Here's One Place You're Allowed to Play With Your Food

If you’d like to have a little fun with pork, check out the interesting facts below.

How is Wall Street related to hog farming?

Free-roaming hogs were famous for rampaging through the valuable grain fields of colonial New York City farmers. The Manhattan Island residents chose to block the troublesome hogs with a long, permanent wall on the northern edge of what is now Lower Manhattan. A street came to border this wall -- named aptly enough, Wall Street.

Was Uncle Sam a pork packer before he became a U.S. government mascot?

During the war of 1812, a New York pork packer named Uncle Sam Wilson shipped a boatload of several hundred barrels of pork to U.S. troops. Each barrel was stamped "U.S." on the docks, and it was quickly said that the "U.S." stood for "Uncle Sam," whose large shipment seemed to be enough to feed the entire army.

Where did the saying "living high on the hog" come from?

It started among enlisted men in the U.S. Army, who received cuts of pork from the shoulder and leg while officers received the more tender cuts from the top loin, or the cuts that are "high on the hog." So "living high on the hog" came to mean living well.