Bringing Home the Bacon: From Shakespeare to the Baconator

Gastropod - Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

This episode explores bacon's history, from its role as a vital preserved food to its modern status as a symbol of indulgence. It traces cultural attitudes across civilizations, religious bans, and the rise of bacon mani

Key takeaways

• Bacon was historically essential for survival due to preservation needs

Transcript preview

Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait a wait a wait a 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 crumbled topping on your maple donut. 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 Cynthia 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. What connects Shakespeare? Wendy's Baconator and what does it really mean when you bring home the bacon? This episode was supported in part by the Alford Peace Loan Foundation for the public understanding of science technology and economics gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Megan Rapino here. This week on a touch more, the beautiful game I am sitting down with fashion designer DJ and the Washington Spirit's first ever creative director Domo Wells in her LA studio. We talk about Domo's unusual path towards sports fandom and how her work as a DJ makes her a better designer and what designing for women's athletes and their fans should actually look like. Check out the latest episode of a touch more wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. and or salted pork product. It was always different than fresh pork and it was always different than ham because ham were prized. Mark Johnson is a professor at the University of Tennessee and the author of the book American Bacon. Ham's were different from bacon just in terms of what part of the animal they came from. Ham's were the hind leg. Bacon was everything else, but they both were cured pork. So why was the hind leg so special? Honestly? really has a good answer for this, but the rear legs are definitely the biggest in meatiest cut of the animals, 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 put 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 water, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great, which is great then can't thrive and spoil the meat, but the fat 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 palates 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. 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 storeability, that made pigs kind of an all-star meat source for most of you history. You could turn the pigs loose, round them up in the fall, cure them for the winter, and then have provisions so you could be all set. Mark Essig, yes both bacon experts today are named Mark. Mark Essig 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 the pig. What archaeologists think instead is that these creatures domesticated themselves. About 10,000 years ago, this was the period when agriculture was first getting started in the near 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, 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. But 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, which I mean great, these were large calm animals that took care of our business. slaughtered and cured and you could eat them all winter long. pigs for the wind. 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 Trichonosis. Trichonosis, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure, is a parasitic infection caused by the trichonella roundworm larvae, which you can get by eating undercooked pork. Dogs, horses, bears, they can also carry this larvae, but pork, but pork, but pork, the most common meat that has it and it makes you sick, occasionally very sick. And so a theory became popular in the 1800s 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 near east. It has a long incubation period. So if somebody did catch it from tainted pork, they would have a hard time, this illness to what it was they ate a week or ten days ago that caused it. 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. Problem 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, Mark 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. Sheep and goats could all be walked miles from the countryside. Biggs 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 mud pack. 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. So pigs were rejected not only because in this culture they tended to eat disgusting things, but they also tend to eat disgusting things, but they also tend to eat disgusting things, but they also, but they also tend to also tend to 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 where this prohibition is this prohibition is 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 look down on pigs. So at first, the Jewish ban on eating pork wasn't really a big deal. But once they came into contact with people, strange. One of the ways the Jews maintained their identity was by sticking to this food avoidance. 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 2,000 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