Food: A Love Story (18 page)

MAN:
I don’t want this baked potato.

FAIRY BACONMOTHER:
(
waves bacon wand over the potato
)

(
SOUND EFFECT of magic dust: Brrrring!
)

MAN:
Now it’s my favorite part of the meal! Thank you, Fairy Baconmother!

WOMAN:
I don’t want this salad.

FAIRY BACONMOTHER:
(
waves bacon wand over the salad
)

(SOUND EFFECT of magic dust: Brrrring!)

FAIRY BACONMOTHER:
Bibbity, Bobbity, Bacon!

WOMAN:
Oh my! You just turned it into a delicious entrée. Thank you, Fairy Baconmother!

Of course, once you put bacon in a salad, it’s no longer a salad. It just becomes a game of find the bacon in the
lettuce. I always feel like I’m panning for gold. “Found one! Eureka!”

Bacon has special powers. I bet if you sprinkled bacon bits on a strip of bacon you could travel back in time through a tasty vortex. This would be redundant for me, because I would just travel back to a time when I was eating bacon. It would be a bacon-to-bacon time-space continuum.

Bacon can even keep you warm.

Preparing and Serving Bacon

The journey of bacon starts from humble beginnings. A package of uncooked bacon is, well, to be generous, not attractive. Taking the raw bacon out of the clear, flesh-filled FedEx envelope doesn’t help its appeal. You know bacon is bad for you
when you see it raw. Zebra-striped raw meat and fat strips are not easy on the eye. Everyone has this same reaction. “Oh my God, fry that up before I realize what I’m putting into my body.” There are not many ways to prepare bacon. You either can fry it or die of trichinosis. Sadly, as bacon is cooked, an amazing amount of shrinkage occurs. You start with a pound and end up with a bookmark. The shrinkage while cooking foreshadows the main problem with bacon. There never seems to be enough.

I never feel like I get enough bacon. At a traditional American breakfast it seems we are rationing bacon. “Here are your two strips of bacon.” Eating two strips of bacon seems cruel. “I want more bacon!” At a breakfast buffet there is usually a whole metal tray filled with upward of four thousand slices of bacon (I’ve counted). Everyone seems to linger over the bacon tray at the buffet like they’ve discovered the location where bacon originates. You almost expect a rainbow to be shooting out. “I’ve found it! I’ve found the source of all bacon!” Everyone pauses at the bacon tray, trying to evaluate what a socially acceptable amount of bacon to put on your plate might be. The bacon tray is always at the end of the buffet. This is a crafty attempt by the chef to preserve the limited and endangered resource that is bacon. You always regret the items you already have on your plate. “What am I doing with all this worthless fruit? If I had known you were here, bacon, I would have waited! I’d eat only you, bacon!”

Busted! I guess he
is
my son.

Types of Bacon

When I talk about bacon, I’m talking about the American version of bacon, which is pork belly bacon, the kind Jesus ate. Besides normal bacon and Canadian bacon, I didn’t even know other types of bacon existed until I traveled internationally.

Canadian Bacon

I was always confused by the term “Canadian bacon.” Sure, you have to love a country that has its own type of bacon, but I remember thinking,
When is someone going to tell Canada that its bacon is really just round ham?
Canadian bacon is a different type of bacon that comes from the side cuts of the pig. Canadians don’t even refer to Canadian bacon as Canadian bacon. They call it “back bacon,” and they call real bacon
(strip-style bacon) “American bacon.” The bacon the British eat seems like a combination of Canadian bacon and American bacon. They call it “bacon,” but it’s really not bacon. Then again, they call a cookie a “biscuit,” so they have a different word for all the important stuff.

Fatback

Supposedly fatback is like bacon on steroids. I’ve never tried fatback. Probably ’cause it’s called “fatback.” I don’t know which word creeps me out more:
fat
or
back
. Why didn’t they just throw in
hairy
while they were at it? “This is some delicious hairy fatback. That reminds me, your uncle called.”

Turkey Bacon

Our health concerns over bacon have led to horrible bacon alternatives. The most popular fake bacon is turkey bacon (I refer to it as TB), which tastes like an airline food version of bacon. I think we can all agree turkey bacon was a valiant but failed experiment. Some believe 70 percent of all disappointment we feel in life is from turkey bacon. I’ll stick with good ol’ American pig bacon, thank you.

The Bad

Sadly, you shouldn’t eat bacon all day, and, according to my overly protective wife, you can’t. Eating a doughnut is a healthier choice. I’ve heard each piece of bacon you eat takes nine minutes off your life, which means I probably should have died in early 1984. To me, the only bad part of bacon is that it makes you thirsty … for more bacon. Apparently bacon affects the brain in the same way as cocaine, overloading pleasure centers and requiring increasing amounts of bacon to feel satisfied. That doesn’t necessarily sound
horrible to me, but we all know the negatives of bacon. A strip of bacon gives you high cholesterol and has a fat percentage that a normal person should only consume over a decade. Bacon is the opposite of medicine, but if I died choking on a piece of bacon, I’d liken it to being murdered by a lover. We’ve known bacon has been bad for us for thousands of years. Eating bacon is literally a dietary restriction in certain religions.

MAN 1:
Our rules to join this religion are: no killing, no cheating on your wife, no bacon—

MAN 2:
Whoa, whoa, whoa. What was that last one?

MAN 1:
Um, no bacon.

MAN 2:
I’m in the wrong cult. Is there a bacon cult around here?

The bad news for bacon goes on and on. Bacon prices are always rising, and recently researchers discovered that eating bacon lowers sperm count. This study also determined that researchers waste time and money on useless studies rather than finding a cure for cancer. I don’t understand why we even need to understand the correlation between bacon and sperm count. I would have loved to have been there when that research grant was pitched to the board.

RESEARCHER:
I’d like to study the effects of bacon on fertility. You know, the possibility of bacon as a contraceptive?

GRANT BOARD MEMBER:
(
beat
) Are you even a scientist?

Contraceptive or not, I’ve always consumed enormous amounts of bacon, and I have five children. I guess if I didn’t eat bacon I’d have thirty children and probably be dead from
exhaustion. Really, what I’m saying is, bacon saves lives. How do we know swine flu isn’t caused by not eating bacon?

The negatives associated with bacon have forced us to restrict our bacon consumption to the morning. I guess the idea is that before noon we are too tired to care that we are eating something entirely made up of nitrates. After the morning, bacon goes into hiding. The word
bacon
is not even spoken after 11:00 a.m. Bacon becomes He-who-must-not-be-named. You would never be crass enough to order a bacon sandwich in the afternoon. You must speak in code. You have to play dumb and order a BLT. “Oh, I didn’t even know bacon was in the BLT. I just love lettuce and tomatoes.” You’re like the underage kid trying to buy liquor while attempting to distract the cashier by also purchasing a pack of gum. “I just need something to drink while I chew my gum.” The word
club
in “club sandwich” is meant to signify the exclusive group that does not like to admit they like bacon with their turkey.

Bacon, of course, comes from the pig. The pig is an amazing animal. If you feed a pig an apple, that apple will be metabolized by the pig and eventually turn into bacon. The pig is converting a tasteless piece of fruit, essentially garbage, into one of the most delicious foods known to man. The pig has to be one of the most successful recycling programs ever. When you think about it, that is more impressive than anything Steve Jobs did. The pig is remarkable on so many fronts. Bacon, ham, and pork chops come from pigs. The pig should really have a better reputation. You’d think calling someone a pig would be a compliment.

“You are such a pig.”

“Well, thank you. I try.”

It is actually the pig who should be known as “man’s best friend.” I love dogs, but pigs would make great companions, and when they die you could have a barbecue. “I’m sorry to hear about your pig passing. When is the luau?”

A scary bedtime story.

PASTRAMI PLAYDATE

After reading this book so far and seeing how I spend most of my time and energy, you may wonder if I ever think about or see my five young children. At the writing of this book, I have a nine-year-old, an eight-year-old, a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a one-year-old. I should really learn their names. Being the father of five is a heavy responsibility. I try to make an effort to spend as much quality one-on-one time with each of my children. To my wife’s chagrin, this usually involves me taking them to get something to eat.

My favorite place to go on my daddy-time dates is Katz’s Deli to split a pastrami sandwich. A true New York Jewish deli, Katz’s has an authentic Old New York environment. Even the process of getting a sandwich is a throwback to an era of Industrial-Age-bureaucracy. It’s an insane system, really. Upon entering Katz’s you are given a ticket. If there is more than one adult in your party, you get a ticket for each adult. You have to hang on to this ticket the entire time you are at Katz’s so they can write down everything you have ordered. You must present the ticket when you leave. If you lose the ticket, they kill
you. I think. I’m not sure. I just know I don’t want to find out. Either way, you don’t go to Katz’s for the service or hospitality. This is not to say people are rude. It’s just more of a do-it-yourself place. There is a self-service water dispenser, stacked high with vintage water glasses, that looks like it was in the movie
On the Waterfront
. Anyway, you go to Katz’s for the deli. Specifically, I go for the pastrami. After you receive your ticket from the pastrami TSA, you approach a counter where you order your sandwich. As you wait, you are given a sample hand slice of your selected sandwich meat, which is placed in front of you on a small plate right next to a makeshift paper tip jar. I am always suspicious of a free sample next to a tip jar. It never seems as “free.” Your sandwich plate is then placed on a school cafeteria tray, your ticket is marked up, and you can go to other stations to get fries, a hot dog, cream soda, or a knish (for those of you who don’t know what a knish is, it’s sort of a fried dumpling of dough filled with potatoes, or, as I call it,
the carboholic’s ecstasy
). Then you show yourself to an open table and enjoy your monstrous sandwich. It’s not just a deli. It is an experience.