Mornings were cooler in the mountains, once upon a time. We still get summer nights in the sixties and temporary relief from the heat and humidity, but those mornings in the fifties — the kind that raised “goosebumples” when the wind rolled off the mountain — belong to another era. I remember them best the summer after I turned seventeen.
Our Chicken City backyard had soil the color of old cardboard, sandy and sterile, starved of nutrients. But Albert and Cordie’s garden at the edge of the cornfield where we hunted for arrowheads, was different. Their earth was rich and brown, born of decades of feeding, turning and tending. It was the kind of soil that seemed to breathe, the kind where the garden does half the work for you. There was still plenty left to do, though, so on weekends I’d get up early, drive over the mountain, and work beside Pa and Granny while the day was still cool enough to enjoy.
They were in their eighties then — spry, steady, and stubborn in the best way. During the week they’d weed and pick what produce they wanted, and on weekends I handled the heavy lifting. They let me carve out a little patch of my own, a place to experiment and learn. I discovered that Jerusalem artichokes are a lot of digging for not much reward, and that okra is itchy and I don’t like it much at all — though I’d give anything for one more bowl of my mother’s tomato soup with a few pieces of okra stowing away in her quiet attempt at giving us a balanced diet.
Granny was especially glad to have me around. I can still hear her singing in the kitchen, the screen door open as she swept and mopped. Pity the cat that tried to slip inside and came within reach of her broom.
Around eleven she’d make me what she called a “working man’s lunch.” Thick slices — slabs, really — of bacon cooked with spring onions, and a square of fresh bread baked in a pan three times my age. Some part of me has spent my whole life trying to find those flavors again. I’m still looking.
And here’s where the telling gets hard. How do you explain what’s missing to someone who’s never tasted the difference? I sometimes wonder about the modern palate — dulled by fast food, softened by microwave meals, numbed by ultra‑processed everything. Cooking shows and celebrity chefs can’t sharpen what the food system has blunted.
My greatest disappointment has been pork. If you’re vegetarian, or if you don’t care about the difference between grass‑fed and grain‑fed beef, feel free to skip ahead. You do you. But bacon does not taste the same. Pork chops do not taste the same. They shrivel and melt away in the pan until you question what you just paid for — and that’s not nostalgia talking. That’s chemistry.
The shift came with industrial farming. Modern hogs are fed diets dominated by polyunsaturated fatty acids, or PUFAs — the same unstable fats found in seed oils like soy, corn, and sunflower. Add in distillers grains, the leftovers from ethanol production, and you get pigs that grow faster but carry fat that is softer, more liquid, and quicker to oxidize. The meat tastes different. It spoils faster. The lard goes rancid very quickly. When PUFA oxidizes, it forms aldehydes and peroxides — compounds that cause inflammation, and inflammation opens the door to a long list of troubles.
Ask the industry about it and they’ll tell you everything is fine — that modern pork is leaner, cleaner, better. But the truth, as any old‑timer could tell you, is in the skillet. The official story says better living through chemistry. The bacon says in a pig’s eye.
If you grew up after Walmart replaced the local market and after Smithfield was sold to China, you may not even know pork used to be a different food entirely. The real product hasn’t vanished completely — you can still find co‑ops and small farms that feed their hogs a healthier, old‑fashioned diet — but you’ll pay dearly for it. And be warned: once you know the difference, nothing else will ever taste the same.
Outside The Box 