Meaning:
Escape from injury; avoid harm, especially to one's body.
Background:
By bacon, we now normally mean the cured and dried meat taken from the back
or sides of a pig. To the medieval mind, `bacon' was meat from anywhere on
the body of the animal - more akin to what we now call pork. This was the
origin of the slang term `bacon' meaning the human body. `Saving your bacon'
was simply saving your body from harm. The expression was used that way as
early as the 17th century as, for example, this extract from Ireland's Momus
Elenticus, 1654:
"Some fellowes there were... To save their bacon penn'd many a smooth song."
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
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In the 70s, peasants survived mainly on corn, sorghum, and sweet potatoes on the
Northern Plains. Besides a general lack of material, none of the staple foods,
called the coarse grains, tasted good. Rice or wheat, the fine grains, were rare
and could be had only on special days.
Then, our prayers were answered. Over a short time span in the mid 80s wheat
flours, code-named the 90, 85, 72, and Rich-Strong, one sweeter, whiter, and
smoother than the other, flooded the country. A miracle. Only it was no mana
from heaven but a plague. When I look back, those days reminded me of the scene
in the movie Alien Covenant where David the android showered the black goo from
the spaceship over the Engineers.
Soon, people, mostly adults, began to fell [sic] prey to the diseases of affluence,
diabetes, strokes, angina, infarction, coronery heart diseases, etc., hitherto
unheard of except among the rich, as we stuffed ourselves day in day out with
the dainty cheap buns, naans, dumplings, noodles, etc., all made of white wheat
flour. The memory of the early 60s' famine still fresh, we couldn't get enough
of the stuff. Few realized in time that they needed to save their bacon from a
much better disguised and much more trecherous [sic] enemy.
