Now don’t get me wrong, I love bacon just as much as anyone, in fact, there is no smell in the world better than that of bacon frying in the morning. You can have your roses, your Chanel and even the smell of sun on a beautiful woman’s skin. I’ll take the scent of bacon crisping and popping in an iron skillet...
Now don’t get me wrong, I love bacon just as much as anyone, in fact, there is no smell in the world better than that of bacon frying in the morning. You can have your roses, your Chanel and even the smell of sun on a beautiful woman’s skin. I’ll take the scent of bacon crisping and popping in an iron skillet...
A Polish piglet
I want to tell you a story about a pig. Not a corn-fed American pig fattened in a massive Midwestern hog lot that generates tons of waste along with the bacon, pork chops and hams that help fatten a largely overweight America.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love bacon just as much as anyone, in fact, there is no smell in the world better than that of bacon frying in the morning. You can have your roses, your Chanel and even the smell of sun on a beautiful woman’s skin. I’ll take the scent of bacon crisping and popping in an iron skillet.
If not an American pig, whose? A Polish pig. In fact a Polish piglet, born to a litter on Poland’s southern border with then Czechoslovakia.
The piglet in question was born during the days of the Soviet Union and its military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, which included Poland and Czechoslovakia. The governments of those countries, in the early and mid-1980’s, were run by the Communist party. The government controlled the economy.
The government so strictly managed the economy that government inspectors came around to farms and checked on the amount of grain raised and stored, the number of cattle in the barns and even counted the piglets when sows gave birth. The inspections were to ensure that farmers, like factories, turned over their production to the state. The number of pigs carefully tallied so that farmers didn’t cheat the state of the goods that belonged to the state, not the individual.
Now it’s pretty hard to hide a pig. Pigs are big, they’re noisy, they eat a lot and create a lot of waste, which quite naturally smells a lot. In fact, as good as bacon smells, hog waste smells at the polar opposite of the scale. Just ask someone who lives near one of the big industrial hog farms that have popped up across agricultural country.
Every farmer I’ve ever met is smart. Wise in the ways of production and balancing the cost of inputs against the increase in output to earn a profit in a marketplace that is world-wide, contorted by government policies, whether to control overseas trade, taxes, including tariffs or programs to encourage growing some crops and discouraging others. It’s a crazy business. Capital intensive, low margin, dependent on weather, with input costs, like fertilizer, seed and herbicides controlled by mega-corporations, whose interests don’t always align with the farmer, much like the Communist government bureaucrat inspector, whose interest didn’t align the farmer, but rather with protecting his job by getting the count right on each and every piglet, to ensure the farmer wasn’t cheating the government.
Now, like I said, hogs are big, noisy and smelly. They’re hard to hide, so it’s easy for government inspectors to find and count. Ahh, but piglets, that’s a different story. Piglets are small, not so noisy and easy to hide.
Farming is a tough business in the best of times. It’s a tough business in a capitalist environment. It’s a tougher business in a Communist environment where the governing philosophy is that the hogs don’t belong to you, the farmer, but rather to the people, as exemplified by the government. Thus, since they belong to the government, the government must keep track of them, remember that nasty old government bureaucrat communist inspector?
If you’re a small-time farmer struggling to get by in Southern Poland during the Communist days with a few hogs, how do you improve your family’s economic situation? You can’t hide a hog, but you can hide a piglet. So, just as the inspector would be pulling in, our Polish farmer would slip a piglet under his jacket and out the back door of the hog shed, as the farmer’s wife greeted the inspector, slowing his approach to the hog lot.
As the piglet matured and it became time to butcher the hog the local economy would be further improved as the farmer swapped a portion of the meat to the local butcher for his labor in transforming the hog into bacon, cutlets and hams. The Communist government none the wiser.
I can’t tell you if the illicit bacon smelled any better, but I’ve no doubt the farmer’s family believed the taste sweeter for not having passed through Communist hands.
That wily farmer’s grandson left Poland to immigrate to this country and is today an American soldier. That soldier has spent his entire adult life defending our country while earning a combat action badge. He told me this story as we were dining on Polish ham while on military training with our NATO allies, the Polish Army.
© William L. Enyart 2021
Reflections from the River
E-mail: bill@billenyart.com