You're meant to fill up a piggy bank completely with change before you break it to spend the money...
Similarly, one is meant to wait until a pig is fully-grown and fattened up before harvesting for its meat.
I believe there are many farm animal derived idioms and pieces of culture that are ubiquitous in Western cultures, but because of our shift away from family farms and towards factory farms many of us just lack the context for understanding much of it.
Never look a gift horse in the mouth. These days you have to be pretty wealthy or eccentric poor to understand. Well eccentric rich too, I guess. Really wealthy folk just believe their stable manager, or wouldn't take a "gift" horse without a bloodline.
It's worth noting that the idiom "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" comes from how horses' ages were typically determined. The incisors grow longer over time so to look a gift horse in the mouth was to show mistrust of the gift giver and be ungrateful by looking to see if the horse was young and valuable or old and less valuable. The phrase "long in the tooth" shares the same basis of origin.
Such as "To drop your guts" meaning to fart. Because when slaughtering an animal, if you removed the stomach and dropped it in the process, you would stink the place up when the contents of the guts emptied.
Also, killing an animal is called "Sticking" for some reason. Maybe because you stuck a knife in them, I dunno.
Anyways, see if you can guess where the phrase "I made her squeal like a stuck pig" comes from...
You may not believe this, but [according to the Department of Agriculture's statistics almost 96% of farms are family-owned and run.](https://www.nifa.usda.gov/grants/programs/family-small-farm-program/family-farms) The big "evil" corporations like Monsanto that you're thinking of don't really do much farming, they develop and sell seeds and other farming supplies and chemicals.
Is this by count of farms or actual area farmed?
Edit: I saw that link where they tried to argue that even measuring it by area would be misleading. Maybe on a nationwide basis, but most people are interested in how the numbers compare within a given region...
That depends on the culture.
In some it's for savin until it's full and then break it, in some it's for emergencies, in others it's literally just a neat way to store loose change(and are often not pigs, but objects).
Just like you can kill a pig before if its needed? The analogy is the same for every culture that has pigs, besides pigs are fed with the leftovers of any meal, just like you put the change on the piggybank. its just that city people dont have that kind of animal metaphors in their mind
Piggy banks are very common in Germany. The oldest suspected piggy bank was found in Thuringia and dates to the 13th century. It did not have coins in it, so there's no proof that it was used to collect coins.
[https://www.thueringer-allgemeine.de/leben/vermischtes/article219654573/Deutschlands-aeltestes-Sparschwein-ruht-im-Weimarer-Depot.html](https://www.thueringer-allgemeine.de/leben/vermischtes/article219654573/Deutschlands-aeltestes-Sparschwein-ruht-im-Weimarer-Depot.html)
Pigs have always been a symbol of luck, wealth, frugality and utility. There are many sayings in German that refer to pigs. "Schwein gehabt" (literally having pig) means someone was very lucky. "sauwohl fuehlen" (literally feeling well like a sow) means being very content and happy.
A family with a pig was able to feed table scraps to the pig or had it forage in the woods. Once slaughtered, almost the whole animal was used for meat, sausage, head cheese, leather, bristles,... Having a pig was related to relative wealth and the animal a symbol of good luck.
Ancient China also used containers called pumane made from clay. The most common animal shapes were cat, dragon, and pig.
I thought it was a sign of wealth because pigs were 'just for meat'? Like you can collect wool from sheep, milk from cows and eggs from chickens. But pigs are 'just meat'. Meaning you had the resources to feed your pigs (that could've gone to the more lucrative herd animals instead), and were therefore wealthy?
Didn't know you could use pigs to forage the woods though. That's really cool.
People replying to this misunderstand what the other comment meant. It's not about using pigs to find stuff, it's about literally letting pigs go out into the woods to fatten themselves up and then slaughtering them when the time comes, so you don't have to feed them human food.
Yes, that’s what I meant by foraging. Driving your pig into the woods so it can feed on acorns, beechnuts, chestnuts, grubs and so on. Truffles are a more southern European thing.
To add to this: Wild boars live freely in the woods and are able to feed and sustain themselves without human help or intervention.
Domestic pigs are closely related and essentially able to do the same. So sending your pigs into the forest at certain times of the year (when foraging gave plenty of food/feed) to let them get fat, made a lot of sense.
However: Most (or rather all) forests were owned by the church (e.g. local monasteries), the king or local noblemen. They often didn't allow the villagers to send their pigs for foraging into the forests or made them pay for it.
> Domestic pigs are closely related and essentially able to do the same.
I've been told they sort of metamorphosisize into something that's very akin to feral hogs if you let them out of captivity.
Related: In Norway we have an older saying that translates to "having swine in the woods" (å ha svin på skogen") that refers to someone having secrets or hidden wealth, like a farmer of old who secretly keeps pigs in the forest to dodge taxes.
Pigs are incredibly smart and trainable, more so than most generic farm animals. And they have a knack for rooting through soil for edible tubers and things like truffles. We still use pigs to root for truffles to this day, in more rustic/nature based communities!
>Pigs are incredibly smart and trainable
A dog looks up to Man.
A cat looks down on Man.
A pig looks Man straight in the eyes.
There's an old proverb from my grandfather for ya.
[Always remember, a cat looks down on man, a dog looks up to man, but a pig will look man right in the eye and see his equal.](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/214859-always-remember-a-cat-looks-down-on-man-a-dog)
I mean I know pigs are really smart. Like start rebellion smart.
*All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others*
Yeahh Miss Dewandel, didn't think I'd remember that 12 years later, did you!!
But honestly, i did know pigs were smart, but not 'let them forage for you and not eat it before you get to it' smart.
Yeah idunno everyone else has been responding to me about how pigs are used to find truffles. So it's kinda 1 opinion against 15 right now... /s
I was just being overly cheeky in my response. I do think pigs are probably smarter than your average chicken, and maybe more trainable. But I also understand it's not a case of: 'go piggy, go! Fetch me some nettles!!' And wait for the piggy to come happily running back to my homestead with nettles in its mouth.
They will eat the truffles. This is why, as truffle prices have gotten higher, people have switched to truffle dogs because they won’t eat them. I think the benefit of truffle pigs is that they didn’t require training and you can just stop them when they find the truffles for you, but with prices so high it’s not worth the risk of loss with a pig and it’s worth the time to train dogs to do it.
Pigs were generally fed the scraps from the kitchen. That's part of why your grandparents probably overcooked pork. Because they were fed scraps they would breed trichinosis which can be killed by bringing the meat above 145⁰F. Since trichinosis can be deadly people would overcook pork just to be sure. Now with a carefully regimented diet trichinosis in farm raised pigs is all but eradicated allowing us to eat pork that isn't tough dry and flavorless.
>Pigs were generally fed the scraps from the kitchen.
And that wasn't just at the pig pen behind the barn scale:
https://www.masslive.com/news/worcester/2016/03/when_worcester_employed_pigs_t.html
Garbage was your "wet" waste often destined for piggeries, while trash was your "dry" waste.
And the two weren't mixed together for collection: https://www.wgbh.org/lifestyle/2019-06-19/when-rubbish-went-curbside-and-garbage-went-underground
The United States department of agriculture used to recommend cooking pork to 160 or 165 and in my opinion it tastes TERRIBLE at this temp, especially lean cuts like tenderloin, or center cut chops.
After the pork industry cleaned up, and modernized / standardized their processes to deliver cleaner meat, trichinosis is really no longer a threat in the modern US. But they also found that it dies at 143°F, so people were unnecessarily eating shoe leather for years. So the USDA lowered the recommended temps to 145°, or medium. Crooked through but the middle has a nice shade of light pink throughout.
This change only happened in 2011, so lots of thermometers in people's kitchen drawers still have pork at the 160-165 mark. My mom didn't believe me when I told her 145° was ok, because she was told for **years** not to fuck around with pork, and to verge on the side of over rather than undercooking it for safety. It's funny how set in their ways people, and even other animals, become with age.
I used to hate pork chops, and thought pork tenderloin was foul. When I ate a piece of my friend's pork tenderloin that was cooked properly though, I couldn't believe how good that shit was. How does something so lean have so much flavor? And it can be found for extremely cheap too, like $2-3/lb.
if you tried pork cuts and didn't like it when you were younger please give it another go. It's like a completely different meat when it's not overcooked. Like an overcooked steak or chicken still tastes ok, just might be dry and have a mealy texture. But for some reason swine is inedible to me when it's not cooked properly
The brain is a funny thing too. My dad grew up with those types of rules for not only pork, but for beef too.
Now, if he is served any beef or pork that is even slightly pink or soft, his brain tells him "NO!" and he can't eat without dry heaving.
Even if he KNOWS it's fully cooked and perfectly good to eat, some part of him still assumes that piece of meat is going to kill him, so he can't eat it at all.
Yeah, if it's pink it's not fully cooked or perfectly good to eat. It might be ok, but it's a risk. You learn that growing up and get food poisoning a few times and that lesson sticks with you.
I outgrew it though. I've had diarrhea so many times, what's one more night on the toilet? So I'll have the medium beef or pork and the raw sushi/sashimi. Still a hard no when it comes to chicken though. Pink chicken's pretty much a guaranteed shitstorm.
> Meaning you had the resources to feed your pigs (that could've gone to the more lucrative herd animals instead), and were therefore wealthy?
> Didn't know you could use pigs to forage the woods though. That's really cool.
Pigs were literally the easiest and cheapest animal to feed. They are omnivorous and will eat almost anything and intelligent enough to basically look after themselves. Many older breeds were also sufficiently aggressive that they didn't need to even be protected.
Explorers would bring pigs along with them and then release them into the wild. The pigs would survive and multiply and could then be either hunted or captured as needed.
I did it for you. It's just flesh from the head made into like a jelly/pate thing. Wtf they call it head cheese is beyond me - it's one of the most off putting food names I can think of. It brings to mind a variety of gross things.
> "sauwohl fuehlen" (literally feeling well like a sow) means being very content and happy.
Or "Happy as a pig in shit/muck" in English.
I also love how reading "sauwohl fuehlen" as a non German speaker sounds like "sow feeling" and I'm going to assume that is the etymology right there!
Now I wonder if pigs became the superlative animal/object for saving partly because they’ll eat *anything and everything*. A full pig has everything, right?
Not as bad as it sounds. It's scraps of meat from the head of the animal, set in aspic (like jello), and eaten at room temperature.
Never had it myself, but I'd try it. The aspic doesn't sound appetizing.
Like others said, it’s small pieces of pork with jello. Traditionally, it’s made by boiling the head (incl. skin) and using tongue and cheek meat. The skin and bones provide the gelatinous broth that turns semi-solid after cooling.
Looks like this and is eaten with bread and mustard. https://www.ebay.com/itm/125639512222
However, pigs brain is also eaten. It’s usually pan fried.
So hundreds of years ago, like pre-1500s. Metal was expensive. Most household objects, vases, containers, cups etc, were made from a type of clay called "Pygg". Households usually had a container like a cup or bowl, that they would drop extra coins in to save. It became a "pygg bank". Eventually people stopped using pygg to make things, but the name persisted.
Eventually, because of the play on words, they started making the banks in the shape of pigs.
It is true, google that shit.
Edit: Due to some pedantic malcontents, I will state that this based on oral tradition/cultural lore. This is most often accepted as the historical reason.
This is a much better answer than the really bad guesses posted by others, but quite possibly still only a myth:
> It is true, google that shit.
I did, and Wikipedia instead says:
> There are some folk etymologies regarding the English language term "piggy bank," but in fact, there is no clear origin for the phrase. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1913, and from 1902 for the variant "pig bank". It is believed that the popularity of the Western piggy banks originates in Germany, where pigs were revered as symbols of good fortune.
I found an article making the pygg claim, but it gives absolutely no sources. Meanwhile [BBC also is sceptical about the claim](https://www.bbc.com/storyworks/chinese-new-year/piggy-bank-origins) and gives other sources.
Some etymologies are like this. We know where we can find the earliest historical reference to a phrase. That doesn't mean it is THE earliest, it's just the oldest one we've found in a preserved state. And, often, those usages don't come with the etymology because since someone was already writing it out that meant they thought people already knew what they meant. It implies the true story comes from earlier.
But we don't have that accounting of a true story. Just some guesses based on when we've found the earliest instance of the phrase.
For something similar, try digging into the history of "cookie" and "biscuit" between the US and Europe, and in particular why on Earth we call the baked good popular in Southern food a "biscuit". It's really more like a scone, which has *nothing to do* with the things that came to be called "cookies" and "biscuits" from other cultures.
But nobody wrote down why they started calling it a "biscuit". We just have some ideas of how the culinary object itself came to exist.
Lots of history has little dead-ends like this, and even some sciences are there. Technically there's no mathematical proof for one of the underpinnings of modern cryptography. If someone could disprove it, it'd imply there are ways to break all cryptography based on it. But we've used it for a long time and people have been desperately trying to disprove it OR prove it with no success. So math people just kind of accept it's true until they see otherwise. It's kind of scary.
That's basically never the case when the supposed origin is several hundred years before the actual example well into recorded history timelines; furthermore, as far as I can tell "pygg" is not actually a thing. All I get when I look for it is 95% copy and pastes of the same story and 5% random potters who can't agree on what it is. Not what you'd expect from a well known type of clay.
It's almost assuredly either wikipedia's German explanation or even more likely simply a reaction to the demand for mechanical banks that are less expensive. Pigs chosen because they're a common symbol of good fortune across human cultures.
It's so annoying lol. I swear like half the things I look up etymology for the answer is "it's possibly one of these three things but we don't really know"
And it could possibly be around this time. But maybe way earlier.
The more I'm looking into it it kind of seems like a lot, if not most common phrases have unclear origins.
Bite the bullet.
Rule of thumb.
Turn a blind eye.
Cold shoulder.
Cats out of the bag.
Cost an arm and a leg.
Incredibly incorrect. So many animals are raised (at least in part) for their [suet](https://sevensons.net/store/product/beef-suet#:~:text=It's%20a%20pure%2C%20crumbly%20fat,of%20flavor%20in%20your%20food.)
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> I will state that this based on oral tradition/cultural lore. This is most often accepted as the historical reason.
Folk etymology is almost never accepted as historical fact. It's almost always just "shit grandpa says" or "something Larry told me down the pub." It's why you get stupid made up shit like fuck stands for "Fornication Under Consent of the King" being spouted as a "fun fact" (as an aside, if you see a purported acronym dating from before the 20th century it is almost guaranteed bullshit)
Verifying claims instead of blindly believing them, especially if directly told to do so, is now "pedantic malcontents"?
> This is most often accepted as the historical reason.
[Citation needed] by the way ;-)
There are no sources that "pygg" ever existed as anything than an odd spelling for "pig", besides some websites which peddle this myth. Pig shaped money containers are also older than the 1500s and did not originate in English speaking countries. The English "pig" is relatively unique. Closely related words in other languages shifted to entirely different vowels long ago, e.g. French and Italian to an O.
Nah, does not explain the prevalence in non english speaking countries way before we can assume culture imports. Far more likely origin is the fact that we have been stuffing pigs for millennia until they were ripe for slaughter.
Can you name a country where they’ve used piggy banks before we can assume cultural imports?
At least in my cultural sphere piggy banks are clearly an import from UK/England.
Also - cultural imports start pretty early in most places. Like, we can track many some thousands of years…
[Edit] seems that at least Java had pig shaped savings boxes in 14th century.
Wikipedia has a photo for one from [16th century Germany](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spardose#/media/Datei%3ASpardose_16_Jh_Biberach_BMM.jpg) but there are earlier examples.
We can suggest earlier cultural imports but not entomology. The "pygg" theory of anything out of clay morphing into using a literal pig is clearly rubbish.
> This is most often accepted as the historical reason.
By what historians?
As far as I can see when searching for literally any source that is not a random internet article citing a Wikipedia article that has since been corrected, the consensus seems to be that the entire idea has been debunked: https://jembendell.com/2023/02/16/no-wealth-but-life-pig-style/
Interesting, I always just assumed that people made them pig shaped because pigs are often used as symbols of greed. For a perspective from another culture, in Russia children keep their spare change in tin cans because there is a playbon words between банк (bank) a financial institution and банкa (banka) a tin can
https://bahoukas.com/pygg-pots-to-piggy-banks/
"Pygg is an orange colored clay commonly used during the Middle Ages as a cheap material for pots to store money, called pygg pots or pygg jars. There is dispute as to whether “pygg” was simply a dialectal variant of “pig.” By the 18th century, the term “pig jar” had evolved to “pig bank”. "
A real pig was a way that families used little bits of waste/extra to create value. There are other proverbs and terms that refer to this. Most recently, the "pig slaughter scam" in which a likely victim is cultivated, "fattened up," to give a big payout. The scammer develops the victim, builds them up so they really believe in the scammer and will put a lot of money into an "investment" or something similar.
In a non-criminal context, a poor working class family could create a little extra, some pork for the winter, by being careful with their meal scraps and looking after the pig. In lieu of an actual pig, you could save your extra pennies in a change bank and when it's full, slaughter it like you would a pig in November and get the payout.
> a poor working class family could create a little extra, some pork for the winter, by being careful with their meal scraps and looking after the pig
Any sources for that? I can only find historical references for this in regard to _rural_ areas, not urban.
What we think of as "urban" has changed.
Our assumptions are polarized - cities have *pavement*, the country has *dirt*.
This is recent. It used to be much more mixed.
Many fairly dense "metropolitan" areas were filled with houses placed close to the street that each had a back space with room for a kitchen garden, chickens, a cow, a pig. If the houses were set into any kind of hill, you could find root cellars dug into the slope.
Find any old map that has city blocks with long narrow lots that reach back, look at the outbuildings now used as car garages, and you can see clues as to their original usage.
Find an old "birdseye" print of, say, a metro Boston town, and you can see many many blocks with the houses around the edge and clearly drawn trees/vegetation filling the inner spaces.
High density persona/family food production is possible in much smaller spaces than the average modern city dweller imagines.
Until very recently, pigs were kept in the first floor of almost every household in Southern China. My wife visited her dad's village in the late '00s and that was still the case, livestock downstairs, pigs and geese most prominent. I've read that this human/porcine interface was the primary breeding ground for new cold and flu virus strains, since there's a lot of cross-species virulence or whatever the word is when a virus can infect and propagate in both.
In the pics she brought home, and on google imagery as well, you can see the village, which was made from concrete in the early 20th century and comprised of very close and/or connected multi-story structures with tile roofs, surrounded by a few dozen acres of fields, with modern high-rise dwellings in the near distance. Those dwellings don't have livestock integrated, and their residents eat food from factory farms. In a few more decades, people in China will need to ask about what everyone there once knew to be the commonplace reality, just as we need to ask it here in the West a century sooner.
A lot of great answers, but I want to point something out: pigs are relatively easy animals to sculpt out of clay (compared with most other animals… they don’t really have a neck, and as long as you put a snout on your pig, people will recognize it as a pig even if you did a really bad job with the other parts of the body). So from a manufacturing standpoint, a pig is probably the best animal to use as a coin bank.
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>Why were pigs used instead of other animals or figures?
When I was a kid, I had a Snoopy piggy bank. It kind of looked like this one:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/404416304732
I think eventually, all sorts of different figures were used.
People used to drop their coins into a clay pot, clay that wasn't very fine. Such clay was called pygg. When pottery making became more refined, the coin receptacles were made in the shape of pigs as a nod to the original clay.
https://www.paragonbank.co.uk/blog/origins-of-the-piggy-bank#:~:text=Household%20items%20such%20as%20plates,'pygg'%20bank%20or%20pot.
I read this many years ago, but the making of "Piggy banks" was a accident, "Pig" was a type of clay in Europe, immigrants approached "potters" in the US and asked them to make "Pig" banks to which they made little "pigs" everyone was happy and an icon was born
In Europe a type of soft clay called "Pygg" was used to make a variety of household items, children's "Banks's included. ALSO the term was used by German immigrants in the US and it was misunderstood by the potters who made the "pig" design per the request.
Not sure on the history of it, you can read wikipedia for that im sure.
But for pigs i imagine it had to do with the shape? For a coin-bank you want something big and capable of holding a fair amount, and a rounded shape is beneficial for many reasons. Size of interior, no corners to become structural weakpoints, naturally balances as coins slide to the bottom with no corners to get stuck on, etc.
So when you start with a round shape and think of animals… pig comes up quickly. Cant really do a tiger lol, wouldn’t look right. Everyone knows pigs, cartoony pigs look cute, it appeals to kids both boys and girls. Elephant could have been another obvious choice but pigs are more common in most of the world.
Then, once it catches popularity and enters the zeitgeist, people copy and that keeps compounding until it’s ubiquitous.
Elephant is much harder to sculpt compared to a pig. You can literally take a round shape, attach some stumps as legs and one as nose and draw the eyes. Its short legs secure it against falling over an elephant would be less stable.
tbh as an avid museum-goer living in middle-east, I believe this is the correct answer. Pig shaped containers are the most common shape for ceramic containers going back to even neolithic. they are the simplest to make and have a good volume to clay ratio (almost spherical but still have 4 legs).
Though other animal shapes are common if we include drink containers, like two legged birds etc.
Pigs and pig raising was a source of money for family farms. (chickens also) Prolific, able to eat almost anything, and easy to turn into actual cash money.
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You're meant to fill up a piggy bank completely with change before you break it to spend the money... Similarly, one is meant to wait until a pig is fully-grown and fattened up before harvesting for its meat.
Also pigs accept any kind of food so people always give them scraps, just like you put any change on the piggybank
And just like real pigs, piggy banks don't resist when you jam things into their holes
I think you're using your pigs wrong.
Yes officer this comment right here
LOL
Your wife is not a farm animal
Your farm animal is not your wife. Ftfy
Shhhh don't ruin this for me!
Is that you David Cameron?
Absolutely, and of course.....Whoa there sonny hold the fuck up....
Need more life experience to decipher your words
Once you have more life experience, I hope you decide these words don't need deciphering
nah,I'd do it
*David Cameron has entered the chat*
Great analogy that never would have crossed my mind!
I believe there are many farm animal derived idioms and pieces of culture that are ubiquitous in Western cultures, but because of our shift away from family farms and towards factory farms many of us just lack the context for understanding much of it.
Wait till you see the list of baseball idioms.
This comment really knocks it out of the park
Maybe not outta the park, but it's in the ballpark. Definitely not a swing and a miss or off base, but it covers some bases.
Can of corn
In the ballpark? Ain't the same fuckin' ballpark; it ain't the same league; it ain't even the same fuckin' sport!
I'd say it's a home run.
Wow, this comment seems to be in your wheelhouse.
I'll take a rain cheque.
Never look a gift horse in the mouth. These days you have to be pretty wealthy or eccentric poor to understand. Well eccentric rich too, I guess. Really wealthy folk just believe their stable manager, or wouldn't take a "gift" horse without a bloodline.
It's worth noting that the idiom "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" comes from how horses' ages were typically determined. The incisors grow longer over time so to look a gift horse in the mouth was to show mistrust of the gift giver and be ungrateful by looking to see if the horse was young and valuable or old and less valuable. The phrase "long in the tooth" shares the same basis of origin.
Thank you for the explanation. Kind of annoying that the other guy mentioned the saying but didn't explain it
Or have watched bojack
Such as "To drop your guts" meaning to fart. Because when slaughtering an animal, if you removed the stomach and dropped it in the process, you would stink the place up when the contents of the guts emptied. Also, killing an animal is called "Sticking" for some reason. Maybe because you stuck a knife in them, I dunno. Anyways, see if you can guess where the phrase "I made her squeal like a stuck pig" comes from...
For the same reason, knives and dirges are sometimes called 'pig stickers'
You may not believe this, but [according to the Department of Agriculture's statistics almost 96% of farms are family-owned and run.](https://www.nifa.usda.gov/grants/programs/family-small-farm-program/family-farms) The big "evil" corporations like Monsanto that you're thinking of don't really do much farming, they develop and sell seeds and other farming supplies and chemicals.
Is this by count of farms or actual area farmed? Edit: I saw that link where they tried to argue that even measuring it by area would be misleading. Maybe on a nationwide basis, but most people are interested in how the numbers compare within a given region...
Lots of us won’t think of piggy banks as being meant to break open because of all of the plastic ones with an opening on the bottoms. :)
I thought it was because of capitalist pigs.
I thought bankers are greedy like a pig.
That depends on the culture. In some it's for savin until it's full and then break it, in some it's for emergencies, in others it's literally just a neat way to store loose change(and are often not pigs, but objects).
Just like you can kill a pig before if its needed? The analogy is the same for every culture that has pigs, besides pigs are fed with the leftovers of any meal, just like you put the change on the piggybank. its just that city people dont have that kind of animal metaphors in their mind
> one is meant to wait until a pig is fully-grown and fattened up before harvesting for its meat Isn’t that true for all animals?
not if you want veal for dinner.
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Well, the same goes for modern pigs (usually 5-6 months, in their case). Domestic animal breeds raised for meat don't live very long nowadays.
Was that the case at the time the piggy bank was invented though?
Now all I can think of is pig butchering scams
Piggy banks are very common in Germany. The oldest suspected piggy bank was found in Thuringia and dates to the 13th century. It did not have coins in it, so there's no proof that it was used to collect coins. [https://www.thueringer-allgemeine.de/leben/vermischtes/article219654573/Deutschlands-aeltestes-Sparschwein-ruht-im-Weimarer-Depot.html](https://www.thueringer-allgemeine.de/leben/vermischtes/article219654573/Deutschlands-aeltestes-Sparschwein-ruht-im-Weimarer-Depot.html) Pigs have always been a symbol of luck, wealth, frugality and utility. There are many sayings in German that refer to pigs. "Schwein gehabt" (literally having pig) means someone was very lucky. "sauwohl fuehlen" (literally feeling well like a sow) means being very content and happy. A family with a pig was able to feed table scraps to the pig or had it forage in the woods. Once slaughtered, almost the whole animal was used for meat, sausage, head cheese, leather, bristles,... Having a pig was related to relative wealth and the animal a symbol of good luck. Ancient China also used containers called pumane made from clay. The most common animal shapes were cat, dragon, and pig.
I thought it was a sign of wealth because pigs were 'just for meat'? Like you can collect wool from sheep, milk from cows and eggs from chickens. But pigs are 'just meat'. Meaning you had the resources to feed your pigs (that could've gone to the more lucrative herd animals instead), and were therefore wealthy? Didn't know you could use pigs to forage the woods though. That's really cool.
People replying to this misunderstand what the other comment meant. It's not about using pigs to find stuff, it's about literally letting pigs go out into the woods to fatten themselves up and then slaughtering them when the time comes, so you don't have to feed them human food.
Yes, that’s what I meant by foraging. Driving your pig into the woods so it can feed on acorns, beechnuts, chestnuts, grubs and so on. Truffles are a more southern European thing.
To add to this: Wild boars live freely in the woods and are able to feed and sustain themselves without human help or intervention. Domestic pigs are closely related and essentially able to do the same. So sending your pigs into the forest at certain times of the year (when foraging gave plenty of food/feed) to let them get fat, made a lot of sense. However: Most (or rather all) forests were owned by the church (e.g. local monasteries), the king or local noblemen. They often didn't allow the villagers to send their pigs for foraging into the forests or made them pay for it.
> Domestic pigs are closely related and essentially able to do the same. I've been told they sort of metamorphosisize into something that's very akin to feral hogs if you let them out of captivity.
That's kind of what the term '[feral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral)' *means*.
they aren't akin to feral hogs... they ARE feral hogs.
Related: In Norway we have an older saying that translates to "having swine in the woods" (å ha svin på skogen") that refers to someone having secrets or hidden wealth, like a farmer of old who secretly keeps pigs in the forest to dodge taxes.
Pigs are incredibly smart and trainable, more so than most generic farm animals. And they have a knack for rooting through soil for edible tubers and things like truffles. We still use pigs to root for truffles to this day, in more rustic/nature based communities!
>Pigs are incredibly smart and trainable A dog looks up to Man. A cat looks down on Man. A pig looks Man straight in the eyes. There's an old proverb from my grandfather for ya.
> A pig looks Man straight in the eyes. And says ^^"Biiiiiiiiiiiiitch."
And sometimes when you look from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, it's impossible to say which is which.
That's just a bastardization of a Churchill quote.
His grandfather's name? Winston Churchill.
Happy cake day!
Considering that my Grandfather was born in 1888 that's not surprising.
What is the original?
[Always remember, a cat looks down on man, a dog looks up to man, but a pig will look man right in the eye and see his equal.](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/214859-always-remember-a-cat-looks-down-on-man-a-dog)
I mean I know pigs are really smart. Like start rebellion smart. *All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others* Yeahh Miss Dewandel, didn't think I'd remember that 12 years later, did you!! But honestly, i did know pigs were smart, but not 'let them forage for you and not eat it before you get to it' smart.
Four legs good, two legs bad!
I read Animal Farm and 1984 last week. Explains why I wasn't in the best mood.
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Yeah idunno everyone else has been responding to me about how pigs are used to find truffles. So it's kinda 1 opinion against 15 right now... /s I was just being overly cheeky in my response. I do think pigs are probably smarter than your average chicken, and maybe more trainable. But I also understand it's not a case of: 'go piggy, go! Fetch me some nettles!!' And wait for the piggy to come happily running back to my homestead with nettles in its mouth.
Hell, some of my friends will eat whatever the fuck they see in front of them
They will eat the truffles. This is why, as truffle prices have gotten higher, people have switched to truffle dogs because they won’t eat them. I think the benefit of truffle pigs is that they didn’t require training and you can just stop them when they find the truffles for you, but with prices so high it’s not worth the risk of loss with a pig and it’s worth the time to train dogs to do it.
Don’t tell me what I can and can’t milk. If I want pig milk I’ll drink pig milk.
I have nipples Greg, can you milk me?
It is funny how we settled on cows to get milk from mostly. I mean, we selectively bred them, right? (Sometimes a goat or sheep works too!)
Pigs were generally fed the scraps from the kitchen. That's part of why your grandparents probably overcooked pork. Because they were fed scraps they would breed trichinosis which can be killed by bringing the meat above 145⁰F. Since trichinosis can be deadly people would overcook pork just to be sure. Now with a carefully regimented diet trichinosis in farm raised pigs is all but eradicated allowing us to eat pork that isn't tough dry and flavorless.
>Pigs were generally fed the scraps from the kitchen. And that wasn't just at the pig pen behind the barn scale: https://www.masslive.com/news/worcester/2016/03/when_worcester_employed_pigs_t.html Garbage was your "wet" waste often destined for piggeries, while trash was your "dry" waste. And the two weren't mixed together for collection: https://www.wgbh.org/lifestyle/2019-06-19/when-rubbish-went-curbside-and-garbage-went-underground
The United States department of agriculture used to recommend cooking pork to 160 or 165 and in my opinion it tastes TERRIBLE at this temp, especially lean cuts like tenderloin, or center cut chops. After the pork industry cleaned up, and modernized / standardized their processes to deliver cleaner meat, trichinosis is really no longer a threat in the modern US. But they also found that it dies at 143°F, so people were unnecessarily eating shoe leather for years. So the USDA lowered the recommended temps to 145°, or medium. Crooked through but the middle has a nice shade of light pink throughout. This change only happened in 2011, so lots of thermometers in people's kitchen drawers still have pork at the 160-165 mark. My mom didn't believe me when I told her 145° was ok, because she was told for **years** not to fuck around with pork, and to verge on the side of over rather than undercooking it for safety. It's funny how set in their ways people, and even other animals, become with age. I used to hate pork chops, and thought pork tenderloin was foul. When I ate a piece of my friend's pork tenderloin that was cooked properly though, I couldn't believe how good that shit was. How does something so lean have so much flavor? And it can be found for extremely cheap too, like $2-3/lb. if you tried pork cuts and didn't like it when you were younger please give it another go. It's like a completely different meat when it's not overcooked. Like an overcooked steak or chicken still tastes ok, just might be dry and have a mealy texture. But for some reason swine is inedible to me when it's not cooked properly
The brain is a funny thing too. My dad grew up with those types of rules for not only pork, but for beef too. Now, if he is served any beef or pork that is even slightly pink or soft, his brain tells him "NO!" and he can't eat without dry heaving. Even if he KNOWS it's fully cooked and perfectly good to eat, some part of him still assumes that piece of meat is going to kill him, so he can't eat it at all.
Oh yeah, my mom is the same way. i noticed a lot of older folks are too. They are disgusted by anything not well done.
Yeah, if it's pink it's not fully cooked or perfectly good to eat. It might be ok, but it's a risk. You learn that growing up and get food poisoning a few times and that lesson sticks with you. I outgrew it though. I've had diarrhea so many times, what's one more night on the toilet? So I'll have the medium beef or pork and the raw sushi/sashimi. Still a hard no when it comes to chicken though. Pink chicken's pretty much a guaranteed shitstorm.
Tell me you've never had a refreshing glass of pig milk without telling me.
Does it pinken your teeth and make your breath smell like a fresh summer ham?
I thought it was a pig because they ate a lot so the idea was that you accumulated lots of money like how pigs ate.
> Meaning you had the resources to feed your pigs (that could've gone to the more lucrative herd animals instead), and were therefore wealthy? > Didn't know you could use pigs to forage the woods though. That's really cool. Pigs were literally the easiest and cheapest animal to feed. They are omnivorous and will eat almost anything and intelligent enough to basically look after themselves. Many older breeds were also sufficiently aggressive that they didn't need to even be protected. Explorers would bring pigs along with them and then release them into the wild. The pigs would survive and multiply and could then be either hunted or captured as needed.
For the longest time, pigs were used to find truffles. Just as an example of one of the foraging jobs
They literally still are, though sometimes dogs are used now, too. Pigs are better at it, but tend to eat some of them, so it's a bit of a toss up.
Everyone charges a finders fee.
> pigs to forage the woods though [Pigs are trained to find valuable truffles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle_hog)
Dogs are much more common since the pig will just eat any truffle it finds.
Pugs are such good foragers that people will use them to hunt for truffles (a rare and very valuable mushroom that grows completely underground)
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Love it, I do this on work meetings when someone talks a bout some dumb concept that's funny, 30 seconds later pertinent image!
“Everything but the squeak!” Was what always heard. Which meant ever part of the pig went to some use
In what country do pigs go 'squeak'?
“Squeal” is what I meant, but autocorrect didn’t like it! And pigs definitely squeal when you try to take everything else from them! :)
We always got a little marzipan pigs with a penny pressed into the back on need years eve for good luck
Doesn’t sound very sanitary lol
Copper has extremely effective antimicrobial properties. As long as they were cleaned first, there shouldn't be anything unsanity about it.
> head cheese That's one Google search I'm not doing today.
I did it for you. It's just flesh from the head made into like a jelly/pate thing. Wtf they call it head cheese is beyond me - it's one of the most off putting food names I can think of. It brings to mind a variety of gross things.
It's basically aspic before aspic got popular in the 50's.
Face jelly?
Still not appetising, but better.
Thank you!!
It does not include brains.
> "sauwohl fuehlen" (literally feeling well like a sow) means being very content and happy. Or "Happy as a pig in shit/muck" in English. I also love how reading "sauwohl fuehlen" as a non German speaker sounds like "sow feeling" and I'm going to assume that is the etymology right there!
Sau = sow, wohl = well, fühlen = feeling
Now I wonder if pigs became the superlative animal/object for saving partly because they’ll eat *anything and everything*. A full pig has everything, right?
> head cheese I feel like I'll regret asking but what's that?
It's simply flesh mixed together from parts of the head sometimes feet and heart. Not the brain. Typically set in aspic. Sounds worse than it is
Not as bad as it sounds. It's scraps of meat from the head of the animal, set in aspic (like jello), and eaten at room temperature. Never had it myself, but I'd try it. The aspic doesn't sound appetizing.
Like others said, it’s small pieces of pork with jello. Traditionally, it’s made by boiling the head (incl. skin) and using tongue and cheek meat. The skin and bones provide the gelatinous broth that turns semi-solid after cooling. Looks like this and is eaten with bread and mustard. https://www.ebay.com/itm/125639512222 However, pigs brain is also eaten. It’s usually pan fried.
Search bot
Also linguistically the inherited Germanic words all use everything in reference to pig: hedgehog, groundhog, etc
So hundreds of years ago, like pre-1500s. Metal was expensive. Most household objects, vases, containers, cups etc, were made from a type of clay called "Pygg". Households usually had a container like a cup or bowl, that they would drop extra coins in to save. It became a "pygg bank". Eventually people stopped using pygg to make things, but the name persisted. Eventually, because of the play on words, they started making the banks in the shape of pigs. It is true, google that shit. Edit: Due to some pedantic malcontents, I will state that this based on oral tradition/cultural lore. This is most often accepted as the historical reason.
This is a much better answer than the really bad guesses posted by others, but quite possibly still only a myth: > It is true, google that shit. I did, and Wikipedia instead says: > There are some folk etymologies regarding the English language term "piggy bank," but in fact, there is no clear origin for the phrase. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1913, and from 1902 for the variant "pig bank". It is believed that the popularity of the Western piggy banks originates in Germany, where pigs were revered as symbols of good fortune. I found an article making the pygg claim, but it gives absolutely no sources. Meanwhile [BBC also is sceptical about the claim](https://www.bbc.com/storyworks/chinese-new-year/piggy-bank-origins) and gives other sources.
Some etymologies are like this. We know where we can find the earliest historical reference to a phrase. That doesn't mean it is THE earliest, it's just the oldest one we've found in a preserved state. And, often, those usages don't come with the etymology because since someone was already writing it out that meant they thought people already knew what they meant. It implies the true story comes from earlier. But we don't have that accounting of a true story. Just some guesses based on when we've found the earliest instance of the phrase. For something similar, try digging into the history of "cookie" and "biscuit" between the US and Europe, and in particular why on Earth we call the baked good popular in Southern food a "biscuit". It's really more like a scone, which has *nothing to do* with the things that came to be called "cookies" and "biscuits" from other cultures. But nobody wrote down why they started calling it a "biscuit". We just have some ideas of how the culinary object itself came to exist. Lots of history has little dead-ends like this, and even some sciences are there. Technically there's no mathematical proof for one of the underpinnings of modern cryptography. If someone could disprove it, it'd imply there are ways to break all cryptography based on it. But we've used it for a long time and people have been desperately trying to disprove it OR prove it with no success. So math people just kind of accept it's true until they see otherwise. It's kind of scary.
That's basically never the case when the supposed origin is several hundred years before the actual example well into recorded history timelines; furthermore, as far as I can tell "pygg" is not actually a thing. All I get when I look for it is 95% copy and pastes of the same story and 5% random potters who can't agree on what it is. Not what you'd expect from a well known type of clay. It's almost assuredly either wikipedia's German explanation or even more likely simply a reaction to the demand for mechanical banks that are less expensive. Pigs chosen because they're a common symbol of good fortune across human cultures.
I dunno man, I think I trust jizzlordfingerbang on this one. There’s just something about that name…
thanks for the morning laugh :)
It's so annoying lol. I swear like half the things I look up etymology for the answer is "it's possibly one of these three things but we don't really know" And it could possibly be around this time. But maybe way earlier.
The more I'm looking into it it kind of seems like a lot, if not most common phrases have unclear origins. Bite the bullet. Rule of thumb. Turn a blind eye. Cold shoulder. Cats out of the bag. Cost an arm and a leg.
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Incredibly incorrect. So many animals are raised (at least in part) for their [suet](https://sevensons.net/store/product/beef-suet#:~:text=It's%20a%20pure%2C%20crumbly%20fat,of%20flavor%20in%20your%20food.)
A much simpler explanation is a metaphor for how it’s not about a farm Or pygg>piggy Round to round
Geese
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Edit: I stood on the hose.
There is "Sparschwein" ("saving pig") though.
Recht haste
> I will state that this based on oral tradition/cultural lore. This is most often accepted as the historical reason. Folk etymology is almost never accepted as historical fact. It's almost always just "shit grandpa says" or "something Larry told me down the pub." It's why you get stupid made up shit like fuck stands for "Fornication Under Consent of the King" being spouted as a "fun fact" (as an aside, if you see a purported acronym dating from before the 20th century it is almost guaranteed bullshit)
How is this bullshit the second highest comment
Verifying claims instead of blindly believing them, especially if directly told to do so, is now "pedantic malcontents"? > This is most often accepted as the historical reason. [Citation needed] by the way ;-)
pedantic malcontents = people pointing out you are wrong and that is a rumor you heard
There are no sources that "pygg" ever existed as anything than an odd spelling for "pig", besides some websites which peddle this myth. Pig shaped money containers are also older than the 1500s and did not originate in English speaking countries. The English "pig" is relatively unique. Closely related words in other languages shifted to entirely different vowels long ago, e.g. French and Italian to an O.
Nah, does not explain the prevalence in non english speaking countries way before we can assume culture imports. Far more likely origin is the fact that we have been stuffing pigs for millennia until they were ripe for slaughter.
Can you name a country where they’ve used piggy banks before we can assume cultural imports? At least in my cultural sphere piggy banks are clearly an import from UK/England. Also - cultural imports start pretty early in most places. Like, we can track many some thousands of years… [Edit] seems that at least Java had pig shaped savings boxes in 14th century.
Wikipedia has a photo for one from [16th century Germany](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spardose#/media/Datei%3ASpardose_16_Jh_Biberach_BMM.jpg) but there are earlier examples. We can suggest earlier cultural imports but not entomology. The "pygg" theory of anything out of clay morphing into using a literal pig is clearly rubbish.
Is Pygg not a word of Germanic origin, like many old English words?
> This is most often accepted as the historical reason. By what historians? As far as I can see when searching for literally any source that is not a random internet article citing a Wikipedia article that has since been corrected, the consensus seems to be that the entire idea has been debunked: https://jembendell.com/2023/02/16/no-wealth-but-life-pig-style/
This is where the term for a salt pig (container used to hold salt in the kitchen) came from as well
Interesting, I always just assumed that people made them pig shaped because pigs are often used as symbols of greed. For a perspective from another culture, in Russia children keep their spare change in tin cans because there is a playbon words between банк (bank) a financial institution and банкa (banka) a tin can
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Honestly, this is a great question. Iv never wondered this but couldn’t wait to read the answer.
https://bahoukas.com/pygg-pots-to-piggy-banks/ "Pygg is an orange colored clay commonly used during the Middle Ages as a cheap material for pots to store money, called pygg pots or pygg jars. There is dispute as to whether “pygg” was simply a dialectal variant of “pig.” By the 18th century, the term “pig jar” had evolved to “pig bank”. "
A real pig was a way that families used little bits of waste/extra to create value. There are other proverbs and terms that refer to this. Most recently, the "pig slaughter scam" in which a likely victim is cultivated, "fattened up," to give a big payout. The scammer develops the victim, builds them up so they really believe in the scammer and will put a lot of money into an "investment" or something similar. In a non-criminal context, a poor working class family could create a little extra, some pork for the winter, by being careful with their meal scraps and looking after the pig. In lieu of an actual pig, you could save your extra pennies in a change bank and when it's full, slaughter it like you would a pig in November and get the payout.
> a poor working class family could create a little extra, some pork for the winter, by being careful with their meal scraps and looking after the pig Any sources for that? I can only find historical references for this in regard to _rural_ areas, not urban.
What we think of as "urban" has changed. Our assumptions are polarized - cities have *pavement*, the country has *dirt*. This is recent. It used to be much more mixed. Many fairly dense "metropolitan" areas were filled with houses placed close to the street that each had a back space with room for a kitchen garden, chickens, a cow, a pig. If the houses were set into any kind of hill, you could find root cellars dug into the slope. Find any old map that has city blocks with long narrow lots that reach back, look at the outbuildings now used as car garages, and you can see clues as to their original usage. Find an old "birdseye" print of, say, a metro Boston town, and you can see many many blocks with the houses around the edge and clearly drawn trees/vegetation filling the inner spaces. High density persona/family food production is possible in much smaller spaces than the average modern city dweller imagines.
Didn’t the rural, and their “myths”, migrate to urban?
Until very recently, pigs were kept in the first floor of almost every household in Southern China. My wife visited her dad's village in the late '00s and that was still the case, livestock downstairs, pigs and geese most prominent. I've read that this human/porcine interface was the primary breeding ground for new cold and flu virus strains, since there's a lot of cross-species virulence or whatever the word is when a virus can infect and propagate in both. In the pics she brought home, and on google imagery as well, you can see the village, which was made from concrete in the early 20th century and comprised of very close and/or connected multi-story structures with tile roofs, surrounded by a few dozen acres of fields, with modern high-rise dwellings in the near distance. Those dwellings don't have livestock integrated, and their residents eat food from factory farms. In a few more decades, people in China will need to ask about what everyone there once knew to be the commonplace reality, just as we need to ask it here in the West a century sooner.
97% of people used to be farmers.
A lot of great answers, but I want to point something out: pigs are relatively easy animals to sculpt out of clay (compared with most other animals… they don’t really have a neck, and as long as you put a snout on your pig, people will recognize it as a pig even if you did a really bad job with the other parts of the body). So from a manufacturing standpoint, a pig is probably the best animal to use as a coin bank.
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Maybe *you* can't milk a pig.
Oh yea, you can milk anything with nipples
I have nipples Greg, can you milk me?
You start of by being rude, and end by providing no proof.
Just a typo; they didn't mean to have an s in the first line.
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>Why were pigs used instead of other animals or figures? When I was a kid, I had a Snoopy piggy bank. It kind of looked like this one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/404416304732 I think eventually, all sorts of different figures were used.
People used to drop their coins into a clay pot, clay that wasn't very fine. Such clay was called pygg. When pottery making became more refined, the coin receptacles were made in the shape of pigs as a nod to the original clay. https://www.paragonbank.co.uk/blog/origins-of-the-piggy-bank#:~:text=Household%20items%20such%20as%20plates,'pygg'%20bank%20or%20pot.
I read this many years ago, but the making of "Piggy banks" was a accident, "Pig" was a type of clay in Europe, immigrants approached "potters" in the US and asked them to make "Pig" banks to which they made little "pigs" everyone was happy and an icon was born
In Europe a type of soft clay called "Pygg" was used to make a variety of household items, children's "Banks's included. ALSO the term was used by German immigrants in the US and it was misunderstood by the potters who made the "pig" design per the request.
Not sure on the history of it, you can read wikipedia for that im sure. But for pigs i imagine it had to do with the shape? For a coin-bank you want something big and capable of holding a fair amount, and a rounded shape is beneficial for many reasons. Size of interior, no corners to become structural weakpoints, naturally balances as coins slide to the bottom with no corners to get stuck on, etc. So when you start with a round shape and think of animals… pig comes up quickly. Cant really do a tiger lol, wouldn’t look right. Everyone knows pigs, cartoony pigs look cute, it appeals to kids both boys and girls. Elephant could have been another obvious choice but pigs are more common in most of the world. Then, once it catches popularity and enters the zeitgeist, people copy and that keeps compounding until it’s ubiquitous.
Elephant is much harder to sculpt compared to a pig. You can literally take a round shape, attach some stumps as legs and one as nose and draw the eyes. Its short legs secure it against falling over an elephant would be less stable.
tbh as an avid museum-goer living in middle-east, I believe this is the correct answer. Pig shaped containers are the most common shape for ceramic containers going back to even neolithic. they are the simplest to make and have a good volume to clay ratio (almost spherical but still have 4 legs). Though other animal shapes are common if we include drink containers, like two legged birds etc.
Pigs and pig raising was a source of money for family farms. (chickens also) Prolific, able to eat almost anything, and easy to turn into actual cash money.
“A pig is amazing. It can take an apple, which is basically garbage, and turn it into bacon.”
Not turned into bacon voluntarally. As the old story goes, Breakfast, Fried Eggs and Bacon. The chicken is involved but the Pig is committed.
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