A crispy and fried piece of meat served with fried eggs for breakfast is called belly in Poland and bacon in UK and US. Is this the same thing? Is the difference just linguistic?

Today, we talk about one of the most delicious foods ever, and we definitely won’t roast it. The dispute about whether bacon is belly and vice versa has been going on for years, and it is not so easy to find any satisfactory answer. There are two possibilities, maybe three.

Is belly and bacon the same thing?

When you look into a Polish-English dictionary, you’ll learn that going to some non-Polish shop you should ask for ‘bacon’. But in fact, this name means four different things – belly, bacon, lard and smoked meats. This is the most important argument of those who state that bacon and belly is the same thing.

Yet, there are people who think otherwise. And it is they with whom we see eye to eye, because when we dive into this topic, it is only a matter of time until we discover that these two pieces of meat have a lot in common, but the surface of a belly is more fatty than in case of bacon. And this leads us to another discovery: belly and bacon come from different parts of pig. Bacon comes from the dorsal part, which contains less fat than belly taken from the sides of pig.

There is also third (emergency) approach, but it also does not seem to explain the belly origin fairly. Some people state that bacon is just belly from which the fat was removed.

And those were the three theories about the differences between belly and bacon. But, there is one thing that remains unchanged regardless of the theory – it is one of the most appetizing meats ever!