This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Bringing Home the Bacon: From Shakespeare to the Baconator, first released on June 23, 2026. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

HOMER SIMPSON: Wait 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?

LISA SIMPSON: No.

HOMER SIMPSON: Ham?

LISA SIMPSON: No.

HOMER SIMPSON: Pork chops?

LISA SIMPSON: Dad, those all come from the same animal.

HOMER SIMPSON: Yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.

NICOLA TWILLEY: That wonderful, magical animal, the source of such wonderful magical foods as bacon and ham and pork chops, is, of course, the pig! But for most of history, pork was basically bacon.

CYNTHIA GRABER: 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 doughnut.

TWILLEY: You’re listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I’m Nicola Twilley.

GRABER: 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?

TWILLEY: What connects Shakespeare with the Wendy’s Baconator, and what does it really mean when you bring home the bacon?

GRABER: 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.

[MUSIC]

TWILLEY: When people say bacon is everything, they are actually technically correct.

MARK JOHNSON: So 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.

GRABER: 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.

TWILLEY: 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 animal, so that’s likely how it became the most prestigious.

GRABER: 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.

JOHNSON: I mean, before the age of refrigeration, which is most of human history, right? Bacon would’ve meant most of the pork eaten by most of the people. And most of the pig would’ve been put to some sort of curing agent.

TWILLEY: 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 really was pretty fortunate that salting, and/or smoking it, preserved it so well.

GRABER: 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.

TWILLEY: 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 to have been heavily, heavily, *heavily* cured.

JOHNSON: It would’ve 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.

TWILLEY: This was another point in favour of bacon especially before the current era of abundance: bacon was a meat that 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 human history.

MARK ESSIG: 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.

GRABER: 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 domesticate the pigs.

ESSIG: What archeologists 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. And 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.

TWILLEY: 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.

ESSIG: So you had to have a certain balance. A brave animal, but not a threatening animal. And so what archeologists 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.

GRABER: 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!

TWILLEY: 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.

JOHNSON: 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.

GRABER: 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.

ESSIG: If you ask people about this issue, you’d be surprised how many people bring up trichinosis.

TWILLEY: 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.

GRABER: 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.

ESSIG: 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 connecting this illness to what it was they ate a week or 10 days ago that caused it.

TWILLEY: 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.

ESSIG: The 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.

GRABER: 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.

TWILLEY: 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. Sheep and goats are better at regulating their temperature without a mud pack.

GRABER: Poor people couldn’t afford to buy meat like sheep and goat. But they could keep a pig around to feed their family.

ESSIG: 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 these cultures they tended to eat disgusting things, but they also tended to get linked to the people who raised them. And those people were… tended to be on the margins of society.

TWILLEY: Mark’s point is that everyone who was anyone in the Middle East sort of looked down on pigs. It wasn’t just 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.

GRABER: Also, a lot of the laws in Leviticus—where this prohibition is described—they’re about cleanliness, cleanliness in all kinds of 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.

TWILLEY: But 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.

ESSIG: But once they came into contact with people who considered this very strange, one of the ways that Jews maintained their identity was by sticking to this food avoidance.

GRABER: 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 two thousand years ago. And that’s because the Romans ate a LOT of bacon.

JOHNSON: Yeah, we know it was really important to the Romans ’cause they talked about pork all the time. And they put pigs on, like, all their battle standards, and their shields. And. And they used pork and bacon as ways to describe their landscapes. Like 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 from by outsiders. They start to view the, the pig as the Roman animal.

TWILLEY: 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.

JOHNSON: I think for most people it’s just mundane, and it might be valuable, and it might be… kinda 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.

GRABER: Maybe 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.

TWILLEY: 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 Dunmow in England, was called the Dunmow flitch trials. A flitch means a whole side of bacon.

JOHNSON: 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.

GRABER: This ceremony actually still takes place today, every leap year, every four years, in the same town, in Dunmow.

VOICEOVER: With slow pomp and majestic dignity, a procession made its way through the streets of Dunmow in Essex on Saturday. For almost 800 years, happily married couples have come to prove that for a twelvemonth and a day, they have lived in perfect harmony.

TWILLEY: This is BBC footage of the Dunmow Flitch trials from the 1940s. Four couples presented their case, including Mr. and Mrs. Shelley of Wolverhampton.

VOICEOVER: 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.

GRABER: That 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.

VOICEOVER: After much weighty deliberation, the jury agreed, and were ready to deliver their verdict.

JUDGE: How say you? For the claimants or the donors of the flitch?

JURY: For the claimants.

JUDGE: And is that the verdict of you all?

JURY: It is.

JUDGE: Verdict for the claimants.

TWILLEY: Mr and Mrs Shelley literally brought home the bacon. After being paraded around town, held aloft in chairs.

GRABER: Not 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.

TWILLEY: Historians think the tradition of giving a side of bacon to young couples may well have been more common than just Dunmow. 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.

GRABER: So bacon was key to a marriage. But is this where the phrase bringing home the bacon comes from? Like, historically, the guy’s supposed to bring home the bacon, support his family.

TWILLEY: Some sources say yes, the Dunmow 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 mum 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.

GRABER: Especially in northern Europe, where it was too cold for olive trees and so they didn’t have olive oil—pigs and their fat, their lard, it was all so important that even the wealthy were bacon fans.

TWILLEY: 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.

GRABER: 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.

OHNSON: So yeah, by Elizabethan England, they’re starting to value beef and mutton as respectable. And pigs and bacon as something from their own uncivilized past.

TWILLEY: To 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.

GRABER: In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Sir John Falstaff called people ‘bacon-fed knaves’—which meant basically country bumpkins—before he robbed them.

JOHNSON: 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.

TWILLEY: 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.

JOHNSON: And after, right, millennia of eating bacon, as soon as the opportunity presented itself to eat almost anything else they took that chance.

GRABER: 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 Baconater—after the break.

[BREAK]

ESSIG: Well, we need to remember first that pigs are not native to the New World.

TWILLEY: It is true! For most of history, the Americas have been a bacon-free zone.

ESSIG: 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.

GRABER: The Spanish brought crops, of course, and they brought other animals to eat, too, cows, and sheep.

ESSIG: The 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, a landscape that was specifically designed for them. They found lots of fruits and nuts to eat. They found ground nesting birds and amphibians.

TWILLEY: They took care of themselves, they reproduced, and then they were turned into portable, nonperishable bacon. Alongside guns and germs, they were pretty much the secret to Spanish success.

ESSIG: Explorers would often drop a boar and a couple of sows on an uninhabited island. You can find instructions from one explorer to the other, say, drop off, 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.

GRABER: 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.

ESSIG: 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.

TWILLEY: 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.

GRABER: English 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.

JOHNSON: 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.

ESSIG: 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.

TWILLEY: Bacon 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.

ESSIG: 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 fields. There 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.

GRABER: Pigs play 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.

JOHNSON: That cattle in Northern states could produce higher quality butterfat, and so that made them useful for making cheese and fresh milk, and cream, and butter. But for—for Southerners in the hot climate at the time, yeah, cows did not have the same quality butterfat or produce the same kinda ratio of fat in their milk.

TWILLEY: 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 those products.

JOHNSON: And when you eliminate those other products, the calculations definitely lead you elsewhere, and that was to the pig.

TWILLEY: Once 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.

JOHNSON: 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.

GRABER: But the people who had money in the South, the enslavers, they tried to have a more diverse diet. And so while Olmstead 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 Northerners, but at least it isn’t basically the only meat we ever eat.

JOHNSON: 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: When Europeans look at Americans of all sorts, they view Americans as bacon-eating people. Within the United States, industrializing, urbanizing Northerners, the emergent middle class, starts to look at rural people, and Southern people in particular, as bacon-eating people. And then within the South, yeah, the wealthier people who can distinguish their diets at least a little bit, look at their inferiors—enslaved people, poor white Southerners—as the true bacon-eating people. So in each stage of the so-called respectability hierarchy people look at the people right below them as the true bacon-eating people.

TWILLEY: This idea, that as you progress upward through the ranks, you become less bacon-dependent—it plays out the same way when it comes to America’s westward expansion. In the movies, it’s all cowboys and steak. In reality, the West was won with bacon.

JOHNSON: As it has been for millennia, bacon proves just too useful for a people on the move. So the same things that made it useful for the Roman army made it useful for people in their covered wagons heading westward. So in the guides for people about to set out on things like the Oregon Trail, or Santa Fe Trail, or out in the California Gold Rush, they tell those future migrants to take plenty of bacon with them. But the idea is that they would eventually progress through the so-called stages of civilization. And in their own time come to be, you know, proper beef-eating people.

GRABER: And this transformation did happen, in the West and in fact around the country. By the end of the 1800s, refrigerated rail cars were introduced and the price of beef plummeted. I’ve read about this in a book you might have heard of by someone named Nicky, but in any case, with refrigerated transport, beef became accessible to the masses.

TWILLEY: And bacon’s superpower—that it gave you access to meat year round when fresh meat would spoil—that was no longer so special or necessary.

GRABER: Obviously people at the time were still eating bacon, it never disappeared from the American diet. But also at this time, something different was that you were most likely going to buy your bacon in these newfangled supermarkets. Which meant that, unlike in the past, when bacon had meant many different kinds of cured pork, bacon had to become standardized.

JOHNSON: Bacon needs to mean the same thing time after time, week after week, and be generally similar, in all the parts of the country, and predictable and uniform.

TWILLEY: In America, by the 1900s, the definition of bacon had come to mean cured pork belly: those familiar strips made of streaks of meat interspersed with fat. But just because the US settled on the belly of the pig as the source of bacon doesn’t mean the rest of the world did.

GRABER: Canadian bacon turned into something slightly different. Instead of the belly, it’s the loin of the pig—which is like if you were looking down at a pig from above, it would be the back, either side above the belly. It’s a meatier cut with less fat. Fat isn’t marbled through that cut, it would be a layer, but that layer is trimmed off.

TWILLEY: And in my homeland, AKA the UK, we sort of split the difference: you can buy streaky bacon, which is American bacon, but bacon-bacon is the loin, like Canadian, but with the fat layer still around it—and then a little bit of streaky belly attached. Best of all worlds.

JOHNSON: And, when push came to shove and they had to decide, like as an industry, what counted as bacon, and what people would expect when they say that word or put it on a package, the English settled on a leaner style.

GRABER: This meant not only a leaner cut of meat, but a leaner pig. They also adopted vegetable oils in Europe before we did in America, and so they didn’t need as much lard. Pigs in Europe were just bred to have less fat.

JOHNSON: But in the United States, we relied on the really fat hog longer than other parts of the world. Relying on the bacon grease as a frying agent, as a way to lubricate our wagon wheels and our machines, and to make our steamships go faster by throwing bacon grease on the fire. And really just using it in all parts of our day, in all parts of our life. And that meant fatter hogs.

TWILLEY: But even in the lard-loving US, by the 1920s, bacon was seen as too fatty, at least for people who had sit-down office jobs. The government at the time explicitly warned white collar workers to eat less cream and fewer fatty meats like bacon to stay healthy.

GRABER: And the company Beech-Nut got stressed, because people weren’t buying enough of their bacon; they had more supply than demand. They’d been advertising their bacon in prestigious magazines like Good Housekeeping for years at this point, and in the 1920s they tried to fend off these anti-fat activists—that is, the government—by creating a specific campaign to try to get people to eat bacon and eggs together for breakfast every morning.

TWILLEY: They hired a guy called Edward Bernays, who happened to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud and who is known as the father of public relations. Previously, he’d convinced women it was ok to smoke in public by creating an advertising campaign that called cigarettes torches of freedom, which wow. Then the Beech-Nut company came to him for help.

EDWARD BERNAYS: We made a research and found out that the American public ate very light breakfast of coffee, maybe a roll, and orange juice.

GRABER: This is Bernays himself telling the story in an oral history from the 1970s. Back in the ‘20s, when he got the Beech-Nut gig, he went to his doctor and he was like: hey doc, which is better, a lighter breakfast or a heavier breakfast? And his doctor said, well, it’s better to fuel up in the morning so you don’t lose energy. And Bernays said, would you be willing to see if maybe around 5,000 other doctors agree with you?

TWILLEY: And his doctor was like, sure, put my name on a letter to other doctors. So Bernays did, and a bunch of doctors wrote back saying yeah, it’s good to start the day with a hearty breakfast. And based on that conclusive evidence Bernays said ok, great, the doctors of America recommend bacon and eggs for breakfast.

BERNAYS: Newspapers throughout the country had headlines saying, “Forty-five hundred physicians urge heavy breakfast in order to improve health of American people.” Many of them stated that bacon and eggs should be embodied with the breakfast, and as a result, the sale of bacon went up.

GRABER: A few years later, there was something else going on that helped bacon sales: the US got involved in World War II, and the boys on the front were thought to need beef to help keep them in fighting shape.

TWILLEY: Beef was being sent to the front, but bacon was available. As always, a little went a long way, and you could even save the grease and contribute it to the government’s Fat Salvage campaign—all that saved bacon grease was a source of glycerin to make explosives. Here’s Uncle Sam explaining the program.

VOICEOVER: With fats, our housewives can add to our armaments, instead of to our garbage pails. Save the grease from cooking. Deep fats, pan drippings, broiler drippings. The housewife strains this into a tin container holding at least a pound. She keeps this in the icebox till it is full.

GRABER: Sure, meats like beef were rationed, but like always, if you had enough money, you could probably find ways to get a hold of it. But eating bacon proved you stood with the troops.

JOHNSON: Yeah, so during World War II, it kind of allows, like middle class and upper class white people to kind of like cosplay as poorer people. And co-opt that then to show their patriotism.

TWILLEY: Briefly, bacon was kind of fashionable. But this wartime bacon blip was soon over and before long, the government was considering banning bacon altogether. That story, plus the rise of baconmania, after the break.

[BREAK]

GRABER: After World War II, things started to go downhill for real for bacon.

JOHNSON: As if bacon’s reputation could not get any worse—as the food of laboring people, enslaved people you know, so-called backward, uncouth, ill-mannered people and mountain people—bacon becomes dangerous. And that’s kind of the last stage in bacon’s falling out of favor.

TWILLEY: The 1950s onwards is really when government advice about food started being concerned with chronic disease, rather than malnutrition. We talked about this moment in history on the show before: Things like heart disease and cancer were on the rise and researchers were connecting them to a diet that had too much fat and too much red meat.

JOHNSON: So yeah, in the mid-20th century, bacon becomes seen as dangerous, and it’s attacked on three fronts. First of all, it’s red meat. By 1977, the US Dietary Guidelines, you know, are trying to convince Americans to eat less red meat. And so that puts bacon in the crosshairs. They’re attacking dietary fat, and bacon’s much fattier than some of these other things, especially the darling of the 20th century, the boneless, skinless chicken breast. So it’s red meat. It’s fatty. It’s especially fatty even compared to other red meat. It’s salty, and they’re starting to realize the dangers of that.

GRABER: On top of all that, the final nail for bacon at the time is that scientists became concerned about the nitrates and nitrites that are used to cure bacon. We covered all of that in our episode about deli meat. The short version is that the salts that are used for curing, even so-called natural salts, these create nitrosamines. Nitrosamines do seem to cause certain cancers, but also if you don’t eat these foods all the time in huge amounts it’s likely not a problem. For all the science, listen to our deli meat episode.

TWILLEY: This business of nitrates and nitrites causing cancer was a hot topic in the 1970s. The USDA put together a panel to study the problem, one of the experts on the panel called bacon, quote, “the most dangerous food in the supermarket.”

JOHNSON: And so by 1977, bacon’s just being attacked on all fronts: dietary science, chemists, public health professionals.

GRABER: Shockingly, given today’s love affair with bacon, the USDA even considered banning it. But instead they put limits on synthetic nitrates and nitrites. Not that actually makes a difference—again, you have to listen to the Deli Is Short For Delicious episode for the whole story.

TWILLEY: With all these strikes against bacon, the pork industry was in a tizzy. Already back in the 50s, they saw the writing on the wall, and started a breeding program copied from Denmark to make American pigs skinnier.

VOICEOVER: Fat pork has been losing in popularity. Quality today means lean pork.

TWILLEY: This is from an educational movie called “Pork People Like” made by the University of Illinois extension service in 1956

VOICEOVER: Years ago, hard labor called for energy, which pork fat supplied so well. But today in all lines of work, many jobs are done by machines. It doesn’t take as much human energy to operate a machine as it does to wield a shovel. We’ve been losing in popularity to the improved vegetable fats. Solution to this problem lies in producing a meat-type hog, a hog that will yield a lot of lean meat and relatively little fat.

GRABER: Scientists and farmers did succeed in breeding a more svelte pig—in the 1950s, an American pig typically had 35 pounds of lard on it. But by the ‘70s, there was only 20 pounds of lard per new, improved pig.

TWILLEY: That was on the production side. On the marketing end of things, they decided to rebrand pork altogether

VOICEOVER: Pork, the other white meat.

GRABER: This campaign was launched by the industry in 1987 as a way to say, hey, pork isn’t like beef! Pork is just like chicken, like that super popular boneless skinless chicken breast you’re all cooking for dinner these days because you’ve been told it’s the healthiest option.

VOICEOVER: Ah, the delightful new meals people are serving today. Creative! Nutritious! Convenient! Light. It’s not surprising that all these meals are made with white meat. What is surprising is that the white meat here is pork.

GRABER: Nice try, but cuts of pork that don’t naturally have a lot of fat in them—ones like pork chop and tenderloin—and then on top of that these cuts are now from super lean pigs? Unless you add a ton of fat or cream to the dish, they’re dry. So instead of creating pork people like, as the campaign claimed…

JOHNSON: They end up creating a hog that no one wanted.

TWILLEY: And meanwhile chicken, the OG white meat, had really taken off. We’ve made an episode about this too, but chicken used to be an expensive treat before the war. And then, thanks to various things including the chicken of tomorrow contest, it was now cheaper than pork and even more fat-free.

GRABER: Also, at the same time, there were other bacon-like options that were competing for the same market. One of them was called Sizzlean, and it was a product that melded pork, beef, and turkey into a fry-able strip.

YOUNG CHILD: Move over bacon, there’s something leaner!

VOICEOVER: Sizzlean breakfast strips from Swift.

WOMAN: So why sizzle fat? Sizzle lean.

TWILLEY: Straight up turkey bacon was introduced in the 80s, it was marketed by the biggest pork companies in America—which gives you an idea of how desperate they were.

MAN: Doesn’t even taste as greasy.

WOMAN: It’s half the fat.

MAN 2: This is turkey bacon?

WOMAN 2: Fifty percent less fat? The less fat, the better. I wouldn’t eat regular bacon again.

MAN 3: I do like it.

GRABER: All this meant that the price of the meat used for bacon absolutely plunged.

JOHNSON: By the 1980s and 1990s, pork bellies are so cheap that the US gives them away as foreign food aid. And that industry insiders portray fat in general but especially something like the belly as, according to one insider, a drag on the carcass.

TWILLEY: But you know who loves selling lots of cheap, fatty food to Americans and making a profit while doing it? The fast food industry!

JOHNSON: You can add bacon to a cheeseburger, or something else. Add a little, little bit of interest to it, and jack up the price. And it’s a cheat code ’cause it’s fat and it’s salt, so it tastes good.

GRABER: The very first bacon that had been placed on a fast food cheeseburger seems to have happened in an A&W restaurant in 1963. But it wasn’t until the 80s that other fast food joints like Wendy’s and Hardee’s and McDonald’s got the same brilliant idea.

VOICEOVER: Guess what they’re putting on McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger?

SINGERS: Bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon.

VOICEOVER: The new Flame-Broiled Bacon Mega supreme! For a limited time only. More great taste for more great value at Burger King.

TWILLEY: And the people loved it.

JOHNSON: I mean, I’m thinking about the 1990s for example. Amid a life of, like, SlimFast and rice cakes, something like a bacon cheeseburger after a week of behaving all week sounds pretty good, right?

GRABER: But by this point, something else was helping propel bacon to the top: SlimFast and rice cakes were already giving way to the fad diets that rejected austerity and carbohydrates in favor of all the fat and all the meat.

JOHNSON: So yeah, in the 1990s, Atkins, which had been around for about two decades already takes off. I should point out that in its own literature, Dr. Robert Atkins did not really consider bacon part of the diet. But in the popular imagination, that’s actually what people grab onto. So in the newspaper coverage of Atkins, it’s very much like, “Goodbye pasta, say hello to bacon.”

TWILLEY: At this point, at the end of the 90s, with the bacon cheeseburger success and the rise of Atkins, the pork industry spotted an opportunity. Maybe Americans were ready to embrace bacon in all its greasy goodness again.

JOHNSON: The National Pork Board, they kind of switch gears around the year 2000. They stop trying to out-chicken chicken with The Other White Meat campaign. They’re going to roll that campaign down. And they do create two alternative campaigns. One of them, designed for the grocery store, and that’s called Don’t Be Blah. So don’t eat, you know, the boneless, skinless chicken breast for the seventh night this week. Do something exciting. Do something interesting. And maybe that’s where bacon plays a role.

GRABER: And then the second pork industry campaign, that was called Better with Bacon. It was a partnership with fast food companies to help them incorporate and promote bacon. Their first big win? They provided $30,000 to Taco Bell to help them develop their new product, the Bacon Club Chalupa.

VOICEOVER: Try Taco Bell’s Bacon Club Chalupa. Crispy bacon over grilled chicken in a chewy chalupa shell.

TWILLEY: The Bacon Club Chalupa made its debut in 2002 and it was the first shot fired in a bacon arms race.

VOICEOVER: The smell of fresh cooked bacon: it just moves you.

CASHIER: May I get you all a Baconator?

ALL: Yes.

VOICEOVER: Come try a Wendy’s Baconator, now with six strips of new Applewood smoked bacon.

SINGERS: You know when it’s real!

GRABER: Everyone was just draping and drenching their food in bacon. Little Ceasar put three feet of bacon around the edge of a pizza. Even chicken got in on the game: KFC created a sandwich that was two pieces of fried chicken around two slices of cheese and two pieces of bacon. And it wasn’t limited to the savory side. Jack-in-the-box introduced a bacon sundae as part of its marry bacon campaign.

MAN: Mom, I’m getting married.

MOM: Who’s the girl?

MAN: It’s not a girl. It’s bacon.

VOICEOVER: If you love bacon, make it official.

MAN: [WHISPERING] Bacon, you look beautiful.

TWILLEY: In 2008, a food writer for Salon coined the term “baconmania” to describe the full spectrum baconfest that had taken over American life. In this brave new millennium, bacon wasn’t just for fast food lovers and keto fans—there were bacon festivals and entire TV shows about the United States of Bacon.

GRABER: And as part of this bacon explosion, high end chefs rediscovered bacon’s usefulness too, as a kind of trick to add smoke and fat and meatiness to a dish. Put some bacon on something, even just like crumbled up bits of bacon, and it adds a punch.

JOHNSON: And so if people are going to only eat a little bit only every once in a while they’re going to chase like thicker cuts, bolder flavors. Maybe even more expensive brands since they’re not buying it as, like, the staple anymore? Since they’re buying it as a treat, they might feel liberated to indulge in an expensive variety or a—or a craft variety.

TWILLEY: Craft meaning it was made traditionally: a slow dry cure, rather than a quick wet brine. But also, the best high-end bacon comes from pigs that haven’t had all the fat bred out of them. In America, that meant finding heritage breeds that hadn’t been turned into the skinny “other white meat” industrial type hog.

PIG FARMER: So one of the things that’s different about our pig farm is we raise rare heritage breed pigs. A heritage breed pig is a breed of pig that was around 150 years ago. These are varieties of pigs that haven’t had all the fat bred out of them in the sort of industrial model of agriculture that’s predominant in the United States.

GRABER: This is from a Wall Street Journal video from 2017. It’s linked to their article with the headline, “America Has a Bacon Problem: Our Pigs Aren’t Fat Enough.” The pigs the headline is referring to are industrial pigs, of course, not these heritage pigs that some American farmers were and are increasingly raising for the rapidly growing high-end bacon market.

PIG FARMER: Our pigs have, you know, an inch to four inches of back fat, depending on the breed. One of the best compliments I get is when somebody comes and says, “This reminds me of pork when I was a kid, or from my grandparents’ farm.”

TWILLEY: The irony is that back then, of course, that fatty bacon was kind of looked down on. Historically, because of all the reasons we’ve discussed: pigs ate trash, pigs were disorderly, pigs allowed poor people to be self-sufficient, and so bacon was always a staple for the poor— because of all that, till really recently bacon has, yes, been depended on by most people, but also repeatedly disdained by the elite.

GRABER: Today, bacon doesn’t have that kind of baggage. Our industrial meat system has made all animals pretty cheap, all raised in a standard orderly and yes extremely cruel way, pigs as well. And bacon’s particular advantage—that it was cured and could last a long time? We don’t have to rely on that today.

JOHNSON: For millennia, bacon was useful. But refrigeration liberates people from bacon.

TWILLEY: And once it was liberated from being a useful staple—then bacon could become a treat. Something you don’t eat everyday, and all the more pleasurable for it.

JOHNSON: Yeah. I think bacon’s associated with something you don’t usually do. But when you do it, it’s associated with, yeah, decadence, indulgence.

VOICEOVER: Mmmmm. Oh. Yeah. Bacon.

JOHNSON: And so I think it gets caught up in this idea that if people are going to sin and have a donut. Or have an old fashioned, or a Bloody Mary or something. Or have brunch. That they might as well, like, go all in and just, like, debase themselves with incredible amounts of bacon.

[MUSIC]

TWILLEY: Thanks so much this episode to Mark Essig and Mark Johnson, we have links to their books on our website gastropod.com. We have more bacon goodness coming right up for our special supporters and you can get on that list by donating at gastropod.com/support or through Patreon.

GRABER: Thanks as always to our fantastic producer, Claudia Geib. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks, till then!