When: December 30
Bacon Day on December 30th celebrates humanity's most beloved cured meat — a food with 3,000 years of history across Chinese, Roman, and European traditions that has become a modern cultural obsession. The story of how bacon conquered American breakfast plates in the 1920s involves a public relations campaign, a medical doctor on retainer, and a very specific script.
Bacon as we know it is a 20th-century product — before industrial curing and nitrates, "bacon" referred to any cured pork, and what filled American breakfast plates before the 1920s was dramatically different from today's strips.
Cured pork belly has been part of human eating for as long as people have kept pigs, which is approximately 10,000 years. The Chinese were salting pork as early as 1500 BCE. Romans produced a cured pork product called "petaso" that closely resembled what we would recognize as bacon. Medieval European peasants kept pigs specifically because the entire animal could be preserved through salt and smoke and stored through winter without spoilage — the pig was a food that could be killed in autumn and eaten into spring. The word "bacon" entered English from Old French and referred to any cured pork, not specifically the thin belly strips eaten at breakfast today. The American breakfast bacon is not ancient. It is the product of a single deliberate marketing campaign. Before the 1920s, most Americans ate light breakfasts — toast, cereal, or pastry. In 1925, the Beech-Nut Packing Company hired Edward Bernays, a publicist who understood that changing eating habits required the appearance of...