Let’s Celebrate…International Bacon Day
We’ve had many people comment on the articles that highlight celebrate events, items, things or places that’ we’ve decided to keep this section, calling it Let’s Celebrate. So to officially kick off this new section, what better way to do it then celebrate bacon, a food almost everyone loves.
September 3rd marks International Bacon Day in both the United Kingdom and the USA. It’s an unofficially observed day but, who says you can’t celebrate by waking up to some bacon and eggs for breakfast.
Bacon may be the U.S.’s current favorite pork product, inspiring countless 21st-century memes and t-shirt slogans, from “You had me at bacon” to “Keep calm and put bacon on.” But the passion for cured pork stretches far back through history.
Bacon’s history dates back thousands of years to 1500 B.C. in which the Chinese were curing pork bellies with salt, creating an early form of bacon, although pigs were domesticated in China in 4900 B.C. and were also being raised in Europe by 1500 B.C. Speculation exists that the Romans and Greeks learned bacon production and curing through conquests in the Middle East.
The English bacon tradition dates back to the Saxon era in the 1st millennium AD, bacon (or bacoun as it was spelt then) was a Middle English (11th/14th Century, High/Late Middle Ages) term that the English used to refer to a traditional cut of pork meat unique to the Great Britain at the time.
You have probably heard the phrase “bring home the bacon” and assumed it had something to do with bringing home money, when in actual fact it was first said in 12th century England in the spirit of matrimonial harmony. A church in the historic English town of Dunmow promised a flitch (side) of bacon to any married man who could swear before the congregation and God that he had not quarreled with his wife for a year and a day. A husband who could bring home the bacon was held in high esteem by the community for his forbearance, self-control and patience.
In today’s health-conscious age, you might expect to find fatty bacon low on the list of preferred foods. But Americans are eating more pork now than they have in decades—eatting 70 percent of their bacon with breakfast. In fact, bacon went into space aboard Apollo 7 in 1968, in the form of “bacon squares” and Apollo 8 astronaut Jim Lovell exclaimed, “Happiness is bacon squares for breakfast.”
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