The Bacon Eaters

In 2013, Mark Johnson stashed away a picture of a maple bacon doughnut for a future project he had in mind.

Around this time, bacon began its renaissance.

Yes, it had remained a breakfast staple, but it also made its way into desserts, cocktails, salads, sandwiches and bacon-wrapped versions of just about anything.

“It was like, ‘Oh, a little treat?’” says Johnson, a UT Chattanooga assistant professor of history. “This little half strip of bacon garnishing my old-fashioned. If we’re already sinning or doing something that’s bad for us, might as well go for it.”

In his new book, American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon, Johnson explores the food’s complicated history. Bacon’s story goes back centuries, and it wasn’t always something people celebrated.

For most of American history, bacon remained a practical meat, used to stretch ingredients to make meals last longer. In the South, enslaved people and later sharecroppers used small amounts of bacon or pork fat to flavor dishes.

Long before that, pork carried mixed meanings. Several religious traditions restricted it, which changed how much of the modern world viewed it.

The story really kicks off, Johnson said, in early-modern Britain, when a pork taboo emerged among “city people and wealthier people.”

“The English really valued their orderly, beautiful, fenced farms as a symbol of their civility and their respectability,” Johnson says, “and pigs just don’t fit in that.”

When English colonists arrived in North America, those ideas came with them. The reality, however, didn’t match what they had left behind. Raising hogs required less labor, as pigs foraged across fields and forests for their own meals.

“They’re trying to be proper English people,” Johnson says, “but pigs are taking off (in popularity).”

Bacon quickly became embedded in American diets, even as its reputation changed depending on who was eating it. Johnson’s book follows those perceptions over time. Europeans viewed Americans as “bacon-eating people,” or uncouth. In the United States, that label shifted to the South, then to poorer white communities and to enslaved and formerly enslaved people.

This perception eventually shifted, which is something Johnson encourages students to analyze in his Food and Southern History class. He also teaches them how to cure bacon.

“I wanted to do something in class so they could get hands-on experience,” he says. “What would it have been like to the best of our ability back then? What would it have looked like and felt like and tasted like? … And how does industrialization, commodification and mass production change it?”

American Bacon answers this question. In the 20th century, refrigeration and shifting diets changed how Americans thought about food.

By the late 1900s, bacon started to disappear from everyday meals. Concerns about fat, sodium and chemicals pushed it out of people’s diets.

The Food and Drug Administration almost banned it.

Then, bacon came back.

“The argument in the book is that bacon had to die in a way,” Johnson says. “It had to be destroyed in the American imagination as a staple, and then it was reinvented for its associations with hedonism and decadence and doing things you don’t usually do.”

That trend gained momentum in the 1990s and early 2000s when diet fads turned to meat, even if bacon didn’t necessarily fit the health guidelines.

“The Atkins diet in the ’90s kind of gave it a jumpstart, but 2000 seems to be a pretty good starting point for the bacon obsession,” he says.

At the same time, people grew frustrated with constantly changing health advice.

“People are kind of fed up with this,” Johnson says. “It’s like one day this is good for you, and the next day it’s bad for you.”

In this cultural recipe, bacon found a new role. It wasn’t something to eat every day but occasionally.

Cooks also adapted pre-cooked bacon to a culture of ease, especially in fast food.

“Bacon has benefited from our obsession with convenience,” Johnson says. “They can add it for next to nothing to a sandwich and raise the price.”

Its role at home didn’t completely disappear.

“People like the ritual of making the bacon and slowing down,” he says. “In a way, it reminds us—even if the time and place only exists in our imagination—of a time when people slowed down and appreciated their food and sat together.

“It found its way back into Saturday morning breakfast.”

In 2013, Johnson first laid eyes on a bacon-covered doughnut while working on his previous book, An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue: From Wood Pit to White Sauce, published in 2017.

It wasn’t until he arrived at UTC in 2019 that he started American Bacon.

“I was able to finally get back into academia and had the resources—and the library—to go to archives,” he says.

Johnson studied the food’s layered history, from religion and labor to marketing and modern diets, understanding it as part of the same story. It fit well into his curriculum.

“I can teach some real and sometimes hard history,” Johnson says, “but bacon is a way to help you learn how we’ve thought about race and diet and gender and body image and health and wellness … that’s why it’s titled the way it is.”

Ultimately, the history book is not about food, he says.

“It’s really a story of the United States and how bacon gets all tied up in it.”