“American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon” By Mark A. Johnson (The University of Georgia Press, 352 pages, $34.95)
For the past two decades, bacon has seemingly been everywhere. And not just in food form. Whether stickers, wrapping paper, socks, perfume, ice cream or a myriad of other products, bacon as image, scent and taste pervades the American marketplace. How did this come to be? In his new book, “American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon,” Mark A. Johnson, who teaches history at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, recounts the saga of one of our country’s favorite and most controversial foods.
Johnson readily acknowledges that bacon is not a uniquely American food. Pork, including the cuts a modern consumer would recognize as bacon, has formed an important part of the human diet since prehistoric times. Methods for curing and preserving this meat have been used in China since about 1500 BCE and in Europe since Roman times. Pigs were brought to North America by the Spanish in the 1500s, and the English brought them to their new colonies in the early 1600s, the period in which Shakespeare wrote about “bacon fed knaves” in Henry IV. “American Bacon” includes this pre-colonial history, but, as the title suggests, it primarily details how bacon became part and parcel of the American experience. Johnson, whose earlier work includes “An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue,” describes his new book as a history of how “bacon transitions from mundane staple to culturally backward and poverty food, then to dietary threat and finally pop culture icon and gastronomic phenomenon.”
As part of our nation’s history, bacon has naturally reflected that history’s economic and cultural development and divisions. One of Johnson’s themes is how views of bacon have evolved as the country progressed from colony to nation, rural to urban, slave owning to free, and as our diet grew from subsistence to culinary snobbishness. His chapters demonstrate how the nation’s growth altered bacon’s place in our lives. “From tastemakers to consumers,” he writes, “Americans put bacon into their meals and their conversations about health, wealth, status, civilization, race, and gender.”
One of the many aspects of bacon’s historical relevance Johnson explores is its relationship to slavery. Bacon was an important part of the slave economy. In antebellum times, there was debate in Southern agricultural journals about how much bacon to allot the various classifications of enslaved people — field hands, craftsmen or domestic workers. The most common recommended ration of bacon for Southern plantations was 3.5 pounds per adult per week, a subsistence level more typical of frontier life.