It made the news in New York: The meat was getting out of hand.

Discontent was simmering in Whitestone, Queens, in the fall of 2016, where neighbours had been shocked to come across hanks of pork belly strung on a line in a house's backyard. It would draw rats, they said, and the smell was a serious problem. The people living in the home merely replied it was for eating – in Chinese food, specifically. So the neighbors started getting public officials involved.

But in many parts of the world, this is not such an unusual sight. Walking down a quiet street in Asia, you'll often happen on slightly macabre culinary set-pieces – long, thick slices of pork belly, draped over a clothes hanger, slabs of fish, or even, as I did once, a whole pig leg dangling next to a light post, hoof and all. As unnerving as it sometimes is to come across, these al-fresco meat dryers are doing something that's been done for centuries, if not millennia: air-curing.

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When we stress about forgetting the chicken breasts on the counter for an afternoon, how is it possible to leave meat — in the Sun, no less — for days, eat it, and live to tell the tale?

The key is moisture. Inside a length of pork, or that whole pig leg, there's a race going on between bacteria and evaporation, with those hoping for a nice bit of ham for lunch egging the evaporation on.