A History of Pork in Europe and in North America

Unlike the United States, continental Europe has a large high-end pork segment, where farmers raise the best they can, often for the cured meat market. The farmers and scientists have discovered what techniques work to produce the best meat. And why these techniques work.

In Canada and the United States of the Americas (as is true of almost anything "American") almost all the large producers have instead focused on producing; with as little labour as possible, as much meat, as cheaply as possible, and selling it for the highest price possible. In the United States of the Americas, unimproved (lard type) breeds were traditionally just turned loose in forests to feed themselves, or penned and fed agricultural-including animal waste, or some combination of both. Up until now they have done amazingly well.

Unfortunately for "American" farmers and producers and as evidenced by their rapidly declining economy; time is not on their side.

Many of the Europeans who visited the early United States and gave their impressions of it when they got home were struck by the exploitation, greed, and total lack of concern for the tremendous waste shown, and also by the huge amount of meat every American man, woman and child consumed.

Although fast disappearing, game was still abundantly available, and pigs were allowed to run wild and fatten in the woods, or (like the also imported Norwegian Rats) roam city streets and eat up the garbage.

Pigs, being omnivorous (like rats), are also basically scavengers; and prefer food that is slightly spoiled. This being the case, of course, much of the pork was diseased. And then as now, much was never inspected. In order that it would keep, but also in order to kill disease; certain cuts of pork were cured i.e., treated with salt and other substances and smoked. This curing could and often did take a very long time. After hams or bacon were salted and peppered, they were hung in a warm haze of oak, apple, and hickory smoke-which is why we Canadians so often see these names on ham or bacon today. Once the smoking process had come to an end, they were aged upwards of a year (they could be aged even longer than that, and an old Virginia recipe is very specific in its instructions for cooking a ham that is five years old).They gradually shrank, gathering their spices and flavourings unto themselves.  The dry meat would keep for three hundred years. For those of us who are used to ordinary ham- which is cured by injecting gelatine and brine into the blood vessels and smoking it over sawdust (or chemical smoke may be used) a process that can take as little as four days- the strong taste of American country  ham would be a real surprise.

“You should soak it first, and then cook it very slowly. Let it simmer, not boil- for simmering brings ye Salt out and boiling drives it in." 

While originally, Canadian pork was also largely uninspected; most of it was kept penned and Canadians tended toward the longer leaner British "bacon hog" rather than the shorter heavier American Mangalitsa, Tamworth, or Ridgeback "lard hog", which could weigh a thousand pounds. When all the visible fat was cut away from the meat the so called lean pork was still almost a third fat. Because the pork contained so much fat, it was considered more difficult to digest than beef or even mutton.

Canadian hogs were slaughtered at a younger age, approximately one hundred and ninety pounds, so they were not so fat and disease was never so great a problem.

So much salt pork was eaten by so many Americans in the 19th Century that molasses, the most popular of sweeteners, was regularly used to subdue the briny taste. It was marvelled that even the poorest of the settlers had salt meat for breakfast, salt meat, or salt fish for dinner, and salt meat again for supper. An English observer was alarmed that the people he encountered never seemed to eat any vegetables, and evidently had an aversion to fresh meat of any kind.

 However much pork may have been eaten, two things are outstanding about the American diet from colonial days down through the 19^th century, and into the 20^th and 21st centuries, - and they are its protein and alcohol base, which were unequalled anywhere else in the world. The meat and protein certainly had its effect on growing American children, but it is very doubtful if it has been for the good.

The American dream of affluence, luxury, instant gratification, rollicking good times, and world domination just may be the very thing that eliminates them from the face of the earth.

Fifty percent of Americans are now considered obese and many more are just genetically too big, which puts much added unnecessary strain on heart, bones, and joints. Their children, today, are expected to have shorter life spans than their parents.

Americans ate and drank so much that dyspepsia was almost a national disease and they were easy prey for medicine quacks peddling nostrums and elixirs.

Corn whiskey was the American wine. Diluted with water, hard liquor was drunk at mealtimes and in between meals as well. Even ministers and children drank it; boys 12 years of age or less were known to enter stores where whiskey could be had, saunter up to the clerks, "and tip off their drams”.

Perhaps the American propensity for whiskey in the first half of the 19th Century had something to do with the countries troubled adolescence. It definitely had, and has, everything to do with the chronic paranoia and need to dictate to the rest of the world