Well Being: The Processed Meat Problem

Part Three: What Actually Killed Virginia Ham

Well Being: The Processed Meat Problem

Part Three: What Actually Killed Virginia Ham

This essay is Part Three of the series “The Processed Meat Problem.” Parts One and Two are linked below. The essay on nutritional epidemiology, relative risk, and the nitrite question moves to Part Four.

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When we published Part One, a reader wrote something in the comments that I have not stopped thinking about since.

He raised the point that pigs are monogastric. Unlike a cow, a pig does not hydrogenate the fats it eats. It largely deposits them. What a pig consumes shows up in its fat with a directness that has no equivalent in beef. He described a friend who raises Mangalitsa hogs that forage in the woods and eat enormous quantities of acorns before harvest, and who had his pigs’ fat tested. The result came back at roughly sixty percent oleic fatty acid. Olive oil is around seventy.

A pig turned into an oak woods in autumn becomes, in a meaningful chemical sense, a container of something close to olive oil.

Several other readers wrote to ask about a different tree. In Part One I mentioned, almost in passing, that Virginia farmers turned their hogs into forests dominated by large oaks and, before the chestnut blight, into chestnut forests. That single clause generated more mail than anything else in the essay.

The question people asked, in various forms, was this. Did Virginia ham die with the American chestnut?

It is a good question. It deserved research rather than a quick answer, and the answer turned out to be more interesting than I had anticipated.

America’s Forgotten Food Forest

Anyone born after 1950 has no idea how important the American chestnut was to both the North American ecosystem and to the indigenous peoples who populated it, and to earlier generations of Americans.

The chestnut made up roughly half of many eastern hardwood forests. There were something on the order of four billion of them. They grew fast, grew straight, and resisted rot so thoroughly that, as one forest pathologist put it, the baby’s crib was likely made of chestnut and so, in all probability, was the old man’s coffin.

And every single autumn, they rained food onto the forest floor.

Chestnuts cropped annually and cropped heavily. Oaks do not. Oaks produce acorns on irregular cycles, with heavy years and failure years, and acorns carry tannins that chestnuts largely lack. A farmer with chestnut woods had a dependable harvest he did not plant, did not tend, did not fertilize, and did not have to gather. He simply notched his mark into a hog’s ear and turned it loose into the forest.

Nineteenth century accounts describe pigs growing so fat on chestnuts, acorns, and hickory nuts that by late fall they could barely move. Scots-Irish settlers wrote home to describe woods where the chestnuts lay knee deep. Chestnut ripening fell conveniently near the holiday season, and turn-of-the-century newspapers ran photographs of railroad cars heaped with nuts rolling into the cities.

Then a fungus arrived on imported nursery stock around the turn of the twentieth century. In roughly forty years the blight moved across two hundred twenty million acres and killed essentially all of these majestic trees.

What Happened in the Virginia Mountains: The American Chestnut Blight

For the mountain counties, the readers who wrote to us were right. The historical record is quite clear.

The American Chestnut Foundation’s own journal, examining Patrick, Floyd, and Franklin counties here in Virginia, documents what happened. The blight ended the chestnut trade, and the loss of the chestnuts helped bring an end to the traditional practice of raising hogs in the mountain forests. Allowing hogs to forage for chestnuts had been one of the best and cheapest ways to fatten them for slaughter.

And there was no easy substitute.

Acorns were not sufficient.

Population decline in those three counties accelerated during the blight years of the 1920s. The authors conclude that out-migration in response to the loss of the chestnut was likely significant. Families left. Certainly not solely because they could no longer fatten hogs on free chestnuts, but the destruction of that food source was part of a much larger economic loss caused by the disappearance of the tree.

So, at least in the Blue Ridge and the free-range hog country of the Virginia mountains, the readers who wrote to us were right. The chestnut forests were part of the agricultural economy. They fed the hogs, provided food and timber for families, and supported a way of life that had existed for generations. When the chestnuts died, much of the economy built around them disappeared as well.

But the Famous Smithfield Ham Was Never a Chestnut Ham

Smithfield ham was one of Virginia’s most famous food exports, a salt-cured, smoked country ham produced around the town of Smithfield for centuries. By the nineteenth century, it had become an international delicacy and a symbol of Virginia’s agricultural and culinary tradition.

But there is a problem with this story. Smithfield lies in Isle of Wight County, in Virginia’s Tidewater region, well outside the areas where American chestnut grew in commercial abundance.

So, this internationally famous Smithfield ham, the one Queen Victoria is said to have kept on standing order, was not a chestnut ham.

It was a peanut ham.

Peanuts became an important commodity crop in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina after the Civil War, thriving in soils depleted by years of farming. Once the peanuts were harvested, farmers turned their hogs into the fields to eat what the harvesters had left behind. The hogs essentially finished the harvest themselves, while fattening for slaughter.

And peanuts mattered to the meat quality. Like acorns, they are rich in unsaturated fats. Pigs are monogastric animals, and the fats they eat affect the fats they deposit. The result was the soft, almost oily fat that became part of the distinctive character of the Smithfield ham.

Even the older history of hogs on the coastal plain points to oak rather than chestnut. A promotional pamphlet written in 1666 to entice British emigrants to Carolina described hogs practically drunk on the enormous abundance of acorns. More than three centuries ago, the tree fattening hogs along the coastal plain was already the oak.

So the disappearance of the American chestnut may have helped destroy the traditional hog economy of the Virginia mountains. But it did not kill the Smithfield ham market.

Which leaves the more interesting question.

What did?

The End of Free-Range Hogs

There was another force dismantling the old hog economy, and it had nothing to do with trees.

Across the South, county by county, stock laws overturned a system that had existed for centuries. Under the old rule, a farmer who wanted to protect his crops fenced livestock out. Under the new rule, the livestock owner had to fence his animals in. Floyd and Patrick counties went even further, defining property lines and streams as legal fences whether or not a physical fence existed.

For the small farmer who owned hogs but had neither fenced pasture nor the money to build it, that could end the practice of free-ranging hogs altogether. And these laws were spreading before the chestnut blight, during it, and after it.

The free-range pig did not just lose the chestnut. It lost the legal right to reach it.

We have seen the modern version of this ourselves. Joel Salatin still raises hogs in the woods at Polyface, rotating them through forest paddocks behind low electric wire. It is an ingenious system, and in some ways recreates the old practice of allowing pigs to harvest food directly from the forest. But Joel has access to an enormous amount of land. We have only about ten acres of woods on our farm, and fencing pigs through that forest would be a serious undertaking.

Electric fencing makes it possible, but it does not make the problem go away. The wire has to run low enough for a pig, vegetation has to be kept from grounding it, the pigs have to be trained to respect it, and the forest has to be divided into paddocks so that they can be moved before they destroy the ground. The old free-range hog simply went into the woods. The modern sylvan hog requires infrastructure, management, and enough land to rotate him through it.

But something else happened in Virginia, and it may be even more important to the story of Virginia ham.

Long before Spain established the modern protected designation for jamón ibérico, Virginia law had created something remarkably similar for Smithfield ham. It protected not merely the name, but the place and the method that made the ham distinctive.

Then Virginia repealed an important part of that protection.

What the Virginia Assembly Protected in 1926, and Gave Up in 1966

The law began with a fight over the Smithfield name.

In 1925, a World War I veteran named James Sprigg moved from Texas to Virginia and bought The Smithfield Company, a competitor of Gwaltney’s. According to the history preserved by the Isle of Wight County Museum, people in Smithfield worried that an outsider might begin selling an inferior ham under the town’s famous name. The Virginia General Assembly responded the following year.

The motive may have been protectionism, but the law they passed did something important.

In 1926, Virginia legally defined a Genuine Smithfield ham. It had to come from a peanut-fed hog raised in the peanut belt of Virginia or North Carolina. The ham then had to be cured, treated, smoked, and processed within the corporate limits of Smithfield.

The law protected the feed. It protected where the hog was raised. And it protected where the ham was made.

Virginia had essentially created what we would now recognize as a protected regional food. The name Smithfield did not simply tell you where the ham had been cured. It told you something about the animal itself, what it had eaten, where it had been raised, and how the resulting ham had been made.

Then, in 1966, the General Assembly removed the peanut-fed and peanut-belt requirements.

The reason was straightforward. A slaughter facility had been built, and the industry was buying hogs from outside the traditional peanut belt. Rather than require the industry to continue producing the ham described by the law, Virginia changed the law to accommodate what the industry was already doing.

That changed the meaning of Genuine Smithfield ham. Today, Virginia law requires a Genuine Smithfield ham to be processed, treated, smoked, aged, and cured by the long-cure dry-salt method. It must age for at least six months, beginning when the fresh pork is first treated with dry salt. And all of this must take place within the corporate limits of Smithfield.

That is essentially what remained.

Nothing about the breed of hog. Nothing about what it ate. Nothing about where it was raised or how it lived. The connection between the animal and the land was removed from the law. What remained was the place of curing and the length of time it spent there.

On January 24, 2024, a Smithfield Foods vice president wrote to the Smithfield Times: “We have decided to discontinue production of Smithfield Genuine Hams in 2024.”

Yep - the Chinese corporation that owns Smithfield Ham removed the Genuine Smithfield ham its from production. The explanation was consumer demand. Americans were buying spiral-cut smoked hams instead.

Genuine Smithfield Ham was a long-cured, dry-salt country ham aged at least six months. The mass-market spiral ham that displaced it is a fundamentally different processed product, commonly cured with nitrite, injected with water and other ingredients, cooked, smoked, and sold for convenience.

The smokehouse the company had built in 2019 for $1.8 million to produce Genuine Smithfield hams was repurposed. It now produces the company’s mild-cure hams. Smithfield’s mayor acknowledged that the replacement does not meet the statutory requirements, while maintaining that it is nevertheless a Smithfield ham.

In April 2024, the company presented the last Genuine Smithfield ham to the Isle of Wight County Museum. There was a ceremony. A William & Mary a cappella group sang, changing the words of an old song to ask that the last ham be saved for them. Then the ham was placed in a glass case beside the museum’s famous old ham, preserved since 1902.

A food that Virginia went to the trouble of protecting by law in 1926 is now an exhibit in a museum.

The chestnut blight had largely finished its destruction by the middle of the twentieth century. Virginia removed the feed and geographic requirements from Genuine Smithfield ham in 1966. Production ended in 2024.

Those dates tell a very different story from one in which a fungus killed Virginia ham.

Spain Faced the Same Problem and Made a Different Choice

Now compare Virginia with Spain.

The Spanish dehesa is an open oak woodland. Not chestnut, but oak. And jamón ibérico de bellota, among the most expensive hams in the world, is produced from pigs fattened on acorns.

The difference was not the tree. It was what Spain chose to protect.

Royal Decree 4/2014 governs Spain’s Iberian ham quality standards. In important respects, it protects the very things Virginia once protected and later removed from its Smithfield ham law: the animal, its feed, the land on which it was raised, and the method of production.

A producer may label pork de bellota only when the animal has completed the montanera, the traditional acorn-fattening season, and meets strict requirements. During this period, the pigs forage on acorns and natural pasture without supplemental feed. They must gain at least 46 kilograms over a minimum of 60 days, cannot be slaughtered before 14 months of age, and must meet minimum carcass weights. The animals are individually identified and tracked.

Pork that does not meet those requirements can still be produced and sold. It simply cannot be called de bellota. Spain created separate designations, including de cebo de campo for pigs raised with outdoor access and supplemental feed, and de cebo for conventionally raised animals. The consumer knows exactly what she is buying when they buy meat labeled jamón ibérico de bellota.

The woodland itself is also part of the standard. Before pigs enter the dehesa, approved inspection bodies determine whether the land has enough acorns to support the number of animals the producer intends to put on it. Qualifying parcels must be registered in Spain’s agricultural mapping system as suitable for acorn fattening. The number of pigs is therefore tied to the carrying capacity of the land.

Spain also protects the language and imagery used to sell the product. Terms such as dehesa and montanera are reserved for qualifying products, as are images and symbols that suggest acorn feeding or the traditional woodland system. Pata negra is reserved for the highest classification.

A Spanish producer cannot put an oak tree and acorns on a package of confinement pork and allow the consumer to assume the rest.

In America, photographs of red barns, green pastures, split-rail fences, and animals outdoors routinely appear on food produced in systems bearing little relationship to those images.

Spain protected the animal, the land, the feed, and the method. America protected the trademark.

What Happened to American Pork?

There is one final part of this story, and it brings us back to the pork we eat today.

Smithfield ham did not disappear from American grocery stores. The Smithfield name remains everywhere. What disappeared was the ham that Virginia once went to considerable trouble to define and protect.

Smithfield Foods was sold in 2013 to Shuanghui International, now WH Group, a Chinese meat conglomerate with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese state. Its chairman, Wan Long, is a Communist Party member, a former People’s Liberation Army soldier, and a former member of China’s National People’s Congress. Other senior WH Group executives have also been identified as CCP members, and the takeover of Smithfield was financed in large part by a $4 billion loan from the state-owned Bank of China.

Smithfield returned to the American stock market in 2025, but that should not be confused with a return to American control. WH Group remains the controlling shareholder. The largest pork processor in the United States, headquartered in the Virginia town that made American ham famous, remains controlled by a Chinese corporation whose leadership has extensive ties to the CCP and the Chinese state.

Nor is Smithfield an isolated example. The two largest hog processors in America are Smithfield and JBS. Smithfield is controlled by Hong Kong-based WH Group; JBS is Brazilian. Using the most recent comparable industry-wide figures, the two together accounted for about 44 percent of American hog slaughter capacity.

That consolidation matters because something else has happened to American pork. We have made it extraordinarily abundant and relatively cheap, but in the process much of it has become an undistinguished commodity.

Compare pork with beef. Americans routinely pay several times as much for a good steak as they do for a pork chop. Beef is marketed by breed, grade, aging, marbling, ranch, grass versus grain, and increasingly by the farm that raised the animal. At the supermarket meat counter, pork is more often simply pork. The breed is usually unknown. The feed is unknown. The farm is unknown. The manner in which the animal was raised is usually unknown. We have spent decades making pork cheaper and more uniform, while removing many of the distinctions that once gave consumers a reason to value one piece of pork over another.

There is another reason modern American pork is not the pork our grandparents ate. Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, the American hog itself was deliberately changed. During the war on dietary fat, breeders selected heavily for faster-growing pigs with larger muscles, less backfat, and increasingly lean carcasses. Packers reinforced that selection by paying premiums for lean hogs. Smithfield was part of the movement, even introducing a “Lean Generation” line in the 1990s built around some of the leanest commercial hog genetics available.

It worked. American pork became remarkably lean, fast-growing and efficient. Modern hogs can convert roughly 2.5 to 3 pounds of feed into a pound of body weight, an extraordinary achievement in animal breeding. But the traits that made pork cheap and efficient did not necessarily make it taste better.

Selection for leanness reduced marbling and could reduce juiciness and flavor. They spent decades breeding the fat out of the American pig to satisfy a low-fat diet doctrine that consumers are increasingly abandoning. We are now left with an extraordinarily efficient animal producing inexpensive meat that many Americans simply do not value as they do beef.

The old Smithfield ham represented almost the opposite idea. The hog came from a particular region. What it ate mattered. Where it was raised mattered. How the ham was cured mattered. Those requirements made production more difficult and more expensive, but they also made the finished food distinctive enough that people were willing to pay for it.

Today, Genuine Smithfield Ham is no longer commercially produced. But a Chinese corporation now uses the Smithfield name to sell ham under the Smithfield brand. Most Americans don’t have a clue about what they are missing. They no longer know the taste of pork grown on chestnuts, acorns, or peanuts. Processed the old-fashioned way.

That may be the larger lesson in this story. America succeeded spectacularly at producing cheap pork. We became much less interested in preserving the things that once made a specific pork worth more.

Spain made the opposite choice. It preserved those distinctions, enforced them, and built an international luxury market around them. A leg of properly produced jamón ibérico de bellota can command extraordinary prices precisely because the consumer knows what the pig was, what it ate, where it lived, and how the ham was made.

We once knew those things about Smithfield ham too.

What Exactly Are We Studying?

In Part Two, I described how the American pig itself changed and raised a question that matters enormously to nutrition research: when epidemiologists compare processed meat consumption across generations, are they actually studying the same food?

The Spanish system makes that question much easier to answer. When a researcher studies jamón ibérico de bellota, the breed is defined. The diet is defined. The minimum age at slaughter is defined. The weight gained during the acorn season is defined. The land on which the animal foraged is regulated, as is the curing process. These are not assumptions about how the pig was probably raised. They are requirements.

Compare that with American country ham. The pig may have been raised in confinement or on pasture. It may have eaten corn and soy or foraged in the woods. Its breed and genetics may be completely different from those of the hogs used to make the same style of ham fifty or a hundred years ago. Yet all of these products can end up in the same category in a nutritional study.

That matters.

A pig deposits dietary fatty acids into its own tissues to a degree that makes diet particularly important to pork fat composition. A hog fattened on acorns or other high-oleic mast can therefore produce fat with a very different fatty-acid profile from a confinement hog raised primarily on conventional grain and oilseed rations. The two animals may ultimately produce hams that look essentially identical on a food-frequency questionnaire, while the foods themselves are chemically and nutritionally different.

And the differences do not end with feed. We changed the genetics of the American pig. We selected for lean muscle, rapid growth and efficient feed conversion. We reduced backfat and marbling. We changed how pigs live, what they eat, when they are slaughtered, and how they are processed.

The curing method adds another variable. Traditional country ham was preserved primarily with dry salt and time, while much modern processed pork is cured with added nitrite or nitrate. Those compounds inhibit dangerous bacteria and give cured meat its characteristic color and flavor, but they can also contribute to the formation of N-nitroso compounds, some of which are carcinogenic. This matters because epidemiological studies often place traditionally dry-salted ham and modern nitrite-cured processed meats in the same broad category. If we are asking whether “processed meat” causes disease, then what was used to process it is not a minor detail.

Then epidemiology puts the old ham and the modern ham into the same box and calls them both “processed meat.”

A traditionally salt-cured ham and a modern nitrite-cured product are not the same food, and there is no scientific justification for treating them as though they carry the same health risks.

Virginia once defined some of those variables in law. The hog had to come from a particular region and it had to be peanut-fed. In 1966, we removed those requirements and then off the company to the highest bidder, a CCP-affiliated corporation.

The Blight Was Only the Beginning

So what killed Virginia ham?

The chestnut blight helped destroy the mountain hog commons, and that loss was involuntary. Nobody chose it. Billions of trees died from a fungus introduced on imported nursery stock, and those old farming families of Patrick, Floyd, Franklin, and other mountain counties paid the price.

But the blight does not explain what happened next.

Closing the commons was a decision made county by county through stock laws and ordinances. Removing the peanut-fed and peanut-belt requirements from the Smithfield ham statute in 1966 was a decision made in Richmond when those requirements no longer suited the industry. Selling Smithfield Foods to the Chinese company WH Group in 2013 was a decision. Ending production of Genuine Smithfield Ham in 2024 was a decision.

And Virginia did not lose its forests.

We lost the American chestnut, an extraordinary tree and a superior source of nuts. But oak and hickory still cover much of this Commonwealth. Acorns still fall every autumn, including here on our own farm, mostly unused by agriculture.

Spain built its most valuable pork tradition around those same acorns. It protected the land, the animal, the feed, and the method in law. Virginia once did something remarkably similar with Smithfield ham, requiring peanut-fed hogs from a defined region and protecting the place and method of production.

Then the government in Virginia abandoned the standards that made its most famous ham distinctive.

The fungus killed the chestnut. The rest of the story was written by us.

Five Trees in Madison County

We are growing five hybrid American chestnuts here on our farm in Madison County. They are four years old and already setting fruit.

I was pleased about that until I began reading more closely about the effort to restore the American chestnut.

For roughly forty years, two major approaches have dominated that effort. Both have encountered serious problems.

The first is conventional breeding. American chestnuts were crossed with blight-resistant Chinese chestnuts, and their offspring repeatedly backcrossed to American trees. The goal was straightforward: retain the blight resistance of the Chinese chestnut while recovering as much of the American chestnut as possible.

The program was built around an assumption made in the 1980s that blight resistance was controlled by a small number of genes. If that were true, repeated backcrossing should eventually produce a tree that was overwhelmingly American chestnut while retaining the few Chinese genes necessary for resistance.

Genomic analysis published in 2020 showed that the biology was considerably more complicated. Blight resistance is polygenic, involving many genes rather than just a few. More troubling, researchers found that the greater the proportion of American chestnut ancestry, the lower the resistance tended to be. Selected advanced-generation trees averaged about 83 percent American ancestry, but their resistance remained somewhere between that of an F1 hybrid and a pure American chestnut.

An eight-year field trial across the Southeast produced similarly disappointing results. Resistance remained well below that of Chinese chestnut, particularly where disease pressure was greatest.

The American Chestnut Foundation now acknowledges the problem. Its own assessment is that the number of trees and degree of resistance produced by the backcross program are not sufficient to provide a restoration population without further breeding.

The second major approach was genetic engineering.

For more than a decade, a transgenic chestnut called Darling 58 was promoted as a possible answer to the blight. Researchers inserted a wheat gene encoding oxalate oxidase, an enzyme intended to reduce the damage caused by the fungus. The American Chestnut Foundation invested roughly $2 million directly in the project and provided another $2 million in legal and technical support. Darling 58 received favorable coverage from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, National Geographic, and elsewhere.

Then, in December 2023, the Foundation withdrew its support.

The trees were showing inconsistent blight resistance, reduced growth, and increased mortality. There was also a serious laboratory error. The trees and pollen used in years of research were not Darling 58. They were another transgenic line, Darling 54, which carried a deletion in a known gene. The mistake may have dated to 2016. Years of experiments, and the material supporting federal deregulation petitions, involved the wrong genetic line.

Which brings me back to the five trees growing behind our house.

Four years is quite young for an American chestnut to begin producing nuts. Chinese chestnuts generally bear earlier. Our trees are hybrids, and their early production and vigor raise an obvious question about how much of what we are seeing is attributable to their Chinese ancestry. The same ancestry that provides vigor and resistance also moves the resulting tree farther from the American chestnut that once dominated these forests.

That does not make these trees worthless. Far from it. But it does require some precision about what we mean when we say that the American chestnut is coming back.

We have encountered this same problem throughout this series. The American hog underwent genetic changes but remained a hog. Smithfield ham changed while retaining the Smithfield name. Now we are attempting to recreate the American chestnut by introducing genes from another species because the original tree remains extraordinarily vulnerable to the disease that nearly eliminated it.

How much can something change before the old name ceases to tell us very much about what it actually is?

There is Another Chestnut Story Much Closer to Home.

The farm where we buy our hay, Pullen Farm in Culpeper County, has native American chestnuts that are thriving and producing heavily. These are not hybrids and they are not genetically engineered. They are American chestnuts that survived a blight that killed billions of their kind, still standing in Virginia and dropping nuts every autumn.

Those trees may be extraordinarily important. Surviving wild American chestnuts preserve genetic diversity that cannot simply be manufactured by a breeding program working from a limited number of founders. It is one reason citizen scientists and chestnut researchers have spent years locating, documenting, and breeding surviving wild trees from Alabama to Maine. A large, healthy, reproducing American chestnut in Culpeper County is more than an interesting old tree. It is genetic material from a population that survived.

And the family that owns those trees has its own history with the Virginia mountains.

They are the descendants of an Appalachian family removed from the Blue Ridge when the land was acquired for Shenandoah National Park. Their family history in those mountains reaches back beyond the blight, to the time when the chestnut forests were still standing.

Many of these families had been in the Blue Ridge for generations, some since before the American Revolution. Virginia had county deed books, but landholding in isolated mountain communities did not always fit neatly into the modern world of recorded deeds, surveyed boundaries, and clean chains of title. Land passed through families. Children remained on parents’ and grandparents’ farms. Boundaries might be understood by everyone in the community without being described with the precision eventually demanded by the state.

When Virginia began assembling land for Shenandoah National Park, all of those distinctions suddenly mattered. These people were not simply squatters on someone else’s mountain. Many belonged to communities whose relationship to that land stretched back generations, but whose rights did not always exist in the form Richmond ultimately demanded.

The sequence of what happened to those mountain families matters.

The blight swept through the Blue Ridge during the 1920s and destroyed an important part of the economy of mountain communities. Chestnuts provided timber, tanbark, nuts that could be sold for cash, and free chestnuts for hogs every autumn. When the trees died, families that depended upon them became poorer. Prohibition damaged another source of income by eliminating legal markets for alcoholic cider. Then came the Great Depression.

Into this already devastated economy came the researchers.

This was not entirely disinterested academic curiosity. Miriam Sizer, an educator who studied the mountain families for three years, was employed by the Commonwealth of Virginia while Virginia was acquiring the land for the proposed park. She reported her findings to William E. Carson, chairman of the state commission overseeing that effort, describing the residents as ignorant, lacking ambition, and deficient in their understanding of law and citizenship. George Freeman Pollock, the wealthy owner of nearby Skyland resort and a leading advocate for creation of the park, had helped put Sizer in the hollows and encouraged the research.

Then came University of Chicago psychologist and eugenicist Mandel Sherman and Washington journalist Thomas Henry. Their 1933 book, Hollow Folk, portrayed the people of Nicholson, Corbin, and Weakley Hollows as isolated, primitive, backward, and biologically deficient. The work helped create the public image of a mountain population that needed to be removed for its own good. Decades later, archaeological work in those same hollows would show a much more ordinary rural population, connected to the outside economy and living lives far removed from the caricature that had been created for them.

The National Park Service’s own history acknowledges that such portrayals helped build public support for removing and effectively disenfranchising mountain residents. One University of Chicago anthropologist described the Blue Ridge hollows as rich material for studying the “growth and decline of human culture.”

The argument presented to the broader public was that these mountain people had degraded an otherwise pristine landscape. But the collapse occurring around them had causes far beyond their control. An imported fungus had destroyed the chestnut. Commercial timber companies had clear-cut enormous areas. And the national economy had collapsed.

Virginia created its Commission on Conservation and Development in 1926. Two years later, the General Assembly passed the Public Park Condemnation Act. Beginning in 1929, more than 141,000 acres were condemned or purchased, assembled from roughly 3,000 individual tracts, and ultimately transferred to the federal government for Shenandoah National Park.

About 500 families, roughly 3,000 people, lost their homes. Landowners received compensation, although modest. Tenant families whose connection to the land sometimes extended for generations generally received nothing for the land itself.

Most of the houses were not simply abandoned and left to disappear. They were dismantled or burned, in part to prevent people from returning to them. The CCC was charged with removing much of the physical evidence of the communities that had occupied the mountains: homes and outbuildings were destroyed, fences removed, and gardens and orchards allowed to disappear back into the forest. In some cases, families watched their former homes burn. What remained were often the stone foundations and chimneys that can still be found throughout Shenandoah today.

The blight helped impoverish these families. Their poverty was then used as evidence that they did not belong there.

And there is a remarkable legislative coincidence in this story.

In 1926, the Virginia General Assembly passed the law defining Genuine Smithfield Ham. It protected what the hog ate, where it was raised, and where and how the ham was produced.

In 1928, the same General Assembly passed a law allowing the state to condemn the mountain land that would become Shenandoah National Park.

One law protected a Virginia food tradition. The other helped remove hundreds of Virginia families from the land where another food tradition had existed for generations.

Forty years later, in 1966, the General Assembly returned to the Smithfield law and removed the requirements governing the animal itself: where the hog came from and what it ate.

Today, after decades of work and millions of dollars, the American chestnut has still not been restored to the eastern forest. The backcross program has not produced the resistance originally hoped for. The most prominent genetic-engineering effort ended after disappointing performance and a major laboratory error.

Yet some native American chestnuts survived without any breeding program at all. Several of them are standing today on a farm in Culpeper County owned by descendants of a family removed from the Virginia mountains.

There is another restoration project that would be considerably easier.

Nobody in Richmond needs forty years of breeding to restore meaning to the words Virginia ham. We already know how the old system worked. We know that feed changes pork fat. We know that genetics matter. We know that the manner in which the animal is raised matters. And Virginia once had a law that recognized exactly those things.

Restoring the American chestnut may take another generation or it may never happen.

Restoring the standard for Virginia ham could take one legislator and one afternoon.

Virginia country ham is not entirely gone. Here in Madison County, Kite’s Country Hams has been curing hams in Wolftown in Madison for roughly sixty-five years. What began with about 400 hams a year has grown to as many as 18,000, and its traditional hams are still aged for eight to twelve months. A handful of other small Virginia producers continue the tradition as well.

But they survive in a food economy that has moved decisively in the other direction. They compete with industrial pork that is cheap, uniform, fast to produce, and available in every supermarket in America. Traditional country ham requires time, skilled labor, curing space, and customers who understand why the finished product costs more. The tradition did not disappear completely. It has been pushed to the margins, where the people still making real Virginia country ham are increasingly preserving something the larger pork industry abandoned.

In Part Four, we leave the smokehouse and the woodlot and turn to the science itself: relative risk, absolute risk, correlation, causation, and what the epidemiology of processed meat can and cannot actually tell us.

Before asking whether a food causes disease, we should at least know what food we are talking about.

By: RWM/JGM

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This essay began with a simple question about pigs and chestnuts and ended up taking us through the destruction of the American chestnut, the disappearance of Virginia’s mountain hog economy, the changing genetics of the American pig, the dismantling of the Smithfield ham standard, foreign control of American pork processing, and the removal of families from the Blue Ridge.

That kind of research takes time. It also takes independence.

If you value long-form work that follows the evidence wherever it leads, including into history that has largely been forgotten, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscriptions are what allow us to keep doing this work without advertisers, corporate sponsors, or anyone else deciding which questions we are allowed to ask.

And thank you to those of you who already support us. You make these deep dives possible

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Sources

Virginia Code § 3.2-5419, Smithfield hams defined. Code 1950, § 3-667; 1966, c. 702, § 3.1-867; 1968, c. 140; 2008, c. 860.

The American Chestnut Foundation, Journal of the American Chestnut Foundation, vol. 19, no. 2, on chestnut loss and the hog economy of Patrick, Floyd, and Franklin counties, Virginia.

The American Chestnut Foundation, “American Chestnut History.”

The American Chestnut Foundation, “Darling 58/54” and “Science Strategies,” on the withdrawal of support for the transgenic line and on the limits of the backcross program.

National Park Service, “The Displaced,” on the sociological studies that built support for removal.

Homa, “Shenandoah National Park: The Human Cost of Conservation,” DttP: Documents to the People, on the 1928 Public Park Condemnation Act, the 141,000 acres, and the roughly five hundred displaced families.

Shenandoah National Park Oral History Collection, James Madison University Special Collections, including accounts of chestnut harvests, the blight of the 1920s, and resettlement.

Westbrook, Jared W., et al. “Optimizing genomic selection for blight resistance in American chestnut backcross populations: A trade-off with American chestnut ancestry implies resistance is polygenic.” Evolutionary Applications 13 (2020): 31 to 47.

Clark, Stacy L., et al. “Eight-year blight resistance of backcross-generation American chestnuts planted in the southeastern United States.” Forest Ecology and Management, 2018.

Hepting, George, quoted in Forest Pathology, “Chestnut Blight: An American Tragedy.”

Freinkel, Susan, “A Whole World Gone: The Loss of the American Chestnut Tree,” Alicia Patterson Foundation.

Southern Foodways Alliance, “Ham to Ham Combat: The Tale of Two Smithfields,” on the 1926 statute and the 1666 Carolina promotional pamphlet.

The Smithfield Times, “End of an era: Smithfield Foods discontinues Genuine Smithfield Ham,” January 24, 2024, and “Last Genuine Smithfield Ham arrives at IW Museum,” April 19, 2024.

Feedstuffs, “Smithfield Foods to continue producing Genuine Smithfield Ham,” June 2023.

Isle of Wight County Museum, on James Sprigg’s 1925 purchase of The Smithfield Company and the origin of the 1926 statute.

Real Decreto 4/2014, de 10 de enero, por el que se aprueba la norma de calidad para la carne, el jamón, la paleta y la caña de lomo ibérico. Boletín Oficial del Estado núm. 10, January 11, 2014.