You got your pig. You slaughter the pig. You take the belly meat and make it into bacon. You take the scraps and make it into sausage. You take the backstrap and make it into back bacon/Canadian bacon. You take the fresh hams and shoulders and make them into ham, including the hocks.
Then you take the spareribs and pork chops and pork steaks and don’t do anything to them. Why aren’t those other cuts of pork cured like ham and bacon? Is it just tradition? Or is there some reason those cuts don’t make good cured pork?
The hams are a huge portion of the pig that could be used for fresh. If you want fresh pork you could easily use the hams fresh. If you want cured pork you could easily cure all the other parts of the pig. So why are the hams almost invariably cured into ham but the rest of the pig isn’t?
Spare ribs can also be cured and smoked, and you’ll see them in Polish delis where we use them as a flavoring meat, like hocks or ham, for soups and the like, as opposed to the kind of the barbecue variety.
Pork chops are usually cut from the loin, and you do see smoked pork loin which is, as you note, back bacon/Canadian bacon. Also, as noted above, you can find cured and smoked pork chops. My local market carries them.
I’ve no idea what goes on in America, but in Britain the traditional method is to cure a whole side of pig as bacon (can you have a “whole” half pig?) – the only parts that aren’t cured are the head, feet and entrails. The hind leg would only be called ham if it was cured separately – if cured as part of the side, it’s called gammon.
Nowadays, I think a lot of bacon is cured as joints in any case, and the difference between ham and gammon (in the UK) is that ham is sold cooked, and gammon is sold raw. But if I want a bit of neck bacon, or a bacon chop, I can have it.
I think generally when you, on a farm, slaughter a hog, you put up most of it for the long hogless months, and you eat the tastiest bits (tenderloin, etc) as your reward for the long, hard, somewhat dangerous work of killing hogs.