Home-grown feasts: How Goans once raised pigs & prepared them for festivals
Goa and pigs have long been closely linked. The Portuguese probably didn’t introduce them, given pork eating traditions in western India, in places like Mangalore and Coorg. But they would have encouraged their rearing, from familiarity with salt pork which fuelled their long sea voyages.
There was also, perhaps, the use that the Inquisition made of pork, to identify Iberian Jews who claimed to have become Christians, but secretly maintained Judaic habits, particularly a revulsion from pork.
'Dominic’s Goa', an entertaining memoir by Domnic Fernandes, has a chapter on women who would raise a few pigs at home, feeding them on kitchen wastes and going to the houses that didn’t keep pigs to collect their waste as well. This was mixed with easily available paddy husk, coconut cake (left after oil pressing) and the water from cooking rice. “Pigs were sort of wet garbage-cleaners,” he writes.
Fernandes decorously skirts around another well-known source of sustenance for Goa’s pigs, but it is gleefully invoked in 'The Stoned Pig', a magazine published in Anjuna’s famous hippie scene. Starting with a ‘Full Moon Edition’ in January 1975, it ran till 1976, featuring Oink, a porcine mascot. It happily drew scatological parallels between its content and the contents of Goa’s pig toilets, eagerly eaten by Oink’s real-life counterparts. (The issues are now online, under the caption: ‘The freest magazine on the world’s freest scene’.)
Pig toilets aren’t special to Goa. Pigs and dogs were possibly first attracted to human
