Bacon is hard to resist. I don't eat much of it, but mostly I simply shake soy Bacos on my salads with some red pepper flakes to give it some flavor.
Pork and ham I do eat perhaps once a week. When I was in France, the public TV channel in the hotel gave a documentary on modern hog processing methods, and it was truly disgusting: from insemination to slaughter, pigs are treated abominably.
Pigs will eat anything. I always thought that was why they were non kosher, and of course, the Philistines seem to have come to Canaan from Mycenaean Greece as refugees with pigs, their favorite food. Baal and his wife Astarte were fond of pigs, so Jehovah was a sheep and goat guy, so that also has been mentioned as a reason. I suppose Mohammad cured at least some of the Palestinians (who were previously know as Philistines) of eating pork.
I wonder what would have happened had Mohammad been presented with some good Canadian bacon and told it was from some other animal. It might have changed the world forever.
The Spanish are major pig eaters. If you ever want to get a conversation started among Spaniards, ask them who has the best ham. Cubans and Spaniards are culturally obsessed with eating lechón for all festive occasions. Eating a pig in public was a major way of showing the world that a given Spaniard was not a Jew or a Morisco, but a viejo cristiano. In Spain, Jews and Muslims were given a choice of becoming Christians and taking Christian names and keeping all their stuff, or leaving Spain with the clothes on their backs. Most seem to have chosen the first option, and took super Christian surnames, like Santa Cruz, Santa María, Samaniego (Saint John) and such.
El Santo Oficio, the Holy Office, aka the Inquisition, had officers who carefully checked to see that smoke was coming out of ever chimney from Friday to Saturday sundown. Jews in Spain were mostly urban. Moriscos (Muslims) tended to be rural.
