China’s ‘bacon apartment’ will turn you off of bacon, maybe forever

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Here's one way to cure everyone's favorite pork product.

A resident of the central Chinese city of Wuhan is either the best or worst neighbor ever -- depending on your feelings around bacon.

Photos of an apartment façade, draped entirely with pork belly strips, have gone viral on social media and are now circulating on the China’s biggest news sites, such as iFeng.

It is worth noting that Chinese bacon is prepared differently than Western-style bacon. It is air-cured in sunlight, as opposed to smoked. As bizarre as it looks, this month is actually the season for hanging bacon outside, although not usually on an apartment balcony.

According to Grace Young, author of The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen, Chinese bacon must be hung outside in the winter.

“Chinese Bacon is air-dried and you must wait until the twelfth lunar month,” she writes. “Around January in our calendar, when the north wind (buck fung) is strong so that the lop yok [bacon] will have the ‘fragrance from the wind.'"

Of course, with smog-levels in Wuhan currently at dangerously high health levels, that wind fragrance is probably not so great.