Swine fever

‘Rightly is they called pigs,’ says a farmworker in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow as he watches porkers grunt and squelch. Pía Spry-Marqués has no time for such nominative determinism. ‘Pigs,’ she points out, ‘are in fact quite clean animals.’ Wallowing in mud isn’t nostalgie de la boue, merely the only way of keeping cool if no shade or fresh water is available.

God disagrees with her. ‘The swine, though he divide the hoof, and be cloven-footed, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you,’ he tells Moses and Aaron in Leviticus. While most Muslims and Jews still go along with this (as do Rastafarians, much to the dismay of pork-loving Snoop Dogg when he converted a few years ago), Roman Catholics defy the edict so insatiably (except on Fridays in Lent) that they may well be the world champion pig-guzzlers. The average Spaniard’s annual consumption is twice ours: 51.6kg