The culinary term long pig arose as an English translation of a Maori name for human flesh prepared for the dinner table. It is unclear whether the Maoris thought humans resembled pigs because of their delicious flavour or because of their beastly behaviour. The eighteenth-century satirist Jonathan Swift, however, asserted in A Modest Proposal that pigs “are no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well-grown, fat, yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at a lord mayor’s feast or any other public entertainment.”