Pigs are more omnivorous than most domestic animals, and like most meat livestock have been bred to put on weight quickly. That's why in fiction pigs are often portrayed as gluttonous beasts whose favorite thing in life is eating — eating a lot, eating all the time, eating anything that moves and that doesn't. This may result in the pig character becoming obese, but not necessarily; quite often they're just a bit pudgy.
If a pig is anthropomorphic, expect them to eat a lot of junk food, in a poignant commentary on the low quality of mass-produced food, or on modern consumer society, or something like that. In a crossover with Messy Pig, such anthropomorphic swine usually have Jabba Table Manners, burping, snorting and farting all the time.
Sometimes, in a twist on this trope's original meaning, a pig character (usually also anthropomorphic) is portrayed as greedy, craving money and riches instead of swill.
Sub-Trope to Big Eater and, in some cases, Extreme Omnivore or Villainous Glutton (if the character is a villain). Super-Trope to Fed to Pigs, where the pigs' gluttonous nature is used as a means to dispose of bodies. For other common porcine Animal Stereotypes, see Messy Pig, Perverted Pig, Brainy Pig, and Housepet Pig. For a trope related to boars, see Full-Boar Action. For birds infamous for their gluttony, see Snack-Stealing Seagulls.
Interestingly, in Judaism pigs are actually a symbol of hypocrisy: they are said in The Talmud to be the only animals with cloven hooves that don't ruminatenote , so a pig displays its hooves and claims to be pure while not being sonote . However, due to a more global version of Eagleland Osmosis, this trope is very well-known among Jews, to the point that khazirútnote (lit. 'swinery') is essentially Modern Hebrew for 'avarice'.
Examples, oink oink!
- Dawn's Swinub from Pokémon the Series: Diamond and Pearl is a gluttonous wooly pig-like Pokémon, eating Dawn's entire supply of Poffins much to her other Pokémon's displeasure. Swinub loses this trait when it evolves into Piloswine and then Mamoswine, coincidentally resembling more of a wooly mammoth than a pig.
- The Seven Deadly Sins:
- Hawk prides himself as this, as he is the one in charge of cleaning leftovers.
- In a more figurative example, the sorceress Merlin is known as the "Boar Sin of Gluttony". However, her gluttony is tied to an insatiable hunger for knowledge rather than food.
- In The 3 Little Pigs: The Movie, Wally, the pig who builds his house out of straw and is the laziest of the three brothers, and the biggest Big Eater among them, just wants to eat all day, as stated during one of the songs.
Wally: —and when I'm so full that I can barely move, I'll have another bite.
- Pigs Is Pigs (1937) and its predecessor At Your Service Madame star a young piglet named Piggy (not to be confused with Porky Pig) who is a remorseless glutton who frequently tries to steal as much food as he can for himself and constantly gets in trouble with his mother for it. At supper time, he steals and eats the entire family's dinner for himself (after already stealing a pie earlier in the afternoon), forcing his numerous siblings to go to bed hungry. That night, he has a nightmare of being punished in an Ironic Hell where he is captured by a man offering him a buffet, only to end up being force fed. Although he's shown to react in horror to his capture and what the man has in store for him, Piggy is implied to have actually come to enjoy the feeding due to having more to eat than ever, despite ending up so fat he can barely walk or breathe. Finally, he can't resist one more bite of food before he tries to escape, only to explode upon eating. He wakes up from his nightmare, but either promptly forgets his dream or doesn't care as he goes right back to gorging himself on breakfast.
- In Spirited Away, Chihiro's parents turn into pigs after gorging themselves on the spirits' food.
- Dr. Dolittle has the titular character openly hating this trope, as it holds to a negative stereotype about an entire species and reduces them to a simple insult (along with other animal-based insults like "Stubborn as a mule" or "Stupid as an ox"). When his ability to talk to animals lands him in court for being accused of insanity, he complains to the judge (who's a Big Eater) that the term should be changed to "eating like a man".
- Legend (1985): The pig-like goblin Pox wants to use the unicorn's magical horn to "turn everything into garbage, a great towering mountain of slop" for him to eat.
- Pigs are used to dispose of bodies in Snatch.. What's even more shocking is their willingness to eat human flesh.
Brick Top: You got to starve the pigs for a day or two, then the sight of chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You've gotta shave the heads of your victims and pull their teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digesting. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who owns a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig... can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh... every minute. Hence the expression, 'as greedy as a pig'.
- Achoo!: The pigs are seen eating ravenously and messily.
- Played with in All for Me and None for All. Gruntly is a pig, and he takes everything for himself to the point of stealing others' things if possible. However, his pig friends Berkshire and Hampshire are very well-mannered and don't take more than their share. Their attitude ultimately rubs off on Gruntly.
- In Animal Farm, the first thing the pigs do when they seize power is keep the milk and apples for themselves. They are also prone to alcoholism and Squealer becomes enormously fat by the end of the book.
- In the eighth Franny K. Stein book, Bad Hair Day, Franny's pigtails turn into giant pig monsters after gorging on Franny's latest formula and proceed to go on a rampage devouring everything with hair in sight.
- Journey to the West: Zhu Bajie is a half man/half pig who, among other things, is quite gluttonous.
- Inverted in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. She has a pig named "Lester," whose sole purpose is to teach children to use their best table manners by setting a good example.
- In Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, there is the Pudgy Pig, a pig-based monster with a ravenous appetite (except when it comes to spicy foods) that threatened to eat the entire world's food supply with 48 hours. This also applies to its Super Sentai counterpart, Dora Circe, who used its hunger in order to spread discord throughout the city.
- Pink Floyd's "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" follows the 'gluttonous for power' variant from Animal Farm. (The real-life targets are thinly veiled, except the third one, which goes straight "Hey you Whitehouse
!")
- Chinese Mythology: According to the origin story of the Eastern Zodiac, the Pig came in dead last because he stopped by for a snack and a nap.
- The Calydonian Boar, of Classical Mythology, which was released by the goddess Artemis as revenge for not being honored in the King of Calydon's harvest festival. It was far bigger than any normal boar, and it ate everything—so much that people starved to death. Eventually over 50 of Greece's greatest heroes, including Jason, Asclepius, and Atalanta, had to team up to kill it.
- The Magnus Archives: Played for Horror in the episode "Cruelty Free". A farmer discovers a massive, 400-kilogram pig, which devours anything that gets in its pen — starting with the other pigs and eventually moving on to humans.
- The Muppets:
- Miss Piggy is sometimes portrayed this way, for example in The Muppet Christmas Carol, in which she insists that she's "testing" the chestnuts, or this
image from the Muppet Movie Parodies Calendar.
- The principal joke of "The Tubmans of Porksmith", the Muppets Tonight period drama about "America's oldest and fattest family", is Howard Tubman's gluttony and resultant obesity.
- Miss Piggy is sometimes portrayed this way, for example in The Muppet Christmas Carol, in which she insists that she's "testing" the chestnuts, or this
- The Bad Piggies in Angry Birds, particularly in the spin-off comics and in Angry Birds Toons. The 2011 Christmas comic has King Pig thinking that the meaning of Christmas is for him to eat all day long. In the games, if they'd just give up on eating the eggs and run for it, they'd save themselves a world of hurt.
- Pey'j, Jade's pig uncle from Beyond Good & Evil, eats flies by snorting them through his nose.
- Hoggmeiser from Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. He's greedy to the point where the periods in his speech have been replaced with $ marks, he uses his own followers as shields, and at one point compares the main character to a fish bone stuck in his throat. He never shows up in more than one chapter in the game, despite forcing his way onto your team for the rest of the game.
- General Mandek from Dragon Rage will eat anything even the remains of his own soldiers.
- The piggies in Glitch require being fed periodically. They will have word balloons pop over their head with knife and fork to indicate they're hungry. And if they are not fed, they will not let you nibble them no matter how much you pet them. And while they can and do eat fruit dropped from trees, they will also eat food dropped by Glitches.
- Hogs of War is about armies of pigs fighting a bloody war for a continent full of swill.
- The villains of Mother 3 have a pig theme. They burp and eat junk food a lot.
- Shin Megami Tensei:
- Horkos is a demon pig/dragon hybrid wearing a crown and cape and wielding a staff that shows up across several different games. In Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey he shows up as a Villainous Glutton that loves to eat.
- Persona 5: With his round and squat figure and his Piggytron superweapon, it's clear that Kaneshiro has a distinct pig motif going on. That paired with his palace being a literal bank and his desire to get more money regardless of means, makes him a clear take on the connection between greediness and pigs.
- The Rashberry species in Viva Piñata. In order to romance them, they need to eat items that have gone rotten. If they eat a hunk of cheesecake, they transform into warthogs.
- Squigley from Sinfest. One of his main flaws is eating a lot of junk food.
- Dream SMP: The Tales from the SMP episode "The Masquerade" features a Pig Man character of the greedy variety named Sir Billiam III, who shows extreme disdain for anyone short of upper class, considering "poor" people (whom he calls "commoners") to be subhuman and unworthy of names, and even multi-millionaires to be "barely" rich enough for his standards. This ends up being Played for Horror by the end of the episode, as The Reveal is that he teamed up with a parasitic, mind-controlling Alien Kudzu to have all his guests murdered.
- Hoggish Greedly from Captain Planet and the Planeteers is a very piggish human rather than an anthropomorphic pig, but otherwise fits the trope with both greed, gluttony and table manners.
- In the U.S. Acres segments of Garfield and Friends, Orson averts this trope by not being very gluttonous, but his brothers play it straight by stealing food whenever they can.
- Waddles from Gravity Falls. The only person who takes issue with this is Stan, when Waddles eats a display he made out of corn husks.
- There are many occasions in Mike, Lu & Og when Pig of the Philosophical Society complains about being hungry or talks about food.
- One Porky Pig cartoon shows Porky going to a hospital, claiming to have eaten too much at a birthday party and gotten a stomachache; an x-ray of his stomach shows a birthday cake with candles still lit.
- A pig-woman in the Rocko's Modern Life episode "Popcorn Pandemonium" pulls the And a Diet Coke routine after ordering a large amount of snacks for herself at the movie theater.
- The Pigs in Shaun the Sheep are extremely gluttonous. Some of the antagonism they have with the sheep is for stealing their food.