There was a discordant chorus of queasy squealing earlier this year, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that “food from cattle, swine and goat clones is as safe to eat as that from their more conventionally bred counterparts.”
Many carnivores, it seems, remain unwilling to munch on meat that’s been replicated with genetic legerdemain. Me? I say bring it on. How could anyone argue with more bacon?
| The making of a Blue Moon BLTini. |
Pigs are noble creatures, selflessly giving of their delectable flesh—and we need as many of them as we can get.
That’s because bacon is bigger than ever. Suddenly everyone, it seems, is talking about bacon, writing about bacon, craving bacon. Breaking fast with bacon and having some more for lunch. Everyone. Sometimes even vegans.
| More bacon features: Home is where the meat is Charlottesville is a prime source for fabulous bacon recipes Life beyond Oscar Mayer |
Search for “bacon” on a social-bookmarking site like del.icio.us and one is presented with a plethora of piggy goodness. Read about how to make bacon chocolate-chip cookies and deep-fried bacon-wrapped bananas. Watch molecular gastronomist Heston Blumenthal on YouTube making bacon-and-egg ice cream. Peruse bacon flow charts, meant to assist the peckish in deciding what to eat (hint: the answer is never not bacon). Purchase stylized bacon wallets and bacon scarves and bacon bandages and bacon air fresheners. Or learn how to salt and cure your own.
Visiting the pop culture blog recidivism.org recently, I clicked on installment No. 017 of Oh, That Heavenly Bacon, the site’s continually updated compendium of cured-meat ephemera. I was greeted with a full-color advertisement for Italian salumeria Negroni, in which a bucolic tableau had been rendered with cured meat: mortadella hills, a babbling brook with whitecaps of marbled prosciutto, the sky streaked with luminous strips of raw, fatty bacon. It looked like…paradise.
Meanwhile, The Bacon Show boldly promises “One bacon recipe per day, every day, forever.” And, verily, for three years and counting, its proprietor has not faltered. I look forward to a steady diet of crispy, salt-cured repasts for something approaching perpetuity. (Until, of course, that inevitable cardiac episode—his or mine—puts an end to all the fun. But even that risk may well have been obviated by scientists’ cloning of piglets that are rich in heart-friendly Omega-3 fatty acids.)
Soon after proposing this article—fully aware of the slings and arrows that will volley toward my inbox from the feral PETA crowd—I felt as if I’d plunged down the rabbit hole (or the piglet hole, as it were). Everywhere I turned: more bacon. More rumination, deliberation, and obsession about those humble sticks of crispy meat. Dozens of blogs (Bacontarian, Going Whole Hog, Six Degrees of Bacon). Innumerable chintzy gag gifts. Breathless paeans to the deceptively simple sizzle of America’s most sinful breakfast food.
Alder smoked. Applewood smoked. Cob smoked. Hickory smoked. Skillet-fried or George Foreman–ed, microwaved or baked. Bacon is omnipresent. Its fans are legion. Resistance is futile.
Meat the greatest
If the canine is man’s best friend, creatures of the porcine persuasion have long been his favorite meal. Archeologists have surmised that the pig was the first animal domesticated for food, a millennium before sheep and goats—and even long before crops. (Man, apparently, has never liked to eat his vegetables.)
According to James Villas’s The Bacon Cookbook: More than 150 Recipes from Around the World for Everyone’s Favorite Food—“the greatest and most beloved food on earth,” he calls it—bacon is one of the oldest meats; the Chinese were aging and salting pork as early as 1500 BC. Well into the 16th century, we learn from cookbook author and about.com columnist Peggy Trowbridge Filippone, the Middle English term “bacoun” referred to pork in general. The term “derives from the French bako, common Germanic bakkon and Old Teutonic backe, all of which refer to the back.” (Ironically, what Americans call bacon today comes from pork bellies.) She also notes that “there are breeds of pigs particularly grown for bacon, notably the Yorkshire and Tamworth,” and that “70 percent of the bacon in America is consumed at the breakfast table.”
But bacon is not just for breakfast anymore. In fact, Blue Moon Diner, where bacon is “always some kind of ingredient,” says cook Jon Hampton, made a whole Valentine’s Day dinner featuring the crispy strips. Bacon ice cream, bouquets of flower-like, chocolate-dipped bacon, BLTinis—“everything had bacon in it."
And what the heck is it about bacon, anyway? Well, for one thing, we grow up with it. For another thing—maybe the only thing that matters—it tastes great. “When you cook with it, it adds natural juices because it releases greases and that kind of thing—the fats in the bacon. It will add smokiness to your dishes,” says Steve Madej, who manages the cheese counter at gourmet grocery Feast!.
Simple fact: Bacon, the so-called candy bar of meats, tastes good. Really, really good. As the comedian Jim Gaffigan puts it: “You wanna know how good bacon is? To improve other food, they wrap it in bacon.”
Seeing past its faults
The catch—and there’s always a catch—is that bacon is not particularly good for you. But the good news—and it is good news—is that it might not be as bad for you as you think.
As we learn from The Bacon Cookbook, bacon has no trans fat. In fact, eating several slices of bacon is healthier—in terms of calories, salt, fat, and cholesterol—than eating a hot dog or a hamburger. (Granted, that’s a relative victory, but one Baconians will gladly take.)
Tom Fussell from Boheme has noticed what might even be considered a good-eating backlash. “All it is is eggs and hollandaise and butter and sausage,” he says of the Downtown restaurant’s popular brunch. “We don’t do, like, granola, or any of that kind of stuff with the Sunday brunch. And I think that’s what people want.”
“And in a weird way,” he continues, “it might be a kind of reaction to all this health stuff, where people just go out…and get to eat whatever they want.”
Clearly, bacon’s biggest fans care little for their favorite food’s health hazards. In fact, it’s sometimes hard to shake the feeling that bacon imparts strength. Surely, that’s why one can buy bacon Live Strong–style rubber wristbands, streaked with faux fat.
And then there’s the move to what Hampton calls “artisan bacon”—Kolsavari Hungarian smoked bacon, bacon with garlic cloves mixed right into the meat, and the current specialty at Blue Moon: Cajun-smoked bacon.
But sometimes quantity trumps quality. In December, Gaffigan proposed on his MySpace page to eat a piece of bacon for every vote cast for his appearance on Comedy Central’s “Stand-Up Showdown.” On the Travel Channel, home to haute-cuisine demigods such as Anthony Bourdain, the new show, “The Feasty Boys Eat America,” follows jovial, corpulent Jon Mayer and Jim Stump as they celebrate “The Four Bs—beer, butter, bacon, and better not forget the cheese.” Even now, as I write this sentence, a co-worker has forwarded me an article about bacon-infused vodka—wanton hedonism has never tasted so good.
Not at all like pelican
Dennis Kucinich dropped out of the presidential race recently—good thing, too. Can you imagine a United States run by the first vegan president? It’s one thing to abhor congressional pork. It’s borderline un-American to abjure the edible kind.
Still, it does sometimes seem the vegetarian hordes are growing stronger (how do they, with so little protein?) and that they mean to turn us all into them.
The good news is that bacon is putting up a helluva fight. I discovered a blogger recently who was weighing the pros and cons of going veggie. She listed the common arguments: cholesterol, the questionable safety of mass-produced meat, mad-cow disease, the fact that “some people object to eating food with a face.” But then, drooling on her keyboard, she confessed. “BACON is a huge sticking point with me…Bacon…mmmm…bacon….”
As they don t-shirts with slogans like “Bacon is a vegetable” and “Bacon: the gateway meat,” vegans and vegetarians aren’t the only ones questioning the strictures that prevent them from supping on succulent swine. At jews4bacon.com, the site’s heretofore kosher proprietor rationalizes his predilection for pork. “Deuteronomy might have been right about a few things. It’s true, we shouldn’t have eaten pelicans, and we still shouldn’t. But bacon is delicious. I don’t think they’ll ever make anything delicious out of pelicans, but c’mon. Bacon?”
Wake-up slow and greasy
What power hath this meat? Matty Sallin, creator of the Wake n’ Bacon alarm clock, has a theory. “There’s a number of qualities that give it wide appeal. It’s a snack; it’s a little strip. There’s no commitment of eating a whole salad, or a whole bowl of cereal. It’s this little ‘accessory meat.’ Second, it’s bad for you, so it’s viewed as an indulgence. Third, it probably packs more flavor per square inch than any other naturally occurring food.”
Not long ago, Sallin, who was taking a class on creative applications of technology, had an idea. Alarm clocks, he realized, are an unnecessary evil. “They wake you up by jarring you awake. It’s such an unpleasant experience. I thought there was great possibility for improvement there.”
So he canvassed his classmates for their favorite way to be rousted from slumber. “The most interesting nonsexual answer was waking up to the smell of bacon.” Genius. Not only is “the smell of Mom’s cooking a fantastic way to wake up,” it also “provides an incentive for you to get out of bed.”
Think of the Wake n’ Bacon like an EZ-Bake Oven, shaped like a pig. Place a strip of frozen bacon in its belly the night before. Set the alarm. Fall asleep. Fifteen minutes before you’re set to wake, two halogen bulbs will begin silently and slowly cooking. “By minute 12 or so, the scent is so strong and unmistakable that you’re gonna wake up,” says Sallin. “Then you get to eat the crispy, tasty bacon. Or you could throw it away, I suppose. But who would want to do that?”
The Wake n’ Bacon is currently just a prototype, but a patent and mass-production are entirely possible. “It was something of a joke when I created it, but it works,” says Sallin. “Anyone who has any experience bringing products to market, I’m here to talk to them.” Let’s make this happen.
Grateful swine
How has this strip of crispy pork ascended to such a vaunted spot in the pop-cultural firmament? Homer Simpson has certainly done his part: “I’ll have the smiley-face breakfast special. Uhh, but could you add a bacon nose? Plus bacon hair, bacon mustache, five o’clock shadow made of bacon bits, and a bacon body?” Waitress: “How about I just shove a pig down your throat?”
The simplest answer, however, is usually the correct one. Bacon speaks for itself. It’s salty. It’s sweet. It’s crunchy. It’s greasy. And it’s everywhere. Whether it’s the gotta-see-it-to-believe-it art site baconrobots.com (“The only thing better than bacon is a smoking-hot animatronic lady to cook it for you”), the delectable Norwegian delicacy that is bacon-flavored cheese in a tube, or—astonishingly—bacon-flavored cotton candy, this meat holds strange sway over otherwise reasonable people.
But as we salivate then satiate, we must never forget from whence bacon comes. We owe the pigs of the world our gratitude and thanks. We must think more like the writer William Hedgepeth, who dedicated his curly-tailed tome, The Hog Book, “to the millions of porkers who’ve gone to their final resting sites inside us, and to the ghosts of still billions more pigs who’ve long since passed away down the throat of time. I’d like to call them all by name, but the list is long and I cannot remember.”
With additional reporting by C-VILLE intern Sara Yenke.
This article was originally published, in a somewhat different form, in the Boston Phoenix, from which it is republished with permission.
