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Growing up in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, I heard plenty about my home county’s cold-cut claim to fame: Lebanon bologna.

From listening to my grandmother’s stories about her father’s job at a local bologna factory during the Great Depression to slicing Kunzler and Seltzer’s smoked meats for customers at my grocery store deli job the summer after high school, I learned that “Leb-nin buh-LOW-nuh” — that’s the pronunciation I remember hearing — was a point of local pride.

Most accounts trace the smoked deli meat back to the early 19th century, when German immigrants in Lebanon County, aka t

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