Mark A. Johnson in conversation with Jim Auchmutey

Join us for an evening with Mark A. Johnson to discuss his new book American Bacon, the four-century history of a gastronomic phenomenon in the United States. He will be in conversation with Jim Auchmutey (Smokelore). This event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested.

This event will take place at Decatur Library after the library has closed for the day. Please enter through the Ground Floor, rear doors (from the lower level of the parking lot).

About the Book: 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.

About the Author: Mark A. Johnson, from Milwaukee, earned a PhD in history from the University of Alabama. Previously, he earned an MA from the University of Maryland and BA from Purdue University. He currently teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and is the author of An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue: From Wood Pit to White Sauce and Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacle, 1877–1932.

About the Conversation Partner: Jim Auchmutey spent twenty-nine years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a reporter and editor, twice winning the Cox Newspaper chain’s Writer of the Year award. His food writing has been honored by the James Beard Foundation, the Association of Food Journalists, and the Sigma Delta Chi journalism society. He is coauthor of The Ultimate Barbecue Sauce Cookbook and author of The Class of ’65: A Student, a Divided Town, and the Long Road to Forgiveness. He lives in Georgia and descends from a long line of pitmasters.