From Charlotte's Web to Porky Pig and Babe, Americans like pigs. In Hog Ties, Richard Horwitz looks at this phenomenon, its relation to American culture, and the way in which themes of life and death are played out in the care, feeding, slaughtering, and eating of pigs. Horwitz grew up in a rural Jewish household in the Northeast and worked part-time as a farm hand on a large Iowa pig farm.

As much a memoir of rural life as it is a work of cultural commentary, Hog Ties looks at the current business of pig farming, its roots in the family farms of the Midwest, and its future in the large conglomerates that take over small farms and increasingly separate farm families from their land.

In the lives and trials of pigs and their caretakers, Horwitz sees a mirror image of our own lives - our fight against myriad diseases and our ultimate death and possible redemption - and therein discovers the Tao of pig.