Bringing Home the Bacon: From Shakespeare to the Baconator

0:02Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Lisa, honey, are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon? No. Ham? No. Porkchop? Dad, those all come from the same animal. Oh, yeah, right, Lisa. 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 crumbled topping on your maple donut. You're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

0:48I'm Nicola Twilley. 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 with the Wendy's Baconator? And what does it really mean when you bring home the bacon? This episode was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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2:31So for most of its history, it could refer to almost any cured and or smoked and or salted pork 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 animals, so that's likely how it became the most prestigious.

3:14You 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.

3:47So 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, 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.

4:25It 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 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 storability, that made pigs kind of an all-star meat source for most of human 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.

5:15Mark 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 domesticate the pigs. 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.

5:48then 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.

6:27But 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 and then could be slaughtered and cured and you could eat them all winter long, pigs for the win.

7:09Pigs 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.

7:45If 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 trichinella 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 1800s after trichinosis was discovered that keeping kosher was a good public health measure. In ancient times, banning pork kept Jews from getting this parasite.

8:21But 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 connecting this illness to what it was they ate a week or 10 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.

9:02And 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. Pigs 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.

9:40Sheep 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 cultures they tended to eat disgusting things, but they also tended to get linked to the people who raised them. And those people 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.

10:19It 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.

10:52But the point was, all the elite were snobs about pigs. Everyone who didn't depend on pigs sort of looked 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 who considered this very 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 to describe their landscapes.

11:42Like, 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. But you know for most of its history, it's not something that's getting people really all that excited.

12:27Maybe it wasn't getting people excited, but it was, as we say, getting people fed. In the Middle Ages in Northern Europe, the word larder 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.

13:13This 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 800 years, happily married couples have come to prove that for a 12-month-and-a-day, they have lived in perfect harmony. This is BBC footage of the Dunmo-Flitch trials from the 1940s. Four couples presented their case, including Mr. and Mrs. Shelley of Wolverhampton. When the court had been called to order, Mrs. 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 news bulletins.

13:54That was Mrs. Shelley's complaint. Mr. 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 weighty deliberation, the jury agreed and were ready to deliver their verdict. How say you, for the claimants or the donors of the fletch? For the claimants. And is that the verdict of you all? It is. Verdict for the claimants. Mr. and Mrs. Shelley literally brought home the bacon after being paraded around town held aloft in chairs.

14:34Not every couple automatically got that bacon. If you've read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I read it in high school, the wife of Bath 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 common than just Dunmo. It seems like it likely took place across England and even in northern France back in the Dark Ages as 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?

15:05Like, 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 till 1906, when a boxer's mom wrote to him encouraging him to win the fight and bring home the bacon. But the point 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 in their fat, their lard.

15:40It was all so important that even the wealthy were bacon fans. But then the Black 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, which 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.

16:18To 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 IV, Sir John Falstaff called people bacon-fed knaves, which meant basically country bumpkins before he robbed them. And those people became known as chawbacons, and it's a word for rural people in England, kind of similar to maybe a 20th, 21st century American term like country bumpkin or yokel or something like that. Once again, like in ancient Egypt, the elite, the wealthy, urbanites with access to high-class meats like roast lamb and beef were like, see you later, bacon, it's been real.

17:03And after a 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 Baconator after the break.

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20:03Well, we need to remember first that pigs are not native to the new world. It is true. 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's 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.

20:44The 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.

21:20You can find instructions from one explorer to the other, say, drop off a boar and a couple of sows. And if you find more, then take what you need, but be sure to leave a breeding population. In fact, a number of the conquistadors, famous names like Cortez and Pizarro, they all came from Extremadura. 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 hams 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.

22:04English 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.

22:49Bacon 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 the Native Americans relied on and the pigs tended to like it as well. The pigs would destroy Indian crops of corn and squash in the field.

23:33There 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. But 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 and fresh milk and cream and butter.

24:14But for Southerners in the hot climate at 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, whereas 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. The 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.

24:56Once the colonists got settled, the northerners were ready to ditch Bacon ASAP. 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 Olmsted, 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 1852 to 1857, 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.

25:37But the people who had money in the South, the enslavers, they tried to have a more diverse diet. And so while Olmsted looked down on everyone in the South, the enslavers 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.