Beef

Bacon: No Need to Overanalyze

Bacon: it's not just for fetishists anymore.
Bacon: it’s not just for fetishists anymore. Photo: Mitchell Feinberg; food styling by Sarah Jane Crawford


Salon launched “Pork Week” today, the online magazine’s tongue-in-cheek answer to Discovery Channel’s popular Shark Week. But it isn’t getting off to a very promising start with “Bacon Mania.” The article, which enumerates seven theories why bacon is popular, is even more tiresome than the bacon fetish it questions. The theories include “Bacon is sexy,” “bacon is rebellious,” “bacon is kitsch,” “bacon is funny,” and so on, each one less convincing than the one before. Salon consults some go-to bacon aphorists, with predictable results: John T. Edge (“Bacon is a sort of 21st century tattoo, a marker that declares the wearer to be a badass, unbeholden to convention.”) Bacon of the Month Club founder Dan Philips (“Bacon is the ultimate expression of freedom.”), and Sex and Bacon author Sarah Katherine Lewis (“Pour me a drink, light me a smoke, fry me up a pan of bacon, and let’s get it on.”) When will the anti-bacon backlash come? Surely it’s overdue already. Not that bacon – the food, not the fetish – has anything to fear from it.

Bacon Mania [Salon]

Correction: Sarah Katherine Lewis was originally identified as Sarah Katherine Phillips. We gret the error.

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Bacon: No Need to Overanalyze