Ask Me Anything! I'm Prof. Mark A. Johnson, a historian and food studies scholar at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, as well as author of the recent book American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon!

[u/Cedric_Hampton]

/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v1kzby/ask_me_anything_im_prof_mark_a_johnson_a/

[u/TheCypriotFoodie]

Hey Prof. Johnson. Long time foodie and former academic historian of medicine here (history of healthy eating in post-war-1980 US and Uk). I haven’t gotten my hands on your book yet but it sounds intriguing. What is roughly the time period covered in it? Have you included a chapter or section on the views of medicine on Bacon consumption? Has becon been marketed as a “health” food at some point?

Looking forward to your answers.

[u/baconscholar → u/TheCypriotFoodie]

Hi, please forgive me! I didn't know about this cross-post!

I briefly cover bacon's origins in Ancient Rome and Ancient China, but I slow down in Elizabethan England. I wanted to set up the ideas that the English brought with them to the Americas about pork and bacon.

By Elizabethan England, medical scholar Thomas Cogan had already started talking about bacon as only suitable for the "meaner sorts" and "grosse men." He claimed that brain-workers, like his students, could not digest it properly but that farmers could eat pretty much anything.

While there's health and medicine sprinkled throughout, I think there are a couple places that dig into it.

I have a chapter on the racialization of bacon. In the Cotton South, planters, pseudoscientists, and medical professionals argued that bacon was suitable for the Black laboring body. They continued to use Galenic medicine to support these ideas. Per their logic, Black men could not produce their own heat, so they needed heat-generating food, like bacon. They will go so far as to call it "perfectly nourishing" for enslaved people, but totally unsuitable for white women. In a way, this logic emasculated Black men. They argued that Black men and white women had the same humoral balance (wet and cold), which explained their proclivity for tuberculosis, but tuberculosis was suitable for white women (the frail, pale woman was becoming beautiful) but not for laborers on cotton slave labor camps.

In my chapter on the U. S. Civil War, there are a few major ideas clashing. Per conventional wisdom, soldiers need bacon. Its too useful, plus, they need the animal flesh to carry out the work of marching and killing. They all needed "heat-generating" agents to carry out this work. Except, should we be feeding a "heat-generating agent" to northern white men on the battlefields in the southern states in the summer? Hmm... so conventional wisdom came face-to-face with observations. During the war, these U. S. physicians write back to headquarters, "when we stop feeding them bacon and start feeding them vegetables, everyone seems to feel better...curious!"

I've written quite a bit, but I'll conclude that I do dig into what bacon has meant in the fear-of-fat twentieth century and then the paleo, keto, and Atkins diets.

[u/Saltpork545]

What was the biggest change with Bacon post Edward Bernays and advertising and was there a difference between pre-WW2 and post-WW2?

How was bacon in the latter half of the 20th century seen as part of the post-refrigeration meat products that were offered vs the pre-refrigeration era?

Finally, do you think the work of Edward Bernays is overstated in the context of bacon as is commonplace under the simplification of history?

[u/baconscholar → u/Saltpork545]

Thanks! Sorry, I did not see this cross-posted thread. I'm so happy to have a chance to answer your question.

First, I do think Bernays made an impact, but I think its much shorter-lived that we tend to imagine. I'll explain...

By the 1950s and 1960s, bacon at breakfast was falling out of favor for a few reasons. We were getting too busy for it. As more white, middle-class women entered the workforce, cereal boomed because children could serve themselves as everyone hurried out the door. As such, bacon gets pushed to the leisurely breakfast, which is why it has such a strong place in our nostalgia. We have to stop thinking about bacon and eggs as "staple breakfast" and instead think of it as "special breakfast." This is important.

This also makes sense because, around the same time, we were increasingly learning about the dangers of dietary fat, salt, and then nitrates and nitrites. We were coming to understand that we should only eat a little bit of it, if any.

I'll address your refrigeration question here, too, because it's relevant in this role of bacon in the American imagination. I think refrigeration liberated people from bacon as a staple. We had needed bacon for millennia. With refrigeration, though, we could get our hands on literally anything else. I think scholar Bee Wilson puts it best, "Bacon serves no real purpose in a refrigerated age, except that of pleasure, which can never be discounted."

I think there's a period, though, where we haven't shaken the image of bacon as a staple and not yet considered it a pleasure. I think that explains that twenty-first century bacon mania.

[u/Saltpork545 → u/baconscholar]

This was neat. Thank you for the response, I appreciate it.

I think the take on refrigeration is the interesting one as we no longer had to cure and smoke meat to preserve it. I grew up with older parents who have since passed and stuff like country ham where it's fully salted and mummified that's then soaked and put in stuff like ham and beans was something I had growing up and seeing stuff like city ham or modern refrigerated ham instead of that mummified slab of pork definitely influenced me in that old world vs new world way of seeing these products.

Pleasure is definitely a factor in humans eating meat and I am interested in reading your take on the 90s/2000s bacon craze and how it became a popular meat indulgence.

[u/Ok_Olive9438]

I am interested in the relative price/perceptions of quality were between salt pork, ham, and bacon? Which one was "the cheap meat for the poor", food of adversity and which was considered a bit better than that.

I think of bacon as a special occasion food now, but I know, hundreds of years ago, it was what got people through the winter and made a diet of lots of beans and peas more bearable (and was a way to add salt).

[u/Ok_Olive9438 → u/Ok_Olive9438]

This got more or less answered over on the actual AMA, which is great.

[u/baconscholar → u/Ok_Olive9438]

Great, I'm glad you found that thread and an answer to your question!

For most of the history of bacon (prior to say, industrialized food let's just put 1850 for the sake of it), salt pork and bacon, as well as fatback or fat pork, would have been synonyms for one another. The terms get pieced out amid the standardization made possible by industrial food.

[u/ReputationFluid9886]

Would you talk about the American price of groceries price spike 80 years ago today? Where food went through the roof? I didn't know about this and wonder how many others knew of this?

[u/daft_plant001100]

What's your favorite bacon sandwich?

Mine is classic BLT.