About this Event
This event will be held both in person and online. Register here for the in-person lecture!
Mark A. Johnson earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of Alabama. He specializes in the history of the United States and, specifically, the U.S. South and African American History. In 2017, he published An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue: From Wood Pit to White Sauce. In 2021, he published Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932. His most recent book, American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon was published in April of this year.
His newest book explores the four-century history of a gastronomic phenomenon in the United States. In American Bacon, Mark A. Johnson asks (and answers) a seemingly simple question: How has bacon overcome centuries of religious prohibition, cultural contempt, and dietary advice to become a twenty-first-century culinary and cultural powerhouse?
Starting in early modern Britain and tracing the story of bacon through the colonial era, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, modern fad diets, and the emerging craft bacon industry, Johnson provides a new perspective on some familiar American narratives. More than a story of production, marketing, and consumption, Johnson argues, this cultural history connects bacon to race, class, and gender while also illuminating major historical forces, such as migration, warfare, urbanization and suburbanization, reform movements, cultural trends, and globalization. For Johnson, bacon’s story from “most dangerous food in the supermarket” to pop culture and gastronomic phenomenon reflects the cultural values of a nation.
Event venue & nearby stays
808 Commonwealth Ave room 124, 808 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, United States
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