Bacon mania

Why are Americans so batty for bacon? It's delicious, it's decadent -- and it's also a fashion statement.

Editor's note: The Discovery Channel has Shark Week. Here at Salon, we bring you Pork Week. This is the first in a weeklong series of stories about that most polarizing of meats.

By Sarah Hepola

Read more: Culture, Irony, Animals, Cooking, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel, Sarah Hepola, Pork Week

July 7, 2008 | I stumbled across an Internet link several months ago that made me gasp. At a time when Amy Winehouse implodes via RSS feed and Mini Me has a sex tape, genuine surprise is as hard to come by as affordable gas. But this link was fascinating and repellent at once. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce: the bacon bra.

The bacon bra did its little cha-cha around the interweb for a good week last April, sparking debate about everything from the offensiveness of a naked woman covered in raw meat to the bra's functionality -- which, let's face it, exists in that vast flyover between a Maidenform underwire and, umm, whipped cream. But what struck me most about the reactions, whether from online commenters or my own friends, was how they were shot through with a childlike giddiness that sounded something like this: "Ohmygod, baaaaacon."

Anthony Bourdain has called bacon the "gateway protein" for its astounding ability to lure vegetarians back to the carnivorous fold, and for me, the bacon bra proved something of a gateway as well. It was through links to the bacon bra that I stumbled into a zany online world of bacon-related wackiness. Bacon clothing, bacon accessories, bacon jewelry, bacon toilet paper. The vegans may get their own bestselling cookbook, the yuppies may get their raw organic walnut oil at Whole Foods, but carnivores have turned bacon into something more than mere food; it has become a fashion statement. Leapfrogging from link to link -- bacon gift wrap, bacon tote bags -- I felt like a weary traveler standing on the jagged edge of the Grand Canyon for the first time, staring into its vast, unfathomable abyss; I mean, I knew this existed, but I didn't know it was soooo huge.

Part of this enthusiasm comes from the fact that, as one hit man told another in "Pulp Fiction," "bacon tastes gooood." Or, to put a finer point on it: "Bacon has the perfect balance of sweet, salty, smoky flavor, and the perfect balance of meaty and crispy texture," says James Villa, the author of "The Bacon Cookbook." "It's the most perfect food ever created by the gods."

But triple crème brie is pretty tasty too, and I don't remember seeing that on any Chuck Taylors.

I spoke with several experts about this bacon fixation and cooked up a few explanations for our exuberance. After all, how do we come to exalt a food so much that it is not enough to merely eat it -- but we also feel an urge to wrap ourselves in its likeness and scream our adoration from our Facebook profile? The following bacon theories should be taken with a grain of salt. (Better yet, a nice, crisp rasher.)

1. 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?

As Dan Philips says, "Death to all food and wine rules. Down with the health establishment. Bacon is the ultimate expression of freedom." Philips -- aka Captain Bacon -- is the founder of Grateful Palate, a company whose popular Bacon of the Month Club and cheeky assorted gift items -- from T-shirts to bacon air freshener to bacon candles -- has probably done more for the bacon chic movement than anything else.

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."

(Oh, and bacon is, in some cases, also literally a tattoo.)

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. A cocktail-swilling, cock-slinging adventurer who disdains cliché, Bourdain is the poster boy for macho hedonism.

You can hear a kind of growling swagger in the introduction to Susan Bourette's "Meat: A Love Story," in which she writes about a spike in carnivore culture: "It's like a bitch-slap to all those reedy, high-minded herbivores who demanded nothing short of a bloodless revolution, dictating the parameters of the discussion, decreeing the rules for years."

"Bacon is the cocaine of the '00s," says author Sarah Katherine Lewis, "a visible sign of decadent rebellion."

2. Bacon is sexy

Sarah Katherine Lewis recently wrote a book called "Sex and Bacon: Why I Love Things That Are Very, Very Bad for Me." It's a series of funny, outré personal essays, with a title meant to transmit a kind of wanton lustiness. Bacon is the perfect food with which to do so. "Sex and Lamb Patties," after all, doesn't quite have the frisson.

To love bacon is to sink your teeth into life, to refuse to nibble at the side salad or sip on the seltzer with a twist of lime. "Nobody wants to be wholesome, boring Betty when they could be sexy, hot-to-trot Veronica," Sarah Katherine Lewis says. "Pour me a drink, light me a smoke, fry me up a pan of bacon, and let's get it on."

A recent Taco Bell commercial has played up this idea of bacon as an aphrodisiac. In order to lure male attention at a bar, a woman hides the new Bacon Club Chalupa in her purse. It's absurd; no one with hair that glossy would suffer the indignity of diced chicken in her handbag. But the spot has prompted at least one male viewer to suggest bacon perfume. And why not? It's probably a more seductive scent than lilacs and roses.

"Bacon is sex in a skillet," says Dan Philips of the Grateful Palate. "It's the ultimate aphrodisiac for all living things. Except pigs, of course."

Next page: Is embracing breakfast meat an ironic gesture?