Bittersweet: A craving for boar in Baghdad

The big kill for an Iraqi hunter, Christian or Muslim, was the wild boar. If you miss with your rifle or shotgun and the boar turns on you, hunters told me, you will at best come off with the kind of long scar that the old hunter with the boar’s head in his fridge had on his left forearm. Boars are tusked and fierce and to kill one takes courage and skill.

Al-Taie once shot a 1,100-pound boar with three bullets and it still didn’t stop, ramming his car before it died, he said, telling one of many old hunting stories that Iraq’s hunters, like any hunters, store up like trophies.

Muslim hunters like Al-Taie, in the old days, would drive back into the city with the huge swine in the back of their pickups and either sell or give out the rich, gamey meat to Christian friends or butchers.

In the 1990s, Al-Taie and the old hunter explained, the numbers of boars populating the marshlands of Iraq — their preferred habitat — declined sharply because sanctions increased the demand for cheap meat. Poor Muslim families, hunters said, joined Christians in buying more and more wild boar from the hunters.

Their desperation led these Iraqi Muslims to directly contravene Islamic doctrine, the hunters told me. Early in the Koran Muslims are told to forsake pork: “O ye who believe! Eat of the good things with which We have supplied you, and give God thanks if ye are His worshippers. But that which dieth of itself, and blood, and swine’s flesh, and that over which any other name that that of God hath been invoked, is forbidden you.”

Some Muslim scholars and clerics believe that pigs have dirty and lustful habits and that anyone eating pork will begin to fulfill the old maxim that “you are what you eat.” Iraqi Muslims also told me that they considered pork to be a disease-carrying meat.

Another suspicion, Iraqis told me, is that a man who eats pork will no longer feel possessive of his wife and female relatives and will allow other men to have sexual relations with them.

Post-invasion Iraq was not the first time and place swine had found themselves falling in the sometimes violent fault-lines between Christian and Muslim — and Jew. When Christians regained Spain from the Islamic Empire in the 15th century, for example, the vengeful Christian authorities used pork-eating as a litmus test to tell whether Muslims and Jews who claimed to have converted to Christianity were true converts. To survive they had to eat the swine flesh.

Such intimidation has its echoes in Iraq today — but this time it was Muslim extremists who had turned pork-eating into an ideological, religious red line.

“There are a lot of bad people,” said the old hunter, referring to the growing number of Islamist militants in Iraq. “Those people don’t understand religion. They just kill … If you shoot a pig, they will say you are feeding the Americans. But really you are just feeding Christians. His religion tells him not to eat pork? Fine. Me? I don’t eat fish. So what?”

For all his bravado, the old man wasn’t planning on going hunting for boar anytime soon. Yacoub Al-Taie, the younger Muslim hunter, had also called a moratorium on the risky sport.

And so I gave up on the idea of roasting a leg or shoulder of boar for my friends. A package of contraband bacon would have to do; sliced, sauteed and added to corn chowder. It wasn’t exactly the pan of garlicky, herby roasted wild boar that I had planned but the imported swine flesh made a few of us happy for an evening in a place where happiness was hard to find. 

Read more by Matt McAllester:

Wartime cravings

Feet in Nepal, head at home

Hardship cooking

Souring on war

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