“Life-changing bacon”: transgression as desire in contemporary American tastes

ABSTRACT

This essay considers how Americans attribute moral qualities to pigs and pork. I explore the ways that producers and consumers of pasture-raised pigs understand their interests in—and especially appetite for—pork in terms of moral values. At once a source of economic distinction, ecological commitment, and culinary indulgence, the pork from pasture-raised (or “heritage breed”, or “outdoor raised”) pigs is, in many ways, simultaneously a contemporary icon of excess and restraint.  This convergence of contrasting values is even more amplified in bacon, the now ubiquitous food, flavor, and substance that is, for many, the quintessence of pork. This contemporary American infatuation with all-things bacon is an expression of both an enduring history of moralization (long associated with pigs and pork); as well as a very specific conjuncture of political economic and sociological forces.  The longue durée and the current moment combine to put bacon on our plates with the distinctive pride of place it now enjoys.  In this paper I suggest that the implications of this contemporary American taste for bacon, and the ways this taste have informed a consuming public knowledgeable about and desirous of this pork product, embody wider changes in American food politics and values. 

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropology
• semiotics
• bacon
• morality
• values

Acknowledgments

I must thank the many farmers, chefs, and customers with whom I carried out this research in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Above all, I will mention Eliza MacLean, who made everything here possible. My paper benefited from generous commentaries from audiences at the University of North Carolina, Drexel University, Tufts University, and Santa Clara University, and from the astute anonymous readers of Food, Culture, & Society

Disclosure statement

No conflicts of interest were reported by the author.

Notes

1. Or at least the synoptic gospels—the idiosyncratic John makes no reference to this episode, or to pigs in any form.

2. It is difficult to know with any certainty what specific qualities the children of Israel might have attributed to fat. But note that neither blood nor fat is part of a discrete organ, muscle, or limb of a beast, but pervades the body; fat is “upon the inwards” and “by the flanks” and “above the liver.” It is tempting to see this uncontained pervasion of the living body as a qualisign that makes fat iconic of divinity itself, a pervasive life-giving potential that is not (and should never be) tangibly fixed in discrete objects.

3. The significance of bacon and the qualifications of fat—let alone bacon—outside of the historical context of “the West” are far beyond the scope of this paper. Certainly in North America, any number of bacon’s consumers and producers are not heirs to the legacy of this “moral taste”. Nonetheless, the ways in which bacon is not merely “represented” but prepared, sold, and consumed across a wide swathe of the North American public is restrained by this “heritage”.

4. Parodied, in a kind of metacommentary, in this commercial that received national airplay in the US in 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c4MNWLtSS8.

5. Stallybrass and White’s (1986, 44–59) discussion of the pig demonstrates the innumerable ways that pigs have been grasped as “almost but not quite” human in European popular culture. In their view, this makes the pig an especially apt subject and object for ambivalent depictions of the grotesque and hybrid that allow “low” and “high” social strata to be juxtaposed and challenged.

6. Run by the Center for Environmental Farming Systems in Goldsboro, a research center dedicated to sustainable and organic agriculture.

7. “The single word ‘crispy’ sells more food than a barrage of adjectives describing the ingredients or cooking techniques on a menu” (Batali 2002, 162).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brad Weiss

Brad Weiss is Professor of Anthropology at William & Mary. He has conducted extensive field-work on social transformation in rural and urban Tanzania; as well as work on contemporary American food systems in North Carolina. Weiss is the author of four books, including Real Pigs: Shifting Values in the Field of Local Pork (2016: Duke University Press). He is part of the Editorial Collaborative of the journal Cultural Anthropology.