MONTCLAIR, New Jersey — The race for New Jersey governor started out on a roll Monday after Republican Jack Ciattarelli circulated a video that purported to show his opponent dissing the Garden State’s favorite breakfast food.
“Who eats pork roll? I think that’s gross,” Dem Mikie Sherrill exclaimed on an episode of “The Zach Sang Show” podcast last week — in an apparent affront to the Jersey-favorite morning meat.
Ciattarelli turned the moment into a campaign ad, posting it on X complete with a shot at the Jersey street cred of Sherrill, who was born in Alexandria, Virginia and moved to wealthy Montclair with her family in 2010.
“Hey Mikie. Tell me you’re not from Jersey without telling me you’re not from Jersey. You know what, don’t worry about it. You remind us of it every day in ways big and small.”
But the Sherill campaign, which has faltered in recent weeks as revelations about her involvement in a cheating scandal at the Naval Academy came to light, fired right back.
The full podcast clip reveals she was actually taking issue with the term pork roll — not the food itself.
“Taylor ham or pork roll, what do you call it?” Sang asked Sherrill, who practically waved the question away.
“Come on, you’re from Wayne, it’s Taylor ham!” she said emphatically.
So what would have been a knock-out blow to Sherrill’s beleaguered campaign instead became just another front in a breakfast sandwich brouhaha that has roiled Jersey for more than a century.
The Taylor ham vs. pork roll debate has long divided New Jersey, with those in the north of the state opting for the former while Central and Southern Jersey residents ardently choosing the latter.
The NJ Dems X account couldn’t resist piling on, creating their own political ad with a clip of a Ciattarelli campaign stop where he boasts “when I’m in South Jersey it’s pork roll, tomorrow up in Bergen county it’ll be something else. But you get it, that’s what you do when you’re running for governor.”
Taylor Ham was invented in Trenton in 1856 by a man named John Taylor. It was marketed for decades as “Taylor’s Prepared Ham” until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 determined it didn’t actually meet the legal definition of ham, which forced him to change its name to pork roll.
The geographic dividing line has been difficult to precisely pin down, but pork roll county seems to start right around where Union County becomes Middlesex County, roughly adjacent to the southern tip of Staten Island.
NJ.com even created a map attempting to plot out the confines of what some call “New Jersey’s Mason-Dixon Line.”
As a Montclair resident, Sherrill lives deep within Taylor ham country.
Ciattarelli’s home of Somerville hugs the border to the south where the popular meat product becomes pork roll and never looks back.
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