Salt-cured pork side meat with visible streaks of lean running through the fat — fried crisp for breakfast with red-eye-style gravy, or dropped into a pot of beans as seasoning. The country cousin of bacon and fatback.
Streak o' lean is country-store and smokehouse food — the breakfast meat and seasoning pork of the rural Black South, sold from the meat case at the crossroads store. It carries the memory of the country hog and the morning biscuit.
Streak o' lean is salt-cured pork belly side meat — named for the streaks of lean meat that ribbon through the fat, which made it a half-step more substantial than pure fatback. It is still a cured, salted pork product: WHO Group 1 processed meat for colorectal cancer, very high sodium from the dry salt cure, and high saturated fat. For a community carrying ~40% higher CRC mortality and the heaviest hypertension burden in the country, that combination is exactly what the doctor is warning about. Traditionally it was either fried crisp and eaten with sopping gravy and biscuits, or used as seasoning meat in beans and greens. The rehab is the familiar one — smoked turkey replaces it as seasoning meat with a fraction of the fat and the ability to control salt. As a fried breakfast meat, it has no real defense beyond 'occasionally, a small piece.' Parboiling it first pulls some of the surface salt, which helps the sodium but does nothing for the cancer or saturated-fat math.
Score the rind, parboil briefly to shed salt, then fry slowly until the lean streaks crisp and the fat renders. Pour off most of the fat. Or simmer a chunk in beans and greens as seasoning. The rendered fat traditionally became the base for gravy.
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