How a salt-cured pork product united a broken nation, nourished the soul of a country, and saved us all. And why it will happen again.
American sentiment is more divided in 2020 than it has been at any point in history since the Civil War ended in 1865. Positions on race, gender, healthcare, politics, and the economy have become so far estranged that it’s difficult for people to even discuss them or current events at all. Despite the political polarization and deficiencies in social discourse, there’s one thing that almost everyone in the United States can still agree on, we love bacon.
Bacon brings us together
Bacon accounts for over a billion pounds of meat consumption a year in the United States and can be found on menus at over 70% of restaurants across the country. The undying popularity of Bacon is almost as unique and impressive as the unbridled passion and creativity it sparks in the umami foraging public. Bacon Mania (spelled Baconmania in Minnesota) has spawned a plethora of festivals, camps, street fairs and product lines devoted solely to slow cured pork bellies. National Bacon Day is celebrated on December 30th while International Bacon Day is recognized on the first Saturday of September (January 15th for our hog back fancying friends in the United Kingdom). Canadian Bacon day is acknowledged on September 4th. For edification that’s Bacon Day in Canada not a day specifically dedicated to the decidedly inferior variety of bacon derived from the pork loin and favored north of the 49th parallel.
There’s no mystery behind why crispy, hardwood smoked slabs of swine are so beloved by Americans that 65% agree bacon should be our country’s national food. That constitutes a greater share of the nation than has agreed on any Presidential Candidate in the past two hundred years. How it became that way and possibly the only thing we all have left in common, is a whole other story.
Christopher Columbus – Explorer, Enslaver, Bacon Pioneer
Palos, Spain – August 3, 1492 
When Columbus made his fateful journey to find the Westward Passage, he was accompanied by eight of Queen Isabella’s finest pigs. This heroic and selfless deed would reverberate throughout the fabric of history and cement his legacy as the culinary innovator that we all know him as today. Fifty years later Hernando De Soto was the first to actually transport sus scrofa domesticus to the mainland coming ashore in what is now Tampa Bay with thirteen swine. America’s first drove of pigs grew to a become a drift of over seven hundred in the next three years and were joined in the 1600s by English sows bestowed upon the Jamestown Colony by another legendary gastronomic trailblazer, Sir Walter Raleigh. It would undoubtedly be difficult to exonerate some of the practices these icons of the cookhouse employed when viewed through a contemporary paradigm. What is of the most profound significance though and the aspect of these paragons of prosciutto that we can all agree deserves nothing but our paramount admiration, is that these are the men who brought home the bacon to America.
In Bacon We Trust
Bacon-Merica!!!
America’s love affair with salt cured deliciousness may have begun over half a millennium ago, but bacon didn’t become a breakfast staple until after German brothers Oscar and Gottfried Mayer began to pre-slice and package smoked pork bellies in 1924. The roaring 20s would see the introduction of Rice Krispies, Wheaties, Aunt Jemima, and Yoo-hoo as Americans traded the heavy breakfasts commensurate to farm living for the light, convenient fares of the suburbs. Demand for pork products was low and the nation’s leading producer, the Beech-Nut company, hired Edward Bernays to promote their pre-packed slices of salty goodness. Bernays was the nephew of legendary Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (as well as a practicing Jew) and was the godfather of public relations. He wrote the book on crowd psychology (Propoganda 1928) and was the world’s leading expert on using psychoanalysis to steer public opinion. His legendary exploits include helping the United Fruit Company (Chiquita Bananas) overthrow the government of Guatemala, shaping American opinion about the first World War, and helping Dixie Cups convince people glasses were unsanitary to drink from. The marketing campaign that followed would be the envy of and inspiration for elected officials and advertisers for close to a century.
Bernays didn’t sell products, he sold ideas. He understood that the most effective way to influence public behavior was to change the way people thought. He had a company physician conduct a survey of five thousand doctors to determine whether they considered a heavy breakfast to be more “scientifically desirable”. Most agreed that it was and over the next six months sales of bacon soared on the advice of articles in every major newspaper across the country citing the study that Bernays himself had conducted. Many quoted his company physician and most even mentioned bacon and eggs as an example of a healthy breakfast. Bacon entered the hearts and abdomens of people nationwide at an unprecedented pace and would forevermore be considered synonymous with the American way of life.
Bacon to the Rescue!
Take me to your dealer
It was 1942 and America was embroiled in the thick of the second World War. The military needed glycerin to make explosives and the polyol compound had unexpectedly become a hot, greasy commodity. Evidently, the solution was to cook some more bacon. American kitchens created more than 2 billion lbs. of leftover cooking oil each year and every pound of grease contained enough glycerin to make five rapid fire cannon shells. The American Fat Salvage Committee was created to propagate the idea that donating your skillet residue to Uncle Sam was the patriotic duty of all civilians. Citizens from all backgrounds and walks of life came together and contributed their pan seared bacon extract to be transformed into the lifeblood of the American war effort.
United we stand, divided we fall, the love of bacon will save us all
An unequivocally American innovation, the bacon cheeseburger was invented at a drugstore in Houston in 1941….or was it an A&W in Lansing in 1963? Like so many other things today, the origin of this magnificent monument to carnivorous gratification is the subject of heated contention and flame-broiled debate across the nation.
Forsake the alternative facts and a distinct realization becomes increasingly clear. Despite ardent conviction to opposing dogmas three core principles remain common to every ideology that unceasingly define and unite us as Americans.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of crispiness.
This post is part of the Life branch of jackrosewrites.com. The thread that connects everything starts with the manifesto: There Is No Escape Room.