Our Bacon Stories: Bacon has a Soul

By Eben van Tonder, 25 May 2025

My first Easter Meat Blessings at Mariatrost Basilica, 2025. The baskets are filled with cured meats.

Table of Contents

Introduction

A new chapter has opened on Origins Global Meats, and it began not with a scientist but with a storyteller. Our Bacon Stories is a series introduced by Christa Berger, whose life, land, and lineage reveal a truth I never saw coming: Bacon is not just cured meat, it is cultural memory, family identity, and spiritual ritual. Her first article moved me deeply. I had tears in my eyes, not as a food scientist, but as a man witnessing something far greater than the product I thought I had mastered.

Opening My Eyes to Magic

Back at home, we enjoyed the “blessed cured meats. For the next few days, every meal would include some of the “blessed meat”.

Christa is Styrian by birth and spirit; sharp-witted, warm-hearted, and full of insight. Her background bridges medicine and anthropology. She trained in radiology and anatomy, which gave her an intuitive understanding of muscle, tissue, and blood, insights that became invaluable when we began working together on the science of meat curing. But more than that, she brought memory. She brought soul.

In 2024, Christa contacted me after reading my research on ancient salts. That message became the start of the most meaningful collaboration of my life. Since then, I’ve travelled to Austria several times. Together, we’ve traced the footsteps of ancient butchers and monks, knelt in Easter rituals, studied ancient salts, and rediscovered something I had lost in all my scientific digging: a sense of belonging.

Christa grew up in a Styrian world where bacon isn’t discussed; it’s understood! In her family, it is not a concept; it is the kitchen table. It’s the work of the hands. It’s church, and hunger, and generosity, and the silence that settles when something meaningful is placed on a plate.

She now runs Korrekturdienst, her language and editing company, one of the sharpest, clearest, most exacting firms I’ve ever encountered. But it isn’t the technical precision that makes her work magical. It’s her ability to hold meaning. She understands tone and hears subtext. She translates not just words, but worlds. What makes her work stand out is not just accuracy, but the unshakeable trust her clients place in her. They know that what they send her is safe. They know that what comes back will be cleaner, clearer, and completely context-aware. It will be right.

That’s because Christa works the way her ancestors cured bacon: patiently, carefully, and always with both eyes on meaning. Nothing vague. Nothing missed. Nothing less than exact.

She also hosts Der Steirische Brauch, a blog that brings to life the rhythms and rituals of her homeland—seasonal customs, food preparation, mountain traditions. It’s not just content; it’s connection.

The South African Who Thought He Knew Bacon

From my Oct 24 article, ***The Historical Origins, Symbolism, and Easter Traditions of Cured Meats: The Ritual of Meat Blessing in Christian Europe***

My own story of bacon began in my thirties. I was still in South Africa, still working in commercial chemicals, when I became fascinated with food chemistry. That curiosity became an obsession. I spent 15 years tracking the historical development of bacon—how curing works, why it works, and what the great scientists and artisans of the past discovered. It became the foundation of my book, Bacon & the Art of Living.

I thought I had covered everything: prehistoric methods, industrial breakthroughs, the modern nitrosamine crisis. In one of my latest pieces, The Crusade Against Nitrites: How Ideology, Fear, and Political Opportunism Hijacked the Science of Meat Safety, I push back against misinformation that continues to plague our industry.

But all my scientific knowledge lacked one thing: context. I knew bacon. But I didn’t feel it. Not until I stood beside Christa in Graz.

Austria: Where Bacon Has a Soul

Bacon in Austria is not a side note. It’s the language of the land. You walk into any SPAR store in Styria and find yourself overwhelmed, not by choices, but by pride. Cured meat is in the blood here. It’s not sold. It’s offered.

This Easter, I stood with Christa at Mariatrost Basilica for the meat blessing. You can read about it—(Historical Origins, Symbolism, and Easter Traditions of Cured Meats), but words are not enough. You have to be there. You have to watch the people carry their meats to be blessed, not just for flavour, but for life. Because bacon here is tied to survival, to winter, to the sacredness of nourishment.

And there’s something else. If you overlay Austria’s meat consumption with colorectal cancer rates, the myth falls apart. There is no link. Perhaps the problem isn’t bacon, but the way we’ve removed culture from food.

What Christa Gave Me and Gave Bacon

Since we began working together, Christa has become more than a collaborator. She’s brought something into Origins Global Meats that I couldn’t have created alone. A kind of rootedness. A kind of clarity. Her story of bacon, of her father, her siblings, her mother; it opened a door in me. It reminded me that food is not just science. It is family. It is history. It is place.

What she brought wasn’t technique. It was truth. She didn’t try to be special. She was simply true to herself, her upbringing, her heritage. And that same truth runs through everything she does, whether she’s editing a doctoral thesis, writing about sacred rituals, or building a new business with me.

My connection to bacon has always been strong. But since last year, it has become something I didn’t even know I was missing.

A homecoming.

Read Christa’s moving bacon story at: