mythical bacon. and brains!
The book I’m reading — Food : a culinary history from Antiquity to the present / under the direction of Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari ; English edition by Albert Sonnenfeld ; translated by Clarissa Botsford … [et al.]. — has a puzzling passage:
Milk-fed veal may still be available, and decent chicken has returned to the shelves in recent years, but good bacon has been impossible to find for at least thirty years, and the same is true of sausage and fresh pork. Gourmets will often travel long distances to buy pork from specialty farmers. Is this progress?
As I write these lines, Europe is in the grip of panic over mad cow disease … [which has] already deprived us of some delectable variety meats.
When I read that, I kind of panicked, or I almost threw up a little bit. What does he mean?? Good bacon went missing from the world at least thirty years ago??? Holy crap. What have I grown up eating? How good could it have been? And is he talking about … BRAINS in that last line?
