Bacon porn

When I was 11 years old, my parents left me home alone for a few hours. Completely idle, I counted the dials on the stove from right to left. There were 10. Then I counted them from left to right. There were 9. It was not my shining moment.

It was about mid-afternoon, and I began to get hungry. I opened the refrigerator and there it was: a package of bacon. I threw a pan on high heat and piled on about fifteen strips of the stuff. But bacon seemed pretty plain, so I smothered it in honey and pepper. Who hasn't heard of honey-smoked bacon or peppered bacon?

My afternoon snack took forever to cook because I couldn't decide if it was better to cook it slowly or quickly, and the honey had scored the pan with heavy black carbon, but finally it was done. I took a bite. It tasted like shit.

While I still love bacon, I don't see it as the salty centerpiece of my breakfast the way I once did. I see this newfound discernment as a sign of my maturity, along with my resignedness to eating dinner before dessert and picking my Legos up off the floor before going to bed. This is why the New Bacon Porn Conspiracy distresses me: While I seem to become more mature, everyone around me has started to eat more bacon.

Bacon is a sometimes food. Conventional wisdom has it that bacon is high in fat and salt, and unless you're a professional athlete or hunter/gatherer on a 10,000-calorie/day diet, it should be consumed sparingly. It was on the eve of this logical conclusion that bacon came into its own. Suddenly, it seemed like everything either had bacon on it or tasted like bacon.

It began, coincidentally enough, in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, on an episode of 'Man Vs. Food.' I had never heard of Voodoo Donuts while I lived there, but this pastry shop has become the home of the bacon maple bar. It sounds dubious, but apparently that's what everybody says before he takes his first bite.

Bacon maple bars at Voodoo Donuts

The BMB is the ultimate in hipster culinary irony––who would have thought that bacon + pastry would be delicious?––and I'm not exactly a health nut, so I forgot entirely about this episode of 'Man Vs. Food.' In fact, I forgot about 'Man Vs. Food' in general, because I found Adam Richman to be completely insufferable. 

But I began to notice that pork was slowly but surely enveloping me in a classic pincer move. First, my neighbor told me about the daughter of a friend of hers who loves bacon and who received for her birthday some kind of bacon flavoring. "Now everything she eats she can make taste like bacon!" my neighbor told me.

OK, fine. Kids love bacon. I get it. But then my parents started eating bacon. Like, for two straight weeks. Bacon and eggs for breakfast was followed by breakfast for dinner with (you guessed it) bacon. On Sunday at brunch, they would ask for bacon sides to go with omelets and pancakes, where before the side meat of choice was sausage.

Even before that, I'd felt my heart beat a little faster at the sight of the KFC Double Down Sandwich on a billboard. Bacon wasn't pervading––it was encroaching.

Friends started posting bacon pictures on Facebook and Google+ that were wildly well-received by their friends. There is even "bacon porn" on YouTube.

Bacon porn

All this has been followed with a change in how bacon is perceived. Before, it was the cheap, fatty meat you had with breakfast or chopped on baked potatoes. It was the kind of thing you pretended to feed your dog. It was a greasy topping on hamburgers, served in units of two thin washboard-y strips.

It's BACON!

But anymore bacon is a gourmet thing to be taken seriously. At the Boise upscale watering hole Bittercreek Ale House, it's served thick-cut on hamburgers hickory smoked and smothered in pepper, as though the more high-falutin it looks on paper, the more nutritious it must be.

I've seen foods make this transition before. Cheese––which is mostly fat and salt, and to me tastes like curdled puke––has been successfully rebranded as a beneficial part of our diets, provided we're spending enough money on it. The same is true for so-called "Lebanon bologna," which is essentially a smokier-tasting version of the cheap-o lunch meat. And despite the fact that the same antioxidants can be found in Welch's grape juice, we still believe that a glass of red wine a day helps prevent cancer.

It may be too late to tell if bacon underwent this transition because of hipster re-appropriation or gentrification. Maybe that's the point: Hipster culture is fascinated by chicken-and-egg riddles and high vs. low culture arguments because they absolve us of having to make distinctions or value judgements; and those of us with money will buy anything if it seems "upper crust" enough.

I once watched a close friend of mine drink with relish a glass of ultra upscale gin. It was the color of whiskey and smelled heavily of juniper berries––apparently signs that this was no mere Sapphire gin––and came in a tall, earthenware jug with a little card describing just how not-Sapphire this gin was.

I later learned that it wasn't until after the repeal of Prohibition that gin went from being the blinding agent of choice of the British working class to an upscale liquor. We have an amazing power to convince ourselves of something's respectability. 

Let's hope someone sees through bacon's peppercorn-encrusted façade before someone has a heart attack.