People love bacon. This is a true thing. Some people love bacon too much. There’s this whole bacon mania thing that has been happening that has produced all kinds of ridiculousness, on the internet and off, and spawned t-shirts and bumper-stickers and not a few food items that kind of seem like bad ideas. Like Baconaise. Baconaise seems like a bad idea to me.
Then again I am a man who hates things. When something is a meme, it is generally cool. But when it has become a thing, and the New York Times is writing things about it, and people begin defining their identities based on something that is only a thing, then we have problems. Maybe I think you’re starting to look silly. Maybe I think you should get a hobby, possibly leave the house for events that aren’t bacon related.
It is easy to see why people like bacon. On a physical level we are programmed to desire fat, salt, and sugar. Most things we will crave until we have had enough, but on some evolutionary level these three things are so important to survival, and so hard to find in nature, that we basically crave them to excess, the evolutionary assumption being that we may not have it later, and anyway when no one lives past 30 who cares about heart conditions. Bacon has fat and salt in generous quantities, all wrapped around a nice protein core. Most cures nowadays also include some sugar as well, and pork is a relatively sweet meat, so bacon is quite literally addictive and delicious.
From a cultural standpoint people associate bacon with much more than a vehicle for fat, salt, and some sugar. We know bacon is bad for us, people have been saying so for years, and so it has become a glorious outlet, allowing people to behave badly and revel in excess. I enjoy excess as much as the next everyman. Unlike other mothods of excess, bacon has for some reason taken on a rebellious, populist aspect. Articles on the cultural implications of what has been called “Bacon Mania” talk about things like giving the “middle finger” to over-sanctimonious “vegans” and health nuts, something which is considered uniquely “American.” Somehow, by eating bacon we are showing them that we can’t be controlled. Yeah. And if some bacon is fun, lets have a whole fucking lot of bacon. That’ll show em. That’ll show all of them that we’re Americans, and if we wanna eat bacon while driving our SUVs and invading Iraq, we’re gonna!
And this is where I get pissed off.
I enjoy bacon. It is tasty. Saying it has wider cultural implications than any other kind of preserved meat is kind of ridiculous. Bacon is a way of preserving and serving an unattractive piece of meat, which happened to have been very popular in colonial and especially southern cooking due to the fact that you can literally feed pigs shit and they will survive. How did bacon become a symbol of being a pompous American douche bag? I understand that food is an important aspect of culture, but why must people become proselytizing ass-hats when someone eats in a different way from their own? Granted, no one is going around calling me a redneck when I order bacon at diners, but people do sometimes look at me funny if I order a tofu dish. What? I like tofu. Do we need to make a big deal out of this? It is food. You eat it. It doesn’t mean anything about my lifestyle other than I occasionally eat soy based products. Is your aversion to it based on anything other then media discussions of vegetarianism? Really?
I was raised kosher, but it was never my idea. My mother, who had converted, kept the house supplied with soy based pork substitutes, and we lived by the compromise, nonsensical rule of Americanized Jews that keeping kosher in the home is a strict necessity, but if you eat shrimp out at a restaurant then god doesn’t mind as much. That being said, bacon was not something I had gotten around to eating until comparatively late, maybe 10 or so. I remember vividly the entire experience. We were eating breakfast at a diner, I think it was the Colonial before their big reconstruction, back when the whole place smelled of cigarette smoke and the salad bar was in the middle of the dining room. I had only recently come to grips with the concept that food I had not tried before was not necessarily awful, and had begun trying a variety of unfamiliar things. As I perused the menu I asked mom what bacon was like. She reacted with shock.
“You’ve never tried bacon?”
“Nope. When would I?”
“oh right, I keep forgetting.”
“you forget we keep kosher?”
“well, I forget you were raised kosher.”
Dad looked somewhat nonplussed as I ordered the bacon. I entirely forget what I ordered it with, probably pancakes. I remember when it came I was suspicious. I hated fat in meat and would scrupulously pick off fatty layers. The bacon looked to be a total loss to me. Numerous stripes of fat taking up a huge percentage of the strip. I remember my parents looked somewhat bemused as I tried to cut off the fat from the bacon, finally giving up and picking up the leanest piece that I had been given and trying it.
You all know what bacon tastes like so I don’t need to describe it here at length. What is interesting about this memory, and this stands out very clearly for me, was that I thought
“oh man, this is amazing. It would be so much better if it were a little bit crunchier.”
In this instant I conceived, even if I did not articulate, the problem of the Platonic Ideal Form. We all hold in our minds the ideal form of objects with which we interact, such as chairs or cats or the people around us. These ideals are, depending on your view, stereotypes which we must constantly refine, or the true form of the thing described to which the things in our lives aspire. I would say the people in our lives exist more as stereotypes, as our minds aspire to hold on to the true form but ultimately fail. This is why people, even those we love and know well, can constantly surprise us, and also constantly chafe at the assumptions we make about them. But in objects, especially those we create, the true form, or at least the ideal form, is much more often something we hold in our minds than something we ever actually find. Those that appreciate food and music and art are, I suspect, those of us that are willing to pursue these ideals. How much we enjoy this pursuit has to do with how much of the ideal we are willing to see in the imperfect forms that surround us while still seeing them as imperfect.
If you ask most people to describe the ideal piece of bacon I think most people would say some variation of the following:
The ideal bacon is crispy. Most of the fat has been fried out so all that remains are the meat, which has been rendered crunchy, if a little chewy. Too chewy is bad. Too much crispy is burnt. Where that line is drawn is certainly up for debate, but most would want their bacon to be somewhat stiff, certainly not floppy. There will be some residual marbling from the fat striping, but overall there should be more meat than fat. The bacon will taste salty, a little sweet, and smoky.
If most of us have the same ideal of bacon, which I am pretty sure is true, why is there so much floppy, soggy bacon in the world? It is a balancing act to make good bacon, but one would assume that there is a market for bacon, and if there is a market there should be people who will learn the relatively simple seeming skills of frying bacon properly. And yet imperfect bacon abounds in our society. Most of the bacon we consume is probably in sandwich form, and I will guarantee that most sandwiches are made with microwave bacon. I don’t know how many of you have ever consumed this stuff straight, but it is very disappointing. It is sliced paper thin, is mostly fat, and is about as crunchy and stiff as wet toilet paper. Sure, it still tastes like bacon, and as such most of us are willing to savor its bacon-y goodness so long as we do not have to confront it directly, but it is honestly a far cry from the real thing.
I personally enjoy vegetarian bacon, but not as bacon. Vegetarian bacon is, for me, the culinary equivalent of a Godzilla movie. It is easy, strangely satisfying, and hilariously bad. When uncooked the “bacon” is floppy and soft. While still in the oil of the pan the same is true, but immediately upon leaving the pan it becomes a salty, somewhat smoky, bacon-colored cracker that bears zero textural resemblance to real bacon. I consume this for the same reason I consume “State” brand vodka and watch “Bruce Lee Strikes Back from the Grave”: pure self hate.
These vain facsimiles of the bacon experience, and I would include most bacon products and dishes in this category, while sometimes tasty, merely ice over the fact that most of us have never actually had that perfect strip of bacon. No matter how many bacon encrusted turkeys or scallops we eat, how many really good pieces of bacon have we had?
The bacon mania thing could have been a really good thing for the world if it had been a quest for the perfect strip of bacon. I have nothing but respect for those who quest for truth and beauty, whatever its form, and bacon mania could have been a quest based culture. I imagine T-shirts depicting Buddhist monks meditating over bacon, or restaurants renowned for the perfect bacon, open only on Wednesdays and only reachable by a footpath leading to the top of a mountain. Instead bacon mania became the culinary equivalent of the tea party movement: a group of people too satisfied with the way they have been doing things to realize no one is actually threatening them. We like eating meat. You tell us its bad, so we’re gonna eat the worst kind of meat we possibly can. That’ll show you. That has no honor. That’s childish gainsaying. That is a thing.
I had not been on a quest for truth or beauty, but I found it in Manhattan over the weekend when my way-hetero life-partner and I stopped into The Remedy Diner to get a snack. The place has a classic diner look, but is very Manhattan. Everyone inside looked like they had gotten specially dressed that morning in order to go there and the special on the sandwich board out front advertized a free mimosa with selected entrées. This being New York, they also have a full bar at the diner, which is weird and immoral, but not pertinent to the story.
I ordered the waffles and bacon, and the bacon came out on top of the waffle, with a sprinkling of powdered sugar. I was somewhat annoyed at the sugar. I like my bacon pure; I like to savor it. As soon as I picked it up my irritation had evaporated. The bacon was stiff as a board, but clearly was not burned. It was thick cut. It smelled wonderfully bacony. I looked at my girl Friday, whose fork hung in midair. Though a vegetarian, she appreciated the magnificence of what had transpired.
“That looks like some really amazing bacon, dude. That’s like perfect.”
I made a noise that was halfway between a whimper and a grunt. I completed the arc of the bacon from my plate to my face and bit in. It was perfect in every way. Thick and crunchy, but just a little chewy. Extremely lean, but with enough striping to let you know that the leanness was the product of excellent culinary technique, and not the residue of a special cut. I nearly wept. The universe seemed less cruel and random. Outside children played and did not fear. Somewhere a kitten attempted to climb out of a bucket.
The waffle was pretty good too. I would definitely recommend this restaurant. I don’t know if their bacon will be up to this standard again, or if it was a fluke. I almost don’t dare return. If it is not, I will feel disappointment. I will wonder if the perfection was manifest, or the result of some trick of psychology. I will wonder if there is even such a thing as perfect bacon. This is the nature of truth in our world: inevitably transitory and illusory. But the authenticity of the moment in which it occurs atones for many of the sins in everyday life, even things like bacon mania.
