Monday, July 07, 2008
Bacon!
Bacon is rebellion
Americans have a guilty relationship with food, and perhaps no food is more guilt-inducing than bacon -- forbidden by religions, disdained by dietitians and doctors. Loving bacon is like shoving a middle finger in the face of all that is healthy and holy while an unfiltered cigarette smolders between your lips.
We live in a time when even a casual trip to the market is fraught with anxiety. Is it OK to buy the salmon? What are the food miles on this red delicious apple? And there is something comfortingly unambiguous about a thick slab of bacon. It's bad for you. It tastes fantastic. Any questions?
John T. Edge, author and director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, says, "Bacon is a sort of 21st century tattoo, a marker that declares the wearer to be a badass, unbeholden to convention."
It's telling that, among the many celebrity chefs who have embraced bacon (Paula Deen, Bobby Flay, Emeril Lagasse), it is Anthony Bourdain who has become its most unabashed spokesperson, calling bacon the "gateway protein" for its astounding ability to lure vegetarians back to the carnivorous fold.
You can hear a kind of growling swagger in the introduction to Susan Bourette's "Meat, a Love Story," in which she writes: "[Bacon] is like a bitch-slap to all those reedy, high-minded herbivores..."
"Bacon is the cocaine of the '00s," says author Sarah Katherine Lewis, "a visible sign of decadent rebellion."
Bacon is America
The turkey is the unofficial mascot of Americana, the 20-pound plumper we dutifully cook on our most sacred of national holidays. But really, it should be the pig. Bacon is our national meat. The pig is not an elegant animal, but it is smart and resourceful and fated to wallow in mud. A scavenger. A real scrapper.
"I see bacon as a celebration of an American birthright," says John T. Edge. "Four slices of Hormel Black Label, hissing in a cast iron skillet on a Sunday morning. To wear the bacon colors, to sport a bacon tattoo, is to announce your belief in the possibilities of bacon, in the American goodness rendered by a low-on-the-hog meat, transmogrified by smoke and salt."
I truly love my vegetarian friends, and I even think about my health from time to time, but truth is, I'm a bacon boy and always will be. Buen provecho, amigos!
