Ham is pork cured in a brine of water, salt and sugar. The process was meant to preserve the meat and make it last longer. But it also made it taste better.

What about a different kind of pork?

“Pork barrel” spending takes its name from those same preserved provisions. The idea of packaging federal money into legislation and sending it back to congressional districts echoes the barrels of salted meat once distributed to feed people. And just like the meat, the money can create a feeding frenzy.

These projects are often disparaged as wasteful, unfair or even fraudulent. But this bacon is in the eye of the beholder. Pork is rarely identified as pork in a legislator’s own district.

Western Pennsylvania lawmakers have been particularly successful in bringing home their share of the latest round of earmarks. Congressional records show the region’s delegation secured more than $406 million for nearly 200 projects in this fiscal year’s appropriations bills.

That is a snack compared with the $15.7 billion buffet Congress has plated up nationwide in non-defense earmarks — more than 8,000 projects across 50 states.

But is it really wasteful and corrupt? Or is it simply lawmakers doing what voters sent them to Washington to do — represent local needs?

Consider the largest earmark secured by Western Pennsylvania’s delegation this year: $183.8 million to upgrade the nearly 90-year-old Montgomery Locks and Dam on the Ohio River in Beaver County. Designed to last 50 years when it opened in 1936, the lock chambers are now among the smallest on the river’s navigation system, creating bottlenecks that slow commerce moving through the region.

The project is expected to cost about $1.6 billion in total. The earmark represents only part of that investment, but it reflects something important: local lawmakers from both parties recognizing a project that serves the region’s economy and pushing to make sure it receives federal attention.

The truth may lie in Benjamin Franklin’s famous observation that the United States is “a republic, if you can keep it.” Earmarks are much the same.

States and municipalities need money from the federal government. It goes to build roads, to keep people safe, to do the necessary work of keeping communities healthy. Doing that isn’t wrong.

The difference between making sure Pennsylvania communities get their due in the divvying up of federal resources and cracking open a fresh barrel of pork is not just who brings the money home. It is about watching how the money is divided and where it goes and making sure it stays fair.

That is the cure in the pork — the careful attention of lawmakers, leaders and the public that helps ensure the resource lasts.

And when transparency exists and scrutiny is in place, the process becomes a little more palatable.

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