American Pork

I was trying to explain my trip to Spain to my dad, especially the food. And I mean, the food, my god man, it’s just the best food culture. More on that in a second. But I told him, think about the best ham you’ve ever had in your life. The Spanish would touch it. They would think it is trash.

I was again reminded at the horrors of American foodways. Like everything else in America, you can get the best food in the world here. But you have to try to find it and it is often the province of the elite, or an extremely localized thing. The average food is so much better in many, many countries around the world than the U.S.–imagine nearly any meal you can find on the street in Mexico or Thailand, the emphasis on freshness and careful preparation in Japan, the sheer quality of ingredients in Spain and Italy and France. Even nations with less successful food traditions–no one is going to Costa Rica or Ecuador or Cuba for the food–at least there is still this often this shared joy around eating good food together, often in casual surroundings.

Then there is the United States, where even a functional loaf of bread requires a special trip to a bakery, where we actually eat turkey, where we slather everything in ketchup, where we raise our children on chicken nuggets and soggy fries. As I have discussed in the depth, the difference in an above average sandwich in this nation versus anything you can get at any train station or 7/11 in other nations is an abomination. Hell, we are even ruining jalapeños!!!

So I read this article on jamón iberico with some amusement because, well, I don’t know if Americans deserve jamón iberico. What we deserve is the ultimate American contribution to pork culture–the McRib. Yep, that’s right. What is more American than taking a super fatty cut of pork and making it extra gross and then slathering it with too sweet BBQ sauce? Nothing. It fits everything that Americans love–unhealthy, too salty, overly sweet, on bad bread, and extra fatty. We could have quality ingredients. But then even our political would freak out that Obama is eating dijon mustard! I mean, we have created an entire food culture around extreme mediocrity and then look down on people as snobs for daring to do something else, or even blame the kids trying something different for eating avocado toast instead of saving for houses!!!

In any case, I had more than my share of iberico while I was in Spain. These sandwiches are just astounding and you can buy them anywhere.

Later, I didn’t even bother with the cheese. You don’t need it. The bread, the ham, that’s it. No oil, no butter, no mayo, no fats necessary. And as for flavor, the bread and meat provide it all.

And then there’s the bellota version, with the incredible hams that these masters carve up for those of us lucky to get to eat it and watch them work. It just melts in your mouth.

Here is the ham which gave me this.

But of course among the reasons we can’t do this is that it requires not eating pork by the pound and allowing the pigs to actually roam and eat acorns instead of putting them in cages their whole lives to produce the terrible sandwich hams of the United States.

So no, I am not happy to be back eating in the United States. In fact, I am not particularly thrilled to be in this near-disaster of a country at all. But I am especially unhappy to think about American food. In any case, this isn’t a nation that gets iberico. Nope, we get McRib. And call me a food snob all you want. I completely embrace the idea that people should have things in life that are better than other things. And just like Miles Davis is objectively better than Kenny G, so is jamón iberico over the McRib.