Stop Buying Bacon From These 7 US Supermarkets — Here's Why

There is a sound good bacon makes in a hot skillet, and a sound bad bacon makes — and the old folks could tell them apart from clear across the kitchen. The bad one spits and hisses, weeps a cloudy white foam, and shrivels to a scrap sitting in a puddle of grease you paid full price for. That cloudy water is the whole story: most of the bacon in this country has been pumped full of water and sold to you at the price of meat. And a few of these labels wandered a good deal farther from real bacon than that. I have raised hogs the better part of forty years and cured my own off the farm, so today we put seven supermarket brands up on the table, one at a time, and read the toe tag on every one. Here is what we get into: The all-American warehouse-club bacon widely reported to be packed by the country's biggest pork processor — owned out of China since 2013. Why "uncured" bacon is still cured — and the one word on the front that fools good, careful people. The "smoke flavoring" trick — a smokehouse that bacon never once hung in. The trusted grocery name reading off the very same recipe card as the cheapest pack in the discount bin. The store brands selling you water and a costume — and the phosphate that holds it in. How to read a bacon package in five seconds, like an old butcher. The 3 words that sort any bacon in any aisle — and what still does it right, for every budget. Then fry whatever is in your icebox tonight, watch the pan, and tell me in the comments: did it render clean, or weep that cloudy water? And tell me the brand. Tell me your county too, and how old your house is — I like knowing where you are all writing from. I read every one. Next time, I am putting the breakfast sausage up on the table — the "case-ready" grind, and the one word on that tube that is worse than anything we read today. The old folks cured their own meat and knew it was clean because their own hands made it so. We are only just starting to remember. Turn the package over. That's all I ask. — Big Jim