On pork and ham

'the best game in the Western world. Gaulish hunting, a kind of rustic war, skifully waged and with a quasi-religious element in it ... was the naturl complement of agriculture, a means of exploiting land and beasts that had remained wild.' For the forest also provided wood, the bark of trees, ashes, fruit and honey; it was silva melliflua, a forest flowing with honey, where pigs not much tamer than the related wild boars -- and none of them the products of stock-breeding -- fed on acrons, wandering almost at liberty under the nominal supervision of swineherds who were hardly more civilized than their charges; swineherds were serfs on the very lowest rank of the social ladder.
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Today a certain amount of pig meat eaten in Europe, particularly ham, actually comes from China, to the annoyance of European pig farmers. However, as a result of some rather complicated trade agreements, certain countries such as Romania pay for Western goods with their own pigs, keeping the Chinese animals for home consumption: they are cheaper, and have certain diplomatic after-taste which does not go down too well in the West.
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The pig was also popular with the Romans. According to Galen, its flesh tasted like human flesh, and it was to be discovered later that the cannibals of the South Sea Islands thought explorers were even better than pork. Such comments on "long pig" all seem to agree, though I do not know that anyone has gone to the trouble of checking them.

But the real delicacy of patrician Roman banquets was a dish made from sows' vulvas and teats. No account of such festivities omits to mention them. Pliny goes so far as to claim that the vulva of a sow who had aborted her first litter was the best of all, while other writers of the time preferred the virgin sow. Comparisons were also drawn between the teats of a sterile sow and of one who had just given birth and was about to suckle her young. Apparently the deranged Emperor Heliogabalus was capable of eating this dish ten days running. Asterix the Gual was not too far out in claiming that 'These Romans are crazy!'
--from 《A History of Food》by Toussaint-Samat