Modern Bacon and Heritage Breeds

wait,ait,a,aitast honey. Are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon? No. H? No. Pork jup? Dad those all come from the same animal Oh you're right, He's a wonderful magical animal That wonderful magical animal, the source of such wonderful magical foods as bacon, ham, and pork chops, is, of course, the pig. But for most of history, pork was basically bacon. And this episode is all about bacon, the prerequisite for your BLT, your bacon cheeseburger, and for some of you listeners, the crumbed topping on your maple donoughnut. You're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Nicola Twilly, and I'm Cythia Graber. Why are so many people today so obsessed with bacon But also, so many cultures over such a long time have reviled and even banned it. What connects Shakespeare with the Wendy's Bacon atater? and what does it really mean when you bring home the bacon? This episode was supported in part by the Alfred Peace Loan Foundation for the public understanding of science, technology, and economics, Gastropod is part of the Vox Media podcast network. for the show comes in part from Ring Peace of mind starts with keeping your home safe, like keeping an eye on packages, visitors, and whatever else your ring system captures. With battery doorbell, you get a clear view of your front door And you can extend that view to your yard with oututdoor Cam plus. It has a wide field of view and enhanced video clarity for both day and night. You can also upgrade to four K cameras and doorbells with retinal vision, which means ultra clear footage and zooming in without losing important details Your door, your yard, your home, with ring It's protected Shop cameras, doorbells and more right now at ring. com We all do it You have a night for yourself but don't like the sound of the silence, so you turn on the TV just for the ambiance It's a little trick that helps you feel like you've got company and aren't alone And other insurers, well, they may make you feel alone But when you switch to GICo, you've got claims repps available around the clock So whenever you need, you'll have people around to help And let's turn on the washing machine, just for good measure Isn't that soothing? It feels good to have support. It feels good to Gaio When people say bacon is everything They are actually technically correct. So for most of its history it could refer to almost any Cured and or smoked and or salted product It was always different than fresh pork and it was always different than hams because hams were prized. Mark Johnson is a professor at the University of Tennessee and the author of the book, American Bacon Hams were different from bacon just in terms of what part of the animal they came from. Hams were the hind leg. Bacon was everything else, but they both were cured pork. So why was the hind leg so special? Honestly, no one really has a good answer for this, but the rear legs are definitely the biggest and meatiest cut of the animal, so that's likely how it became the most prestigious. You might be wondering about ribs or pork chops or all the other parts of the pig that people cook and eat today. But back in the day, people ate very little from the pig as fresh cooked pork, mostly they had to preserve it. I mean, before the age of refrigeration, which is most of human history, right Bacon would have meant most of the pork eaten by most of the people and most of the pig would have been to some sort of curing agent. You'd slaughter your pig in November when it got cool enough that it wouldn't spoil in the heat right away. You'd enjoy a little fresh pork then, but a pig is big So it was really pretty fortunate that salting and or smoking it preserved it so well. Turns out that beef from cows and mutton from sheep, these don't cure as well because they tend to get kind of tough and leathery. But pork has a lot more fat in the meat, and so the cured meat stays tender even as it ages and dries. It loses water, which is great because bacteria then can't thrive and spoil the meat It keeps it from tasting dry. It might not have tasted dry, but it would have tasted quite different from bacon today To be able to be safely stored at room temperature all year round without going bad, that historic bacon would have had to have been heavily, heavily, heavily cured. It would have been really to our palets painfully salty But that makes sense considering how they used it versus the uses of it today they didn't intend to put it on a bacon cheeseburger. So in a pot of greens or a stew or a porridge That saltiness is valuable. and a little strip or a little hunk tossed in the pot goes a long way. This was another point in favor of bacon, especially before the current era of abundance. Bacon was a meat you could stretch Combined with Bacon's year round room temperature sturability kindind of an all star meat source for most of human history. You could turn the pigs loose aroundound them up in the fall. Cure them for the winter And then have provisions so you could be all set. Mark Esig, yes, both bacon experts today are named Mark. Mark Esseig is the author of the book Lesser Beasts, and his point here, that you could turn pigs loose. That's because pigs are actually incredibly self sufficient, and they pretty much always have been, right from the beginning of the pig domestication story when pigs started to separate off from their wild boar relatives Mark says we didn't actually domesticate the pigs. What archeologists think instead is that these creatures domesticated themselves About ten thousand years ago. This was the period when agriculture was first getting started in the Nar East Then when people settle down into permanent villages, one of the things they're best at is producing garbage And so what we think is that when people gathered, they would be producing things like butchery scraps. They would be burning food and throwing that out they would have stores of almonds and grains that would get moldy. And so these Eurasian wild boars would slink into town to devour the garbage of these early settlements. Which was great because there were no council funded rubbish collection trucks back then Wild boar, like all wild animals, are pretty uncomfortable around people, but also they were big and dangerous enough to make people uncomfortable. some wild boar were both bolder and less aggressive. So you had to have a certain balance, a brave animal, but not a threatening animal. And so what archaeologists think is that over a period of hundreds or thousands of years, the pigs that were best in this new niche that existed in human villages, They separated themselves off into a separate population. So gradually these Eurasian wild boars evolved into what we know of as domestic pigs. But those domestic pigs stayed pretty self sufficient and pretty much just kept feeding themselves off our trash, whichich I mean, great. theseese were large comm animals that took care of our business and then could be slaughtered and cured and you could eat them all winter long. pigs for the win. Pigs were so useful to early humans that this domestication process happened more than once. A similar relationship developed in China, and cured pork became essential there too. One of the very ancient bone script characters in ancient Chinese, for the word home is a picture of a pig with a roof over it. So it might seem kind of odd that the meat from such a useful, easy to raise animal would get banned by two of the world's major religions, Judaism and Islam I was always taught, probably back in Hebrew school that the original ban had something to do with health. Mark E says this idea is pretty common. If you ask people about this issue, you'd be surprised how many people bring up trichinosis. Trichinosis, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure, is a parasitic infection caused by the Tichonella roundworm larvae which you can get by eating undercooked pork. Dogs, horses, bears, they can also carry this larvae, but pork is the most common meat that has it, and it makes you sick. occasionally very sick. And so a theory became popular in the eighteen hundreds after trichonosis was discovered that keeping kosher was a good public health measure. In ancient times, banning pork kept Jews from getting this parasite. But it's almost certainly not true There's no proof that this was a disease that even existed in the ancient Nar East It has a long incubation period. So if somebody did catch it from tainted pork, They would have a hard time connecting this illness to what it was they ate a week or ten days ago caus Another theory is that both of these religions were invented in desert regions where maybe the pigs would have been in competition with humans for precious grain. The P probleblem is that it doesn't take into account how efficient pigs were at converting waste that they could eat lots of gross things that we wouldn't eat and sustain themselves just fine. And so it seems like neither of those were the reasons for my people's pork prohibition Instead, Marark thinks it's because the nobility at the time weren't eating pork, and that's because of a couple of reasons. Historically, the elite of the Middle East typically didn't live with their meat. They had meat brought to them, because they could afford to pay the costs associated with longer distance supply chains and goats could all be walked miles from the countryside Bigs aren't big walkers. They also aren't very good at sweating, so they have to cool down by wallowing in watery mud puddles which are in short supply in this pretty dry region Sheep and goats are better at regulating their temperature without a mudpack. Poor people couldn't afford to buy meat like sheep and goat, but they could keep a pig around to feed their family. You can feed it on garbage you can feed it on dead animals. There's a long tradition of feeding pigs on the feces of humans and other creatures. pigs were rejected not only because in this cultures they tended to eat disgusting things, but they also tended to get linked to the people who raised them and those people were tended to be on the margins of society. Mark's point is that everyone who was anyone in the Middle East sort of looked down on pigs. It wasn't just the Jews who didn't eat pork, Egyptian nobles chose not to either The Jews were just being like nobles, but they were the ones to write it down to codify it as a prohibition because that's sort of what they did. Also, a lot of the laws in Leviticus where this prohibition is described, they're about cleanliness, cleanliness in all aspects of life, and pigs were seen as unclean On top of that, if you ban an animal that someone can easily raise on their own, it makes them more dependent on the community. and being tightly bound into community is also one of the basics of Judaism. But the point was all the elite were snobs about pigs. Everyone who didn't depend on pigs sort of looked down on pigs At first, the Jewish ban on eating pork wasn't really a big deal. But once they came into contact with people who considered this very strange One of the ways the Jews maintain their identity was by sticking to this Food avid Those people were the Romans. This is when Jews really became known as the non bacon people when they came in contact with the Roman Empire about two thousand years ago. And that's because the Romans ate a lot of bacon. Yeah, we know it was really important to the Romans because they talked about pork all the time and they put pigs on like all their battle standards and their shields And they used pork and bacon as ways to describe their landscapes. like Um, you know, This amount of woods can feed this many pigs or something like that So the Romans come to be associated with the pig by outsiders. they start to view the pig as the Roman animal. But even for the bacon centric Romans, cured pork was really only valued because it was the best way to colonize the known world and feed a massive army It wasn't a delicacy or a treat or something people went wild for. I think for most people, it's just mundane and it might be valuable and it might be kind of like prized for its ability to flavor and extend another meal You know, for most of its history, it's not something that's getting people really all that excited. Maybe it wasn't getting people excited, but it was, as we say, getting people fed. In the Middle Ages in Northern Europe, the word lardder came to mean a place where you store your bacon. It came from the Latin lardum for bacon or pork fat. A store of bacon was so essential to household happiness that it became part of folk traditions across Northern Europe One of these in the village of Dunmo in England was called the Dunmo Flitch Trials A flitch means a whole side of bacon. The idea that a couple a year and a day after their Wedding can go before a lord or a jury of nobles or whatever the case may be, maybe a bishop And if they can testify that not once in that previous year they'd regretted their marriage, they get to take home a flitch of bacon, this ceremony actually still takes place today, every leap year, every four years, in the same town in Dunmo. With slow pomp and majestic dignity, a procession made its way through the streets of Dunmo in Essex on Saturday For almost eight hundred years, happily married couples have come to prove that for a twelve month and a day, they have lived in perfect harmony. This is BBC footage of the Dunmo Flitch trials from the nineteen forties, four couples presented their case, including mister and Mres. Shelley of Wolverhampton. When the court had been called to order, mrses Shelley took the witness stand and after telling of her wedding, admitted that she did have one small grumble Her husband's addiction to BBC newews bulletins. That was mrs. Shelley's complaint. mis. Shelley expressed a bit of concern about a frayed shirt cuff that tickled him. Apparently she was supposed to be the one to fix it. but in any case, the judge questioned them and both admitted their concerns were minor After much weighted deliberation, the jury agreed and we're ready to deliver their verdict How sa you For the claimants, or the donors of the flitch, or the claimant And is that the verdict of you all? It is Verdict for the claimants mister and miss. Shelley literally brought home the bacon, after being paraded around town held aloft in chairs. Not every couple automatically got that bacon. If you've read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I read it in high school, The wife of Beth says most of her five marriages would not have merited the flitch of bacon. Apparently there were some complaints. Historians think the tradition of giving a side of bacon to young couples may well have been more cool commommon than just done tho It seems like it likely took place across England and even in Northern France back in the dark ages. It a way to encourage marital bliss. So bacon was key to a marriage, but is this where the phrase bringing home the bacon comes from? Like historically the guy is supposed to bring home the bacon, support his family. Some sources say yes, the Dunmo Flitch trials are the source, some are more cagey about it. Apparently, the first time the expression bringing home the bacon appeared in print wasn't til nineteen oh six xer's mom wrote to him encouraging him to win the fight and bring home the bacon The pointoint is bringing home the bacon has always been a good thing. A hefty supply of bacon is the key to a happy home, especially in northern Europe, where it was too cold for olive trees, and so they didn't have olive oil, pigs and their fat, their lard, it was all so important that even the wealthy were bacon fans. But then the Back Death came along and killed about a third of Europeans, and that meant higher wages for the poor peasants that survived They started to be able to afford as much bacon as a nobleman, whichich meant the nobility needed a new dietary status symbol, and their new status symbol was cows and sheep. These animals had the benefit of being more orderly, no rolling around in the mud and eating feces and garbage. So yeah, by Elizabeth in England, they're starting to value beef and mutton as respectable and pigs and bacon as something from their own uncivilized past. To the point that calling someone a bacon eater became an insult. Bacon brains meant a stupid clodhopper. Bacon chops or bacon slicer meant a yokel or peasant, and bacon picker meant a glutton. In Shakespeare's Henry IVth, Sir John Falstaff called people bacon fed knaves, which meant basically country pumpkins before he robbed them. And those people became known as chaw bacons, and it's a word for rural people in England, kind of similar to Maybe a twentieth, twenty first century American term like country bumpkin or yokel or something like that. Once again, like in ancient Egypt, the elite, the wealthy, urbanides with access to high class meats, like roast lamb and beef, were like, see you later, bacon. It's been real. And after right millennia of eating bacon As soon as the opportunity presented itself to eat almost anything else They took that chance. But pigs weren't done with their perhaps unconscious quest for world domination, how bacon enabled the colonization of the Americas and eventually led to the Bacon Aater after the break Support for this episode comes in part from NetSuite. AI is changing how business gets done and NetSuite wants to help you keep up You may already know NetSuite, the AI powered business management suite that securely connects all of your data. It's a unified suite that brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR, and CRM into a single source of truth Trusted by more than forty three thousand customers, NetSuite nextext is the next huge leap in how business gets done, because AI is built into everything you do. 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I think you've wandered too far, mate. It feels good to find what you're looking for. It feels good to Gica. We're not saying a visit to Bloomington, Indiana will turn you into a forest bathing, sandal wearing dissertation defending street cat rescuing, nonprofit starting, Monroe Lake, paddling, guitar, strumming march, organizing, vinyl listening, Laf watchatching, Zen finding, coffee roasting, yoga practicing, beer drinking bread, baking co op, joining pottery throwing, vintage thifting, bike everywereing, art appreciating fararmers markarket shopping, Biz sincking football fans But we're not saying it won't Visitloomington See how it inspires you Well, we need to remember first that pigs are not native to the New world. It is true. For most of history, the Americas have been a bacon free zone. The Eurasian wild boar from which they descended lived from Southeast Asia all the way to England, but did not live in the Americas. So pigs first set foot in America On Columbus' second voyage, they landed in what is now Haiti, the Dominican Republic And they were part of a larger attempt by the Spanish to recreate the European diet in the New world. The Spanish brought crops, of course, and they brought other animals to eat, too, cows and sheep. The sheep tended to die rather quickly. The cows did okay, but they took a while to acclimate. But the pigs, as soon as their sharp little hooves hit the jungle mud They were in heaven. It was as if this was a landscape that was specifically designed for them. They found lots of fruits and nuts to eat. They found ground nesting birds and amphibians. They took care of themselves, they reproduced, and then they were turned into portable, non perishable bacon. Alongside guns and germs, they were pretty much the secret to Spanish success. Explorers would often drop a boar and a couple of sows on an uninhabited island. You can find instructions from one explorer to the other, say, Drop off a boar and a couple of Sows. And if you find more than take what you need, but be sure to leave a breeding population. In fact, a number of the conquistadors, famous names like Cortz and Pizaro They all came from Extramadora, and that's the region of Spain famous for its pigs and its cured pork even today. And those very same skills that produce some of the most wonderful has in the world also proved essential in the rather horrible exercise of conquering a couple of continents. And not only by providing bacon for the conquerors, but also because the pigs brought with them all sorts of diseases like anthrax and influenza that wiped out even more of the indigenous people. English colonists also came to the New World, as we all know, and like the Spanish, they too brought pigs with them Remember, by this point in history, many upper class Brits weren't fans of these disorderly beasts. But it's just too damn useful to have a pig that can feed itself and defend itself. and otherwise roam in the woods without anyone really taking care of it. And they did not have a lot of time for the sort of careful, tidy husbandry, animal husbandry that was practiced in England at the time. and they counted on pigs because the pigs could simply be turned loose into the woods to feed themselves on acorns and other wild foods and then rounded up in the fall so they could be slaughtered and then their meat cured for the winter provisions. Bacon was an essential and reliable source of meat for the colonists. And once again, there was an additional benefit to the colonists that weakened native people. It wasn't just that the pigs brought disease. While those pigs were roaming around the woods One of the things they ate were the very foods that Native Americans counted on You see complaints from Native American leaders about pigs spoiling the clam banks along the New England shore. and that was a food source that Native Americans relied on and the pigs tended to like it as well pigs would destroy Indian crops of corn and squash in the field. There were also a wide number of roots and tubers that Native Americans counted on for food and the pigs ate those as well. And so it really spread the footprint of European colonization and drove Native Americans off the land even when the Europeans weren't doing so directly. Pigs played an unintended, but still significant role in the genocide of Native Americans Of course the British colonists preferred cows and sheep, and those animals did fairly well in the northern colonies. That cattle in northern states could produce higher quality butter fat. and so that made them useful for making cheese fresh milk and cream and butter. but for for southerners. in the hot climate att the time, cows did not have the same quality butter fat or produce the same kind of ratio of fat in their milk. In the south, Mark says that cows at the time would produce about a quart of milk a day. whereereas in the north they would produce around eight times that, a couple of gallons of milk a day. Plenty to make butter, so you didn't have to depend on lard, and to make cheese that you could store for a long time too South didn't have enough milk to make these products. And when you eliminate those other products the calculations definitely lead you elsewhere, and that was to the pig. Once the colonists got settled, the Northerners were ready to ditch bacon Aap And of course, as is traditional in the story of Bacon, they then began to look down on the southerners who were still dependent on it. I think this is really on display when Frederick Law Olmsteed long before he became the architect of Central Park in New York and at a time when he worked as a journalist with an interest in slavery and the slave economy From eighteen fifty two to eighteen fifty seven, he did a series of tours of the Southern states And he moans constantly about the amount of bacon on his plate. He comes to call it the bane of his life. But the people who had money in the South, the enslavers, they tried to have a more diverse diet. And so while Ulmstead looked down on everyone in the South, the enslaavvers too, they looked down on the enslaved who had to be dependent on bacon It's like, sure, we eat more bacon than the Northerners, but at least it isn't basically the only meat we ever eat. At this time, almost all people are eating so much bacon. But they're really just differentiating and distinguishing themselves by the slight variations in their tastes and refinement and manners So with that said, I like to look at it this way When Europeans look at Americans of all sorts They view Americans as bacon eating people within the United States industrializing, urbanizing northerners, the emergent middle class starts to look at rural people and southern people in particular as bacon eating people. And then within the south,, the wealthier people who can distinguish their diets at least a little bit. lookook at their inferiors, ennslaved people, poor white southerners as the true bacon eating people. So in each stage of the so called respectability hierarchy people look at the people right below them as the true bacon eating people. This idea that as you progress upwards through the ranks, you become less bacon dependent, it plays out the same way when it comes to America's westward expansion In the movies, it's all cowboys and steak In reality, the West was one with bacon. As it has been for millennia, Bacon proves just too useful for people on the move. So the same things that made it useful for the Roman army. made it useful for people in their, u covered wagons heading westward. So in the guides for people about to set out on things like the Oregon Trail or Santa Fe Trail or out in the California gold rush. tell those future migrants to take plenty of bacon with them. But the idea is that they would eventually progress through the so called stages of civilization and in their own time come to be proper beef eating people. And this transformation did happen in the West and in fact around the country. By the end of the eighteen hundreds, refrigerated railcars were introduced and the price of beef plummeted I read about this in a book you might have heard of by someone named Nicki, but in any case, with refrigerated transport, beef became accessible to the masses. And bacon superpower that it gave you access to meat year round when fresh meat would spoil That was no longer so special or necessary. Obviously, people at the time were still eating bacon. It never disappeared from the American diet, but also at this time, something different was that you were most likely going to buy your bacon in these new fangled supermarkets, Which meant that unlike in the past, when bacon had meant many different kinds of curred pork, bacon had to become standardized. Bacon needs to mean the same thing time after time, week after week and be generally similar in all the parts of the country. predictable and uniform. In America by the nineteen hundreds, the definition of bacon had come to mean cured pork belly. those familiar strips made of streaks of meat interspersed with fat Just because the US settled on the belly of the pig is the source of bacon doesn't mean the rest of the world did. Canadian bacon turned into something slightly different. Instead of the belly, it's the loin of the pig, whichich is like if you were looking down at a pig from above, it would be the back either side above the belly. It's a meatier cut with less fat marbled through that cut, it would be a layer, but the layer is trimmed off. And in my homeland, AKA the UK, we sort of split the difference can buy streaky bacon, which is American bacon. Bacon bacon is the loin like Canadian, but with the fat layers still around it And then a little bit of streaky belly attached Best of all worlds. And when push came to shove and they had to decide Like as an industry, what counted as bacon and what people would expect when they say that word or put it on a package The English settled on a leaner style. This meant not only a leaner cut of meat, but a leaner pig. They also adopted vegetable oils in Europe before we did in America, and so they didn't need as much lard. Pigs in Europe were just bred to have less fat. But in the United States we relied on the really fat hog longer than other parts of the world, relying on the bacon Grease as a frying agent as a way to lubricate our wagon wheels and our machines and to make our steamsips go faster by throwing bacon grease on the fire and Re just using it and all parts of our day and all parts of our life and That meant fatter hogs. But even in the Lord loving US, by the nineteen twenties, bacon was seen as too fatty, at least for people who had sit down office jobs. The government at the time explicitly warned white collar workers to eat less cream and fewer fatty meats like bacon to stay healthy. And the company bechnut got stressed because people weren't buying enough of their bacon. They had more supply than demand. They'd been advertising their bacon in prestigious magazines like Good Housekeeping for years at this point, and in the nineteen twenties, they tried to fend off these anti fat activists, that is the government by creating a specific campaign to try to get people to eat bacon and eggs together for breakfast each morning. They hired a guy called Edward Bernays, who happened to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud and who is known as the Father of public relations. Previously, he'd convinced women it was okay to smoke in public by creating an advertising campaign that called cigarettes prches of freedom Which wow Then the beachnut company came to him for help We made a research and found out that the American public veryer night breakfast. Coffee Mbe a roll an orange juice. This is Bernades himself, telling the story in an oral history from the nineteen seventies Back in the twenties when he got the beachnut gig, he went to his doctor and he was like, Hey Doc, which is better? A lighter breakfast or a heavier breakfast? And his doctor said, Well, it's better to fuel up in the morning so you don't lose energy. And Beret said, wouldould you be willing to see if maybe around five thousand other doctors agree with you? And his doctor was like, sureure, put my name on a letter to other doctors Bernays did, and a bunch of doctors wrote back saying, Yeahah, it's good to start the day with a hearty breakfast Based on that conclusive evidence, Bernays said, Okay, great. The Doctors of America recommend bacon and eggs for breakfast newspapers throughout the country had headlines saying four thousand five hundred physicians Age Heavy breakfast in order to improve health of American people Many of them stated that bacon and eggs be embodied with the breakfast And as a result The sale of bacon went up. A few years later, there was something else going on that helped bacon sales. The US got involved in World War two, and the boys on the front were thought to need beef to help keep them in fighting shape. Beef was being sent to the front, but bacon was available. As always, a little went a long way, and you could even save the Grease and contribute it to the government's f Salvage campaign. All that saved bacon grease was a source of glycerin to make explosives Here's Uncle Sam explaining the program P Our housewives can add to our armaments instead of to our garbage pails Save the grease from cooking. Dep fats, pan drippings, broiler drippings. The housewife strains this into a tin container, holding at least a pound. She keeps this in the ice box till it is full. Sure, meats like beef were rationed, but like always, if you had enough money, you could probably find ways to get a hold of it eating bacon proved you stood with the troops. Yeah, so during World War II, It kind of allows like middle class and upper class white people to kind of like Huseplay is poorer people And co opt that then to show their patriotism. Briefly, bacon was kind of fashionable, but this wartime bacon blip was soon over, and before long, the government was considering banning bacon altogether That story, plus the rise of bacon mania afterfter the break Whoa. Okaykay, this one says you get a free phone if you switch. Hey, this one also says you get a free phone if you switch. Yeah, they all do one H. The T Mbile one says their customers had the lowest wireless bills versus the other big guys over the past five years. 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And it's available in two delicious flavors peach and raspberry Time for a tea break. Time for a purely tried yourself. Check out the product locator at pureleaf. com slash findash us After World War I, things started to go downhill for real for Bacon. As if Bacon's reputation could not get any worse as the food of laboring people, enslaved people you know, so called backward, uncouoth, ill mannered people and mountain people Bacon becomes dangerous and that's kind of the last stage in bacons falling out of favor. The nineteen fifties onwards is really when government advice about food started being concerned with chronic disease rather than malnutrition this moment in history on the show before, things like heart disease and cancer were on the rise, and researchers were connecting them to a diet that had too much fat and too much red meat. So yeah, in the mid twentieth century, bacon becomes seen as dangerous and it's attacked on three fronts. First of all, it's red meat. By nineteen seventy seven, the U.S. dietary guidelines, you know, we're trying to convince Americans to eat less red meat And so that puts bacon in the crosshairs they're attacking dietary fat and bacon's much fattier than some of these other things, especially the darling of the twentieth century, the boneless skinless chicken breast So it's red meat, it's fatty It's especially fatty even compared to other red meat It's salty and they're starting to realize the dangers of that. On top of all that, the final nail for bacon at the time is that scientists became concerned about the nitrates and nitrites that are used to cure bacon We covered all of that in our episode about deli meat. The short version is that the salts that are used for curing, even so called natural salts, these create nitrosamines. Nitrosamines do seem to cause certain cancers, but also if you don't eat these foods all the time in huge amounts, it's likely not a problem. For all the science, listen to our deli meeat episode. This business of nitrates and nitrides causing cancer was a hot topic in the nineteen seventies The USDA put together a panel to study the problem. One of the experts on the panel called Bacon quote the most dangerous food in the supermarket. And so by nineteen seventy seven, bacon's just being attacked on all fronts Dietary science, chemists. public health professionals. shockingly, given today's love affair with Bacon, the USDA even considered banning it. But instead, they put limits on synthetic nitrates and nitritates, not that that actually makes a difference. Again, you have to listen to the Dli is short for Delicious episode for the whole story. With all these strikes against bacon, the pork industry was in a tizzy Already, back in the nineteen fifties, they saw the writing on the wall and started a breeding program copied from Denmark to make American pigs skinnier. Bat pork has been losing in popularity Quality today means lean pork. This is from an educational movie called Pork People Like, made by the University of Illinois Extension Service in nineteen fifty six Years ago, hard labor called for energy which pork fats supplied so well But today in all lines of work, many jobs are done by machines It doesn't take as much human energy to operate a machine as it does to wheld the shovel have been losing in popularity to the improved vegetable fats. The solution to this problem lies in producing a meat type hog, a hog that will yield a lot of lean meat and relatively little fat. Scientists and farmers did succeed in breeding a moreor svelt pig. In the nineteen fifties, an American pig typically had thirty five pounds of lard on it By the seventies, there was only twenty pounds of lard per new improved pig. That was on the production side. On the marketing end of things, they decided to rebrand pork altogether. Pork, The other white meat. This campaign was launched in nineteen eighty seven as a way to say, hey, pork isn't like beef. pork is just like chicken. like that super popular boneless, skinless chicken breast, you're all cooking for dinner these days because you've been told it's the healthiest option. A the delightful new meals people are serving today. Creative Nutritious, Cvenient. L. It's not surprising that all these meals are made with white meat What is surprising is that the white meat here is pork Nice dry, but cuts of pork that don't naturally have a lot of fat in them, ones like pork chop and tenderlin. And then on top of that, these cuts are now from super lean pigs. Unless you add a ton of fat or cream to a dish, they're dry. So instead of creating pork people like, as the campaign claimed, they end up creating a hog that no one wanted. And meanwhile, chicken, the OG white meat really taken off. We've made an episode about this too, but chicken used to be an expensive treat before the war. And then, thanks to various things, including the Chicken of Tomorrow contest It was now cheaper than pork and even more fat free. Also, at the same time, there were other bacon like options that were competing for the same market. One of them was called Sizzleine, and it was a product that meldted pork, beef, and turkey into a fryable strip M bacon! something leaner! Sizzleine brereakfast strips from Swift. So why sizzle fat? Sizzleine. Straight up turkey bacon was introduced in the nineteen eighties. It was marketed by the biggest pork companies in America, which gives you an idea of how desperate they were. Ites doesn't even taste as greasy.alf fat fifty percent less fat, less fat, the better. I wouldn't eat regular bacon again. I like it. All this meant that the price of the meat used for bacon absolutely plunged. By the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, pork bellies are so cheap. The U. S. gives them away as foreign food aid and that industry insiders portray fat in general but especially something like the belly as, according to one insider, a drag on the carcass. But you know who loves selling lots of cheap fatty food to Americans and making a profit while doing it? The fast food industry. You can add bacon to a cheeseburger or something else, addd a little bit of interest to it And jack up the price. And it's a cheap coat because it's fat and it's salt, so it tastes good. The very first bacon that had been placed on a fast food cheeseburger seems to have happened in an AW restaurant in nineteen sixty three. But it wasn't until the eighties that other fast food joints like Wendy's and Hardy's and McDonald's got the same brilliant idea. Guess what they're putting on McDonald's double cheeseburger Bacon bacon Bacon Bakers. The new flame boils bacon Baker supreme for limited time only, more great taste for more great value at Burger King. And the people loved it. I mean, I'm thinking about the nineteen nineties, for example, amid a life of like slimfast and rice cakes, something like a bacon cheeseburger After a week of behaving all week, sounds pretty good, right? But by this point, something else was helping propel bacon to the top, Slimfast and rice cakes were already giving way to the fat diets that rejected austerity and carbohydrates in favor of all the fat and all the meat. So yeah, in the nineteen nineties, Atkins, which had been around for about two decades already, takes off I should point out that in its own literature, Dr. Robert Atkins did not really consider bacon the diet. But in the popular imagination, that's actually what people grab on to So in the newspaper coverage of Atkins, it's very much like Goodbye, pasta, say hello to bacon. At this point, at the end of the nineties, with the bacon cheeseburger success and the rise of Atkins T industry spotted an opportunity. Maybe Americans were ready to embrace bacon in all its greasy goodness again. The National Pork Board, they kind of switched gears around the year two thousand They stop trying to out chicken chicken with the other white meat campaign. They're going to roll that campaign down And they do create two alternative campaigns One of them designed for the grocery store and that's called Don't be Blah So don't eat, you know, the boneless skinless chicken breast for the seventh night this week. Do something exciting, do something interesting. And maybe that's where bacon plays a role. And then the second pork industry campaign, that was called Better with Bacon. It was a partnership with fast food companies to help them incorporate and promote bacon Their first big win, they provided thirty thousand dollars to Taco Bell to help them develop their new product, the Bacon Club Chilupa. Try Taco Bell's Bacon Club Chilupa. crispy bacon over grilled chicken and a chewy chilupa shell. The Bacon Club Chilpa made its debut in two thousand two, and it was the first shot fired in a bacon arms race. The smell of fresh cooked bacon It just moves you. May I get you all a bacon Eater? Y Come try a Wendy's Bacon Eater Now with six strips of new applewood smoked bacon. Everyone was just draping and drenching their food and bacon Little Caesar put three feet of bacon around the edge of a pizza. Even chicken got in on the game. KFC created a sandwich that was two pieces of fried chicken, around two slices of cheese and two pieces of bacon. And it wasn't limited to the savory side. Jack in the Box introduced a bacon Sunde as part of its Marry bacon campaign. Mom, I'm getting married Who' the girl? It's not a girl Bacon If you love bacon Make it official In two thousand eight, a food writer for Salon coined the term bacon mania to describe the full spectrum bacon fest that had taken over American life In this brave new millennium, bacon wasn't just for fast food lovers and keto fans There were bacon festivals and entire TV shows about the United States of bacon. And as part of this bacon explosion, highigh end chefs rediscovered bacon's usefulness too as a kind of trick to add smoke and fat and meatiness to a dish putut some bacon on something, even just like crumbled up bits of bacon, and it adds a punch. And so if people are going to only eat a little bit, only every once in a while They're going to chase like Thicker cuts, bolder flavors maybe even more expensive brands since they're not buying it as like the staple anymore. Since they're buying it as a treat, they might feel liberated to indulge in an expensive variety or or a craft variety. Craft, meaning it was made traditionally a slow dry cure rather than a quick wet brine But also, the best high end bacon comes from pigs that haven't had all the fat bread out of them. In America, that meant finding heritage breeds that hadn't been turned into the skinny other white meat industrial type hog One of the things that's different about our pig farm is we raise rare heritage breed pigs. A heritage breed pig is a breed of pig that was around one hundred and fifty years ago. These are varieties of pigs that haven't had all the fat bred out of them in the sort of industrial model of agriculture that's predominant in the United States. This is from a Wall Street journal video from twenty seventeen. It's linked to their article with the headline, America has a bacon problem Pigs aren't fat enough The pigs headlineer is referring to are industrial pigs, of course, not these heritage pigs that some American farmers were and are increasingly raising for the rapidly growing high end bacon market Our pigs have an inch to four inches of backfat, depending on the breed One of the best compliments I get is when somebody comes and says, This reminds me of pork when I was a kid or from my grandparents' farm The irony is that back then, of course, that fatty bacon was kinda looked down on. Historically because of all the reasons we've discussed