The Great Bacon Catastrophe
When I was a young kid on the farm in Durham, the one Mama called Rancho Eno, Daddy raised pigs. Some he raised for sale and some he raised for us, and the ones destined for the family table would eventually get hauled downtown to the Farmers Exchange, a farmers’ co-op that slaughtered and processed them and kept the meat in sub-zero freezers. During the year we’d go back and draw out whatever we needed. Daddy took cows there too, but the cows have wandered into the wrong story and can just graze quietly somewhere until I get around to them.
This is about the hogs. More particularly, it is about bacon, and about several years during which the Ward family, despite having successfully raised the hog that produced it, seemed unable to arrange for the fat and the lean to occupy the same strip of meat in anything approaching reasonable proportions.
The trouble had started before Durham, when we were still on the farm at Aventon. Those hogs got a lot of slops, which were mostly liquid or food that contained a lot of liquid, and every evenin’ I got the privilege of lugging a forty-pound bucket of the stuff out to the hogs and pouring it over the electric fence. I don’t remember anybody explaining why a growing boy ought to carry forty pounds of pig slop up to an electrified wire every evening, but childhood on a farm contained a number of educational programs that had apparently been designed without consulting the student.
Anyway, the hogs prospered. Lord, how they prospered. When slaughtering time came and we eventually started drawing our bacon out of the Farmers Exchange freezer, we discovered that they had prospered mainly in the fat department. There was meat in the bacon, certainly, but you had to look for it. A strip might have a little streak of lean running through all that white, apparently to establish beyond legal doubt that the package had once had some association with a pig.
Now the fat tasted fine when it cooked up, because bacon fat has never needed much assistance in the flavor department, but this was not what Daddy had in mind. He studied the matter and decided the problem was all those wet slops. Daddy was a practical man, and if doing something one way produced the wrong result, there wasn’t much sense in doing it the same way next year and acting surprised. So when we moved to Rancho Eno in Durham, he built a special hog pen and changed the feeding program.
No more buckets of slop. These hogs were going to get commercial feed, reasonably dry, properly balanced, and manufactured by people who presumably had given considerable professional thought to what ought to go into a pig. Daddy had removed the suspected cause of the Great Bacon Catastrophe, and the following year we sent the hogs off with every reason to believe the problem had been solved.
Well, it had.
We got an entirely different problem.
That year’s bacon was lean and stringy, with hardly enough fat to fry itself. Mama liked lean meat, so she was more kindly disposed toward it than some of the rest of us, but even she had to admit that we’d gone sailing past the middle. One year we’d produced enough fat to keep a lamp burning through winter; the next year we’d produced something that looked as though the hog had been training for the Olympics.
Somewhere between those two pigs was the bacon we wanted.
None of us knew how to get there.
By then Uncle Burch and Aunt Marian were living with us, which made this a matter involving more than just Daddy, Mama and us three boys. Mama and Marian were sisters, and they both loved to cook, while Marian also loved to sample what got cooked with a devotion that seldom left much behind on her plate. Maybe that came from being born during the Depression, or from being next to youngest in a family of five children, where I imagine a child who spent too much time contemplating supper might discover somebody else had already reached a conclusion about it. Whatever the reason, food mattered in that house, breakfast mattered, and bacon most assuredly mattered.
So we had now conducted two experiments in hog husbandry. Wet feed gave us bacon that was mostly fat. Dry commercial feed gave us bacon that was mostly lean. Daddy and Burch could discuss it, Mama and Marian could cook it, and us boys could eat the evidence, but none of that told us how to persuade a hog to put down one nice streak of fat, then one nice streak of lean, and keep alternating until breakfast.
As fate would have it, assistance was already living down by the old tenant house.
His name was Sylvester.
Sylvester Enters the Agricultural Sciences
Sylvester was a sharecropper who lived on the farm, and after the hogs outgrew Daddy’s special pen they were moved down into the horse pasture near his house. Part of Sylvester’s responsibilities was feeding them.
That was one of Sylvester’s occupations.
His other occupation was making moonshine.
He kept a still back in the woods on the farm and sold the liquor to shot houses around town. As far as I know Daddy never stopped him, because Sylvester seemed to keep right on doing it. I was a kid and didn’t know the arrangements between grown men, particularly arrangements involving moonshine, tenant houses and activities conducted back in the woods, and I had enough sense not to conduct interviews.
Sylvester was also lazy and mean. The meanness may have been helped along by sampling his own product, although I can’t prove that and don’t intend to convict the man at this late date. I did hear that he used an automobile radiator to cool the steam and condense the liquor, which may or may not have contributed something like lead to the character of the finished product. Again, I was a boy. What I knew for certain was that Sylvester made moonshine, that the still was back in the woods, and that moonshine production left behind a considerable quantity of still slop.
Now we come to one of those little economic arrangements that make considerably more sense if you don’t examine them too closely.
Pig Food to Still Slop
Sylvester was stealing some of Daddy’s pig feed to use in making his moonshine. When the still was finished with it, there was slop left over, and Sylvester fed that to Daddy’s pigs. Perhaps he figured he was returning the merchandise. Daddy’s feed went into Sylvester’s still, Sylvester’s still produced moonshine and slop, and the slop went back into Daddy’s hogs. If you ignored the portion that had gone to the shot houses, the books came mighty close to balancing.
I spent a fair part of my later life around accounting and auditing, and I have since encountered more sophisticated financial arrangements that rested on shakier reasoning.
But Sylvester had another characteristic that turned out to be important. He did not believe in walking any farther than circumstances absolutely required.
His still was back in the woods, so naturally he put the hog trough at the end of the pasture nearest the woods. That way he didn’t have to carry the still slop any farther than necessary. The well, on the other hand, was up near Sylvester’s house at the opposite end of the pasture, so naturally he put the pigs’ water there. That way he didn’t have to carry water any farther than necessary either.
From Sylvester’s point of view, this was a triumph of agricultural efficiency.
Nobody had asked the hogs.
The Rancho Eno Hog Marching Society
That pasture was long and narrow, probably a football field and a half wide and maybe two and a half to three football fields long. I can’t swear to those measurements because I wasn’t out there with a surveyor’s transit; I’m telling you how that pasture lives in my memory. What mattered to the hogs was that the food was at one end and the water was way down yonder at the other.
And still slop made those hogs thirsty.
Mighty thirsty.
So a hog would fill up on still slop down by the woods, discover shortly thereafter that his mouth had become acquainted with the Sahara Desert, and start walking toward Sylvester’s house to get water. After he’d drunk his fill, he was still a hog, and the walk having burned up the slop in his stomach meant a hog with an empty spot developing somewhere inside him is eventually going to remember where he last saw something edible. So back down the pasture he’d go toward the trough.
A few more bites of still slop would make him thirsty again.
Back to the water.
Then back to the slop.
Then back to the water.
This went on all day, or at least often enough that somebody eventually noticed those hogs were spending a remarkable portion of their lives traveling between two points that Sylvester, through careful planning, had arranged so that he didn’t have to travel between them at all.
You have to admire the system.
Sylvester had accidentally transferred his share of the walking to the pigs.
Now I don’t know how much exercise a hog normally gets. I don’t know what still slop does to the metabolism of a pig, and I certainly don’t know whether any animal nutritionist would endorse a diet consisting partly of the residue from illegal whiskey production followed by repeated cross-pasture marches for water. I am merely reporting the experimental conditions as they existed at Rancho Eno.
Nobody planned this.
Daddy didn’t call the county agent and ask him to design an exercise program for livestock. Burch didn’t calculate the ideal ratio of feed to mileage. Sylvester wasn’t conducting research. He was trying to save himself a few steps.
The hogs took the steps for him.
And Then We Got the Bacon
Fall came around, as it generally did, and Daddy took some hogs to market and the ones we were keeping went down to the Farmers Exchange. They were slaughtered and processed, the meat went into the freezer, and eventually some of that year’s bacon made its way home and into Mama’s frying pan.
Dear hearts, it was beautiful.
There was a streak of lean and a streak of fat running through every slice, enough fat to fry properly and give you that wonderful bacon flavor, enough lean to give you something to chew, and neither one attempting to occupy the entire package. After one year of hogs raised on wet slops and another year of hogs raised on proper commercial feed, we had somehow arrived at the bacon we’d been trying to raise all along.
Burch and Daddy swore for years that Sylvester had done it.
Their theory was that the still slop put the fat on the hogs while all that walking back and forth to the water kept them lean, and somehow the two opposing forces reached an accommodation inside the pork belly. Whether that explanation would survive examination by somebody who actually knows something about pigs, I haven’t the foggiest idea. Daddy and Burch believed it, and the bacon was sitting right there on the breakfast table providing what they considered fairly persuasive supporting evidence.
I was too young to know whether they were right, and at that age I didn’t rightfully care. Agricultural science could fight it out among the grown men.
I had eggs, grits and bacon.
Years later I would learn that pork belly itself is a magnificent piece of meat, and Dear Celeste can take one today and turn it into an extravaganza of flavors that would probably cause Daddy and Burch to reopen the entire investigation. But that’s getting ahead of the story again, and this story belongs back there at Rancho Eno, when we were still trying to figure out why one batch of hogs came back mostly fat and the next batch apparently had spent its life on a reducing plan.
Maybe Daddy and Burch were right. Maybe they weren’t. I still don’t know.
What I do know is that for one memorable season we had some of the finest bacon I ever ate, and according to the prevailing scientific opinion around our breakfast table, we owed it to a mean, lazy moonshiner who stole Daddy’s pig feed and hated walking so much that he made the hogs do it for him.
Come to think of it, Daddy never did try to improve on the system.
Sometimes a man ought to know when his research is complete.