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 — the perfect ingredient for another recipe I stumbled across: the bacon martini. (“Skim excess bacon grease from surface of cocktail. Garnish with one slice of bacon.”) 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. . . .”
Bissonette knows bacon’s power to persuade firsthand. “I know this kid who’s been a vegan for seven years,” he says. “But now he’s starting to get out of veganism. He eats vegan six days a week. And on Sundays he has bacon. That’s awesome.”
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?”
