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Language in Australia

Not pork but bacon

By June 26, 2010June 2nd, 20194 Comments3 min read9,679 views

Image courtesy of Mahmoud Al-Mahmoud

Rashid is an overseas graduate student at an Australian university. He is a Muslim from the Middle East, and this is the story of how he inadvertently ate pork during his first week in Australia. New on campus, his office mates asked him to join them for lunch in the university’s cafeteria. The cafeteria has a food-court set-up with stalls representing a diversity of cuisines including Chinese, Japanese, Mexican and Turkish. Most of it was unfamiliar to Rashid and he opted for the sandwich stall. There you can have your sandwich of choice assembled for you by choosing from a variety of bread types, greens, cold cuts and sauces. Rashid asked whether the cold cuts where pork and the friendly food service worker behind the counter answered “No, bacon.” So, Rashid had his bacon sandwich and was happily munching it when the conversation turned to a comparison of dietary customs and one of his new friends pointed out to Rashid that in Australia bacon is a type of pork. That’s when Rashid’s face turned green and he ran for the bathroom.

What went wrong here? The authority on Australian English, the Macquarie Dictionary, defines “bacon” as “meat from the back and sides of the pig, salted and dried or smoked.” Other dictionaries of “center Englishes” such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam Webster, are in agreement that “bacon” is a form of pig meat. None of these dictionaries mention, as the Wikipedia entry for “bacon” does, that

meat from other animals, such as beef, lamb, chicken, goat, or turkey, may also be cut, cured, or otherwise prepared to resemble bacon, and may even be referred to as “bacon”. Such use is common in areas with significant Jewish and Muslim populations.

In the Englishes of the Middle East, where the distinction between pork and other types of meat is highly salient, the statement “it’s not pork but bacon” thus means “the meat comes from an animal other than pig.” I can only speculate what the sandwich service worker was trying to say but imagine that, for her, the contrast was one of preparation. So, “it’s not pork but bacon” might have meant “it’s not uncured but cured” or something similar. Alternatively, she might have intended to say “We don’t call it pork. We call it bacon.” – in the way that native speakers sometimes like to teach non-natives speakers little lessons. Whatever she meant to say, she was obviously oblivious to the semantic feature of “bacon” that mattered to Rashid.

In a truly inclusive society and a university which explicitly aims to internationalize and where more than a quarter of the student population are overseas students, Rashid should have been spared the experience. Would it be too much to include awareness of the prohibition against eating pork in Islam in the training of food service workers in a cafeteria where a fair number of the customers are Muslims?

Ingrid Piller

Author Ingrid Piller

Dr Ingrid Piller, FAHA, is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research expertise is in bilingual education, intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization.

More posts by Ingrid Piller

Join the discussion 4 Comments

  • Ingrid Piller says:

    LOL!!! Thanks for sharing, Prince of Persia!

  • Prince of Persia says:

    I had the opposite experience. Once I took a group of Chinese clients who were on a business trip to a Chinese restaurant in Sydney. As they were the “experts” in Chinese cuisine, my guests ordered the food. When we got the meal on a beautiful round communal spinning table, I quietly said to one of the waiters “Excuse me, I have a problem.” Before I could go on, he started to apologize profusely and yelled at other waiters in Chinese and there was a big rush and they took half of the dishes away from the table and brought new ones instead. It was all very confusing and I asked them what they were doing. They apologized again and said they had removed all the pork dishes because I was a Muslim. As a matter of fact, I may look like one but I am not and so I told them that my problem wasn’t the pork but the fact that I don’t know how to eat with chopsticks. Everyone laughed ……..

  • xiaoxiao says:

    Thanks, Ingrid. This reminds me of the naming of some Chinese food in English which can be confusing to both Chinese people and native English speakers. One typical example is that dumpling is used to refer to both “饺子” (“Jiaozi,” which consists of ground meat and/or vegetable or egg filling wrapped into a thinly crimped piece of dough) and “汤圆” or “元宵” (“Tangyuan” or “Yuanxiao,” which is made of glutinous rice flour ball with or without fillings). People who have seen dumpling, Jiaozi and Tangyuan or Yuanxiao know very well that they are far from each other. Of course, this is more a case of mistranslation, but wouldn’t it cause the same confusion as seen in “Not pork but bacon”?

  • Mahmoud says:

    Interesting! I had a similar experience! one day i went to a restaurant in Sydney. In the food menu it is written that “100% Halal food” which is simply means that (No pork). However, one of the meals according to the menu contains bacon! So, i told to one of the waiters: the menu is confusing, how do you sale bacon and claim that your food is 100% Halal. He smiled and told me that ‘we use beef bacon’!

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