American BaconThe History of a Food Phenomenon
The four-century history of a gastronomic phenomenon in the United States.
In American Bacon, Mark A. Johnson asks (and answers) a seemingly simple question: How has bacon overcome centuries of religious prohibition, cultural contempt, and dietary advice to become a twenty-first-century culinary and cultural powerhouse? Starting in early modern Britain and tracing the story of bacon through the colonial era, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, modern fad diets, and the emerging craft bacon industry, Johnson provides a new perspective on some familiar American narratives. More than a story of production, marketing, and consumption, Johnson argues, this cultural history connects bacon to race, class, and gender while also illuminating major historical forces, such as migration, warfare, urbanization and suburbanization, reform movements, cultural trends, and globalization. For Johnson, bacon’s story from “most dangerous food in the supermarket” to pop culture and gastronomic phenomenon reflects the cultural values of a nation.
MARK A. JOHNSON, from Milwaukee, earned a PhD in history from the University of Alabama. Previously, he earned an MA from the University of Maryland and BA from Purdue University. He currently teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and is the author of An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue: From Wood Pit to White Sauce and Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacle, 1877–1932
American Bacon is a delicious read that serves up many crispy, enjoyable, and surprising bits of culinary history. It’s a fascinating look at how changing perceptions transformed this particular preserved meat from a lowly staple item into an enduring food celebrity. -Adrian Miller, James Beard Award-winning author
Mark A. Johnson fries up the preeminent cultural history of bacon in America. Covering four hundred years, American Bacon shows how and why bacon’s role and meaning has dramatically transformed from mundane option to impoverished foodstuff, an unhealthy choice to a mania-inducing culinary darling. Wide-ranging, deeply researched, surprising, and satisfying. -Emily J. H. Contois, author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture
American Bacon is a fascinating and important book that forcefully demonstrates that taste is contextual and contingent. Johnson reveals that although the meaning and value of bacon changed over time, bacon has always served as a surprising—but accurate—barometer of American values and preoccupations. -Jennifer Jensen Wallach, author of How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture
American Bacon is a good example of how following one food’s history reveals the personal and cultural investments we have in the foods we eat and how we constantly invent tradition as a kind of casual everyday history-making. Mark Johnson shows us how bacon’s cultural capital shifts over time as it is associated with the poor and the enslaved, vilified in the era of fat phobia but then resurrected in ‘bacon mania’ of twenty-first century. -Megan J. Elias, author of Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture
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