Alan Davidson

Peccary

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

peccary Tayassu angulatus and two other spp, American animals which look something like a small wild pig, and are sometimes so called, but which belong to a different family, Tayassuidae. This family is the New World counterpart of the pig family in the Old World.

The peccary is one of the animals which exhibits a smell of musk, so is also called musk hog.

The range of the peccary is from S. Brazil to Arizona in the USA. It is eaten locally but is not accounted a delicacy. For the Maya people, however, it was a food resource of some significance. The region of C. America which they inhabited was not rich, in pre-Columbian times, in edible animals.