The Biggest Table

Host Andrew Camp welcomes historian Mark Johnson, author of “American Bacon,” who explains how his work on Alabama barbecue led him to study bacon’s shifting meanings. Johnson describes food as a narrative device for telling difficult histories and highlights a recurring theme of performance, including his claim that modern bacon enthusiasm can resemble minstrel-like impersonation, exemplified by a 1983 New York Times “In Praise of Bacon” cartoon mocking yet admiring a “Georgia mountain man.” The conversation traces bacon’s role from a broad term for cured pork in colonial America, both staple and insult, through English associations of respectability with beef and mutton, and early U.S. debates that sometimes reclaimed bacon as humble republican virtue. In the 19th–20th centuries bacon became linked to Southern “backwardness,” fat, and health fears; by 1977 the USDA considered banning it over nitrites/nitrates. Bacon’s resurgence is tied to distrust of dietary experts, low-carb culture, fast food, and upscale “rustic” Southern cuisine that can romanticize marginalized peoples without materially benefiting them, prompting discussion of systemic change, food deserts, and “culinary colonialism.”

MARK A. JOHNSON, originally 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. His most recent book is American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon. He resides in Knoxville, TN with his wife, Kate, and two cats, Peri and Remy.

Follow Mark on Instagram: @baconscholar
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