Why 'knowledge is power' and 'France (really) is bacon'

In October 2010, responding to a post on Reddit about words or phrases that had been misunderstood as children, one user confessed to mishearing “Knowledge is power – Francis Bacon” as “Knowledge is power, France is bacon”.

“For more than a decade, I wondered over the meaning of the second part and the surreal linkage between the two,” he wrote.

“If I said to someone ‘Knowledge is power, France is bacon’, they nodded knowingly. Or someone might say ‘Knowledge is power’ and I’d finish the quote ‘France is bacon’, and they wouldn’t look at me like I’d said something very odd, but thoughtfully agree.” 

It wasn’t until years later, when he saw it written down, that the penny dropped.

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France is very much NOT bacon

For many Connexion readers, this story will be even more droll given their lived experience of the country versus the comestible. 

France is very much NOT bacon, any British expat forum will tell you. 

Like Cheddar, ‘proper’ tea, brown sauce and Carr’s water biscuits, bacon – at least, the juicy, thick-cut, loin-lifted stuff of fried breakfasts – is a culinary chimera across the Channel. 

The nearest equivalent, a wraithlike rasher of poitrine fumée, is gossamer under the grill. The trimmed rounds actually labelled ‘bacon’ in supermarkets are equally disappointing stand-ins.

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The word ‘bacon’ is French, however. Old French. It was adopted in England and in early use referred not just to cured meat from the back and sides of a pig, but pork generally – a staple of poorer, rural families for whom a single, home-grown hog would often stretch an entire year. 

When Shakespeare’s Falstaff hurls it as an insult (“bacon-fed knaves”) in Henry IV, the insinuation is ‘country bumpkin’ and cruel. The word returned to France with anglicised pronunciation, but France still has the greater claim to it, given pork remains its most popular meat. 

While the UK and US favour chicken, the French consumed more than 30kg of pork per person in 2023, mostly as charcuterie. 

It is a hugely lucrative export too – and here’s where Bacon (Sir Francis) does have a credible link.

Knowledge really IS power

On a cold April day in 1626, the polymath was travelling through London when he suddenly wondered “why flesh might not be preserved in snow as in salt”, according to John Aubrey, writing in Brief Lives 50 years later. 

Promptly stopping his carriage, he procured a hen, had it killed and gutted, and stuffed it with snow on the spot. Regrettably, this experiment did nothing to extend Bacon’s own life – he died a few days later of pneumonia – but it was not long after that ice became part of food preservation in kitchens of the affluent.

Later, ice-making machines began to be patented, from which the trade in fresh meat stood to gain considerably.

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Coming up with reliable mechanical refrigeration on ships was the next step, and here it was two Frenchmen – Charles Tellier and Ferdinand Carré – who made the breakthrough, successfully shipping cargoes of frozen meat between France and South America in 1876-77.

Today, 25% of France’s pork production is for export, making it the ninth largest exporter of pig meat in the world and generating revenue of €1billion-plus in 2022. 

Knowledge really is power. It has been bringing home France’s bacon for years.