Antique French La Normandine Pig Feed Supplement Box 🐖 NOS c1910s Farmhouse For Sale

Size: 9.5 x 4.75 x 2.75 inches

A French phosphated feed for fattening pigs, sold "dans toutes les pharmacies et drogueries" — through pharmacies and druggists — with a Belgian depot at a pharmacy in Namur. Two flag-waving pigs on the back, a farm scene on the front, French sales text and feeding directions on the sides. Unused new old stock.

• Brand: La Normandine
• Product, as printed: "Aliment merveilleux phosphaté pour l'engraissement rapide des porcs" — a phosphated feed for the rapid fattening of pigs
• Origin, as printed: "Produit Français"
• Belgian depot, as printed: Pharmacie-Droguerie de l'Étoile, A. Van Lier, Pharmacien, 30 Rue Saint-Jacques, Namur
• Printer's line: "Imp. La Normandine … France"
• Front: farm woman pouring feed into a wooden tub, pipe-smoking farmer, church spire, four spotted pigs
• Back: two pigs holding a French tricolor flag; sales text ending "Donc GROS BÉNÉFICES !!"
• Sides: French sales panel; French feeding directions
• Printed date: none

New old stock — printed, never filled, never sold, never used. Bright color and crisp French type on every panel, as shown. The first four photos show the flat, unassembled sheet. The last two show the design folded as a box from a different printing: its back reads "renforce l'ossatine," a misprint of the flat sheet's "l'ossature."

Pig feed from the chemist. The pharmacie-droguerie sold far more than remedies, and La Normandine sat on its shelves as a farm supplement. The box calls itself an aliment — a food — while promising what a remedy would: no more "mal de pattes" (bad legs), rickets or poor appetite, pigs ready for market "plusieurs semaines" early, and five million boxes sold every year in France as the proof.

The dose. Two soup-spoons a day for piglets, three for grown pigs, four for sows in gestation, doubled for weakness. One spoon in the daily potatoes, bran or wheat makes a complete ration, and weaning is when it matters most.

Why phosphate. Rickets in young pigs comes from a diet short of bone minerals, and French chemists had argued for calcium phosphate in animal feeding since the middle of the nineteenth century — among them Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, whose 1869 margarine patent changed kitchens everywhere.

Normandy's spotted pig. The pale, black-patched hogs in the art look like Normandy's Bayeux breed, crossed from Norman sows and Berkshire boars and kept, by old dairy-farm tradition, on the whey from Norman cheese making. The 1944 landings nearly destroyed it; when the rescue began in 1984, 5 boars and 15 sows remained.

Namur. The depot town sits where the Sambre meets the Meuse, with a belfry built around 1388 and listed by UNESCO. A pharmacy trades at 30 Rue Saint-Jacques today, and Arthur Aeschbacher, a Swiss-born torn-poster artist working in Paris, titled a collage "Pharmacie Van Lier Namur."

• Collectors of French advertising, pharmacy and veterinary packaging
• Framing flat as farmhouse, kitchen or charcuterie wall art
• Pig lovers, pig farmers, butchers, chefs and vets
• Francophiles and collectors of Belgian and Norman history