with the line Lincoln is supposed to have given Harriet Beecher Stowe. "Miss Carson, you are the lady who started all this." She died on 14 April 1964, aged 56, of the cancer she had hidden for four years so that it could not be used to discredit her work. America banned DDT in 1972. In 2015 the daughters of the women sprayed in her lifetime turned out to carry 3.7 times the breast cancer risk when their mothers had carried the most DDT. Rachel Carson spent her last four years proving the chemical killed birds, and died of the disease it would later be found to have passed down through the daughters of the women who stood in the fog. The industry called her hysterical. She never once mentioned her own body in the argument. She did not need to.