What's interesting about this story is that it starts out seemingly like it's going to be about devious marketers devising a way to turn a product nobody wanted into a hot seller strictly through marketing, in much the same way that clever marketing turned the universally reviled Patagonian toothfish into a big seller by bestowing upon it the more upscale name "Chilean sea bass" (see http://priceonomics.com/the-invention-of-the-chilean-sea-bas...).
But then you get into the meat of it (sorry) and find that the root of the turnaround is an actual technical accomplishment -- a method to cook and distribute pre-cooked bacon that wouldn't rob the bacon of its flavor:
> The early 1990s was a time of great advancements in precooked bacon technology. Pork producers, food labs, and agricultural schools such as Iowa State University began investing substantially in precooked R&D. Hormel and Swift worked on microwaveable precooked slices for home consumers, while Chicago’s OSI and the now-defunct Wilson Foods poured their efforts into bacon spirals that would fit perfectly atop a hamburger.
These technical innovations turned out to be the key, because the pork marketers were pitching bacon to fast-food chains as a "flavor enhancer," but the chains that tried it mostly came away dissatisfied: the hassle of adding bacon-cooking to their highly regimented kitchens created expense and added time to the burger-assembly process, while existing methods for pre-cooking bacon yielded a tasteless product. Pre-cooked bacon with taste intact (that came in shapes ready to plop on top of a hamburger patty, no less) took all that friction away.
My only regret is that the whole thing is written from the perspective of the Pork Marketing Board, which funded the research into pre-cooking bacon, but doesn't really tell you much about the research itself. That seems like it'd be an interesting story, for those of a technical bent; here's a problem, how do you solve it?
Exactly, pre-cooked bacon was the thing. And it is a thing, at least in my house where it is trivial to put some chopped pre-cooked bacon onto the pan next some stir fried green beans and spinach and poof really tasty side dish.
Maybe your brand is different but in Ontario pre-cooked bacon is gross and tastes like McDonald's bacon. The texture is all wrong, it's thin and weird.
Agreed. Food science is an amazing field that has been making huge advances in recent decades. But where can you find anything written about the actual research, outside of highly technical journals?
I misread the title to be about Beacon (since a story about it was trending earlier on HN), and your quote really threw me off, like why is this guy talking about pork :P thanks for the comment, it both fixed my mistake and provided insight once I got on the actual story :)
Non US based HNers might be confused; bacon really is a big deal in the US. Restaurants put it in salads, sandwiches, and pretty much anything they can- I've had bacon ice cream once (weirdly it was pretty tasty).
Some macho people proudly eat pounds of it, claiming that it is a manly/american food- see for example this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8u8Z3bUQfs . In stores, you can find as many items with bacon texture on them as you can find items with prints of the US flag. "Bacon bowls" are a thing.
It's really more than just a food in the US- people are obsessed with it. If you spend time on reddit, you can get a glimpse of that through the ever recurring bacon posts in the mainstream subreddits.
This has been the case in the UK for many years as well.
One of my earliest memories at the tender age of 3 (very early 1980s) was wearing one of those blue anoraks with a fuzzy collar and being wheeled to the greasy caf'[1] in a buggy and fed bacon, beans, chips (French fries) and tea. This was in Islington in London. I can't think of a single week I haven't eaten bacon since.
That's just normal here. No crazy or macho rubbish. Food staple.
And as I've had this argument before (on reddit...), to the Americans, we don't eat that shitty Canadian bacon or the streaky stuff you get in the US here. We use the latter to add flavour to other foods and eat the nice lean back bacon: http://www.clancysofchester.co.uk/back%20bacon.jpg . The streaky stuff is kind of horrible and clogs up your arteries.
Just to update your nutrition information, the streaky stuff is great for you. Fats, especially animal fats, are pretty wonderful for human health. You lose both flavor and nutrition when you remove it from your diet.
I feel like I'm letting a secret out, but if there's any crowd that we want to be healthy and productive, it's HN. Eat fat. It's great for you. What's important is to remove sugar from your diet in all its forms.
The belief that the human nutritional optimum is narrow and deep, so that "complete elimination of food X" and "total focus on food Y" will enormously enhance your health is a crypto-creationist argument, as it requires a complete rejection of everything we know about evolution in general and human evolution in particular.
Omnivores like humans evolve with broad, shallow nutritional optima. Humans are happy with a diet of simple starches (metabolically almost indistinguishable from refined sugars) or a diet of fatty meat, and do pretty much the same on almost everything in between. There are statistically measurable variations, but the optimum is so broad and shallow--as our evolutionary history would predict--that it is full of really shallow local optima that are due purely to noise. Crypto-creationists glom onto these shallow local optima and make out like they have incredibly deep minima hidden in their midst, which is utterly implausible unless you reject evolution as the force that shaped us as species.
I'm not sure that equating creationism with nutrition makes sense. Nor does the rise of grain necessarily signal evolutionary adaptation. It seems quite possible that humans can survive and thrive on sub-optimal nutrition.
In fact, Jared Diamond quite convincingly demonstrates that hunter-gatherers, with their meat-and-vegetable diets, were far healthier than their agricultural cousins. But the abundance that resulted from agriculture (along with the perils of nomadic hunting) allowed farmers to have far larger families and eventually drown out hunter-gatherers through sheer demographic superiority. It doesn't mean that grains are ideal for human consumption, only that agriculture allowed population growth and urban density that eventually crushed the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
We could live on Twinkies if required. We are, as you pointed out, omnivores. The relevant question is what diet is most optimal for human health.
I think you didn't exactly read the answer? Humans can survive on much any diet, and the differences between them are mostly insignificant, certainly as it pertains to criteria that apply to people sitting most of the day doing mental work.
Not too much. Coronary heart disease wiped out a big chunk of my family and it wasn't because they ate sugar - it was the lard on toast and chips cooked in lard...
Everything in moderation is probably better advice than a single fact.
If you say "eating fatty things will give you heart disease", most people will blindly agree with you. In actuality there is very little valid basis for making that claim.
(Edit, and this is a parenthetical because I do not believe anecdotal evidence is useful for arguing for general cases: My personal n=1 experiment: I have comprehensive blood panels done every three months. Over the past four years I adopted a diet that is high in healthy animals fats and proteins, high in vegetables, low in fruit, and devoid of grains. As in: 3 eggs plus sausage or bacon and a salad for breakfast. Every day.
Prior to starting, I had mediocre to bad cholesterol. My numbers are now: 105 LDL, 70 HDL, 52 triglycerides. Superb by all measures.)
> The connection between saturated fat and coronary heart disease has had a lot of legitimate doubt cast upon it
So has the belief that all fat is all good for you, to put it lightly. Human nutrition is a lot more complex than that. Unless you like experimenting with yourself for the sake of it, go with a balanced diet.
"go with a balanced diet."
As much as I'd like to, it's next to impossible to even figure out what a "balanced diet" is these days. The information conflicts even on something that basic.
Balanced diet: some fat, some sugar, some protein. You've got a lot of flexibility, just make sure every major food group has something of a presence. No need to micromanage.
The position that saturated fat is causative in heart disease is not the default position. If an idea is going to generate prescriptive advice it should come with ample supporting evidence.
Despite this we've been strongly indoctrinated with the idea that fat == unhealthy. It has caused us to change our behavior by avoiding foods that our parents and grandparents have been eating down through the generations. We've moved away from the default "balanced diet" on bunk data.
I define healthy fat as meat which came from a healthy animal. I define a healthy animal as an animal that was raised in accordance with its species' natural diet and lifestyle.
Personally, I'm persuaded by my personal experience as well as testimony from /r/keto. I've lost nearly 100 lbs over the past year by switching to a high-fat, moderate-protein, and ultra low-carbohydrate diet. I really can't endorse it enough.
If I had to guess, your family's health problems weren't with lard -- they probably resulted from the companion toast and french fries. Any calories you eat will be directed to storage if your insulin is spiked... which happens when you eat carbs like those found in wheat and potatoes.
That's not to say that glucose, which you find in potatoes, is necessarily awful. I don't eat it, but Dr. Robert Lustig (an incredible font of knowledge) thinks glucose can be a valuable part of a diet. What's particularly important is to eliminate fructose and sucrose. They're toxins with no redeeming qualities except making fat-free foods palatable.
You think you're being sarcastic. The only reason why fruits are okay in moderation is that their fiber mitigates some of the damage of their sugar content. The vitamins you can get from fruit are valuable, but the sugar rush isn't.
I'm not opposed to the occasional fruit. But given your tone, I rather suspect you think Jamba Juice is healthier than a steak. Go ahead, I'm not here to save your life... but you may want to read a bit on the subject. I'd start with Gary Taubes, Peter Attia, and Robert Lustig.
> I'm persuaded by my personal experience as well as testimony from /r/keto
Being healthy and athletic in the short-term is one thing, living a long and happy life is another. I always feel that the Paleo/low-carb communities focus on the former, but if you can believe the gist of The Blue Zones, then happy centenarians have very "boring" eating habits (statistically speaking): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
An anectode is not data, as you well know. Neither is it surprising that you can find likeminded communities on the Internet.
Great to hear that you feel well though. But please avoid the opportunities to convert heathens on the Internet, if you can. Some of us are skeptics by nature and will never be persuaded by anything less than full scientific studies (especially with areas as complex as the human physiology).
While I do appreciate the benefits of a ketogenic diet, I don't think it's for everybody. This could work great for people who are "out of balance", i.e. if you have excess body fat, it might be beneficial to switch to a metabolism that uses your fat stores (rather than continuing to add to it). I don't think it's a good idea to put your kids on a ketogenic diet (unless they're epileptic and don't respond to treatment) because it is known to stunt growth in children.
No their problems weren't just the lard. It was derision pointed at the unfounded basis of your analysis and the complexity of the human diet, metabolism and relatively limited knowledge of nutrition we have.
/r/keto isn't a valid citation, well no more than /r/spacedicks (NSFW) or the pope. Neither is you losing weight.
My health has never been better. I'm not sure why you think I've earned your derison... but okay.
Eat sugar, dude. I'm not here to save your life. But if some of the awesome nerds who read HN decide to get healthy, I'd really recommend eliminating sugar from your diet. Life is so much better without it.
Recommended introductory reading would be Gary Taubes, Robert Lustig, and Peter Attia. The history of nutrition over the past fifty years is absolutely shocking.
I eat a shit ton of straight sugars, fat and carbs and am technically obese if you consider the rather non-scientific BMI system.
However, I rode 59 miles from London to Brighton on my nice Dawes Ultra Galaxy a couple of months back without any trouble. Last month I had a medical and am, according to doctor "in wonderful shape". Go figure.
Oh right, everything in moderation. That's the win. I eat that stuff when I need it.
I wouldn't cite a bunch of random popular reading health authors and an endocrinologist incapable of using the scientific method in his work. Go read some Feynman and apply some critical thinking and get back to me.
this sounds like a very typical (and incredibly flawed) HAES (health at every size) argument - "so what if i eat all that bad crap and am obese? i can run more miles than you so that means i must be fitter and healthier than you!"
i'm not sure if i'm interpreting this correctly, but it sounds like you essentially admitted that you're really fat, despite being active. while i agree that the BMI system is very flawed especially when it comes to measuring the health and fitness level of active people, but for the typical non-active keyboard warrior (which statistically HN would probably have a very high percentage of relative to the whole userbase), the BMI is a decent gauge of health.
simply put, what i'm saying is, unless you're telling me you're in fact a massive 250-lb muscle-bound beast, the BMI reading is probably quite accurate that you're overweight and not healthy at all.
you can convolute the argument as much as you want, dropping names and terms like "critical thinking" and "Feynman" etc, but ultimately there is no denying the reality that is your body.
You're not interpreting it correctly. Go read it again and my other comments. In summary, perhaps a little more concisely:
I'm an outlier. I'm well built but thanks to BMI, I'm classified as obese. I eat a lot of crap as well, probably more than most. That doesn't affect my general health at all.
I'm referring to scientific integrity and application of the scientific method which this entire thread is devoid of. One poster posted with citations from known crackpots and a reddit group of obsessive religious dieters.
Nutrition is complicated. Everyone has an answer. I'm saying there isn't one. Life is a race to the finish line. Whoever gets there last with the most bits still attached wins.
Are you sure, or is the medical community changing its mind in 10-20yrs now with a "oops, we just realized its only good when you eat a tenth of what you are eating", or something like that. Also, is both the fat of the pork, and all the oil it is cooked in healthy, or just the first?
I think we don't really know enough about health to have a comprehensive answer, sp. regarding long term effects, so the best thing may be just to be conservative.. i.e. don't each much of anything that our body may not be wired to (like you said, processed sugars, but also deep fried precooked bacon)
It's great once a week. Stay on nuts, beans and other sources of fat and protein for the rest of the time.
Obviously don't do sugars, but a piece of bread or pasta is just going to give you energy. Which you will use in your exercise. Do eat fruit and plenty of vegetables. They have different types of fiber which does different things to your intestines.
I have been lardon myself most of my life and now I am going thru a change. Took me years, took me meeting some very smart people whose only hobby besides technology/work is exercise. I have also met some crazy illuminati believing, LSD loving, psychedelic trance vegans who spend most of their day looking for healthy stuff. Met overweight vegetarians, some of who only ate fruit.
For some reason people think food is the only saint thing they are allowed to imbibe on. The disappointing truth is that you have to be starving a bit. That's it.
What was even more shocking was recent article about how fasting forces revival of your immune system. Or that yoga moves some of the muscles that normal exercise wouldn't move, hence removing more toxins from there. Or that meditation is one form of natural high and there is nothing esoteric about it.
There's plent enough fat in back bacon. Its unclear why the US doesn't sell it readily. Streaky bacon is more of a condiment than useful protein source.
"Canadian bacon", as you call it, is back bacon, same as the UK. In the US, it's often salted and cured kind of like a packaged deli meat or something and it's pretty awful and bears little resemblance to the genuine article.
Funny that you chose Epic Meal Time - they're actually Canadian. But yes, not to take away from your point, bacon is a Big Deal(tm) in America (and its northern neighbor).
It's different than the kinds of bacon you'll find in parts of the U.K., Ireland or Canada which usually serve a more hearty cut of meat that's processed differently and can include back bacon, or middle cuts from the pig.
This article was very interesting, since I'd been puzzled by the popularity of bacon as a meme. I've also wondered about moustaches, which became a meme around the same time and with similar people and products, sort of the same "meme space". Is there something that drove the handlebar 'stache as a meme? (Reading this, it seems like kind of a crazy comment, but I do mean it seriously.)
I think Movember was the precipitant for the moustache craze. People started plastering moustache stickers on everything to indicate their support for the popular prostate cancer fundraiser, and then decided that moustaches were cool any time of the year (but not cool enough to actually grow them.)
Obviously The Pork Board would wish to claim credit for the shift in demand for bacon. Lobbyists and advertisers will tend to portray themselves as essential to the industries that support them. It is more likely that "the bacon boom" was a market phenomenon driven by lots of small cultural and technological shifts, not social engineering. The article is undermined by its title and reliance on Pork Board anecdotes.
Reading about the Pork Marketing Board, I can't help but be reminded of the Celery sketch on Portlandia, where the Produce Sales Board tracks the marketing of various produces. Bacon plays a key role.
As an Australian living the in the US, I _really_ miss Aussie "full rasher" bacon and am somewhat amazed that it hasn't become a thing over here in bacon crazy land.
I suspect that in the not too distant future, we will look back at ourselves eating this highly intelligent and emotional animal with disgust. Why do we call it "bacon" instead of "pig belly"? To keep consumers from remembering that it was ever an independent, conscious creature. The amount of marketing that goes into this narrow vision of "mm smoky salty tasty" B.S without thinking with your brain about what it actually IS, really is a tragedy
This post was downvoted, but I'm not sure why. I eat bacon every day... but only with the aid of significant ethical dissonance.
Pigs are incredibly intelligent, comparable with dolphins and dogs. The way they're raised and slaughtered is awful. The only reason I can continue to eat bacon is because I refuse to acknowledge the suffering behind food that I believe provides essential animal proteins and fats to my diet. Even so, I should switch to chicken or fish rather than continue my support for pig slaughter.
We need cloned meat to arrive yesterday. The current industry is unsustainable and absolutely brutal to captive animals -- and incapable of scaling to the needs of the 7-12 billion people who will demand meat over the next several decades. Bacon is delicious and wonderful, but let's not lie to ourselves about the cruel conditions that produce it.
Pork belly is delicious, but generally when folks talk about pork belly they're not talking about bacon.
You don't really need to read too much into it. I doubt folks refrain from referring to couscous as "wheat" because they're ashamed about the factory cultivation and wholesale destruction of this noble plant; we just like having specific names for specific preparations.
I didn't mean to turn this into a discussion about evolutionary linguistics, taxonomy or nomenclature, and i wasn't positing any conspiracy theories...
my point is that when you think about 'bacon', what is salient are only qualities related to it qua food -- that is to say, how it tastes, how nutritious it is, what to eat it with, etc.
bacon denotes only the food. but of course the fact that bacon is also an animal is relevant. i would argue, that is much more important than the qualities of it as food.
so here is the distinction with wheat: if i ground you up and put you on a bun, technically that would be a 'burger'. but there is something more we want to say about it -- sure its a 'burger', but it was also shog9!!! so in that sense, it seems like a trick to call the ground up shog9 merely a burger instead of 'ground up shog9 on a bun'. i feel this way about the entire meat industry.
I'll respect your wishes by not getting into the history of the term "burger" (but if you wish to delve, you'll find it plenty creepy enough on its own, were you to take it literally). Point is, we tend to seek efficient language for terms we use frequently.
You might, once in a while, go to a good restaurant and order a meal in which you specify in excruciating detail what you wish to be served and how you wish it prepared. But most of us, most of the time, are selecting common ingredients and common preparations from a very limited set of options. Being excessively detailed in this context is just a waste of time.
Most places that serve burgers offer one option: beef. Ground-up cow or steer. You don't even get to choose the cut - the flesh is likely a mix of cuts, blended to a consistent flavor profile and fat content, pre-measured and machine-formed to ensure consistent results and fast preparation. You might, if you go upscale a bit, have the option of a burger made from turkey or buffalo, or perhaps even one that doesn't contain meat at all; you'll indicate your desire for these with a convenient prefix: "turkey burger", "buffalo burger", "walnut burger", etc. If folks at some point developed a taste for gamey Coloradoan, you might briefly have the option of ordering a "shog9 burger"...
...all of these would be shorthand for "ground-up, seasoned patties of [prefix], served on a bun".
At some point, you learned this. Hopefully, you learned it young, from your parents or caregivers, who taught you where the meat came from, how it was prepared, showed you the cost to all involved in transforming a beast of the field into a meal... Hopefully you learned before you'd built up too many false assumptions about what food is.
Many, sad to say, do not - there is a troubling breakdown in our culture that distances folks' notions of sustenance from the knowledge of the cycles and processes that are prerequisites to sustain life - whether the meal consumed is a burger or a cabbage.
So what is your point? You aren't trying to talk about etymology, you aren't positing conspiracy theories, ... what are you trying to achieve? To remind us bacon is made of pig?
Dunno about that. Here in the UK you can buy a product clearly labelled as pork belly, and it's not the same as bacon. It isn't cured, and is cut much thicker with more fat. It's great.
I am slowly trying to re-evaluate my consumption of certain meats from certain sources... I feel hunting and local farming can substantially improve the ethics of meat consumption.
I also have never heard a pig called smart. They're dirty, and the mothers sometimes eat the young. I thought Octopus was the animal of the week to defend.
Maybe you think pigs are dirty as they wallow in mud? This is because they lack functional sweat glands, and can't pant like a dog can. They wallow to keep cool.
I'd be curious to know if "savaging" (eating/killing their young) occurs outside of factory farms. I imagine if it does, the likelihood is a lot lower.
It's an anecdote, but my mom grew up on a small farm and she remembers hearing the squeals of a piglet as the sow ate it one time. She didn't eat pig for a while.
There are plenty of languages in which the name of a meat product isn't an indirection. Do those speakers treat animals any better? IIRC stronger forms of Sapir-Wolf are more or less discredited nowadays. Even in English, we're happy to refer to "chicken," "turkey," and "fish." They're not treated particularly well.
Supposedly the demarcation line in English has to do with class and our Norman overlords in 1100. Rich folk ate in French, and that's why we get terms like pork (porc), beef (boeuf), veal (veau), and mutton (mouton). Poor peasants stuck with their poor peasant words when eating their poor peasant foods, so those foods retained the reference to the source when moved from field to table.
I don't know how true it is--if it were that uncomplicated, why do we have pollo and gallina?
And regarding "discredited", it seems (http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Sapir%E...) that various strong forms of the hypothesis don't hold but there is support for a weak form (that linguistic differences have some effect on cognition).
Your point still stands, but to be fair we do that with almost all meats we consume. Pork instead of pig, veal instead of baby cow, beef instead of adult cow, etc. Chicken is the only one that comes to mind that we call it as we see it. I'm curious what we'll end up calling ants and grasshoppers when we start eating them en masse.
I think you also need to accept that most people don't care that it was a living, intelligent, conscious creature. I know plenty of people who will vocally celebrate a meal with bacon (or steak or whatnot) with a blatant reference to the animal that died to be on the plate. I hope this attitude changes in our time, but it is the current reality.
Not just chicken but most birds (goose, turkey, duckling, pheasant...). Also, lamb.
My understanding is that the difference is because at one point in England the nobility (who ate the animals) spoke something closer to French while the peasants (who raised the animals) spoke something closer to German. So we get beef on our plate but a cow in the field, pork versus pig or swine. It wasn't to distance the food from the animal, but the lower classes from the aristocracy. Whether it now serves that role is another question.
Interesting, thank you. I didn't really know much about the etymology, but yes, I think the current language certainly perpetuates a convenient cognitive dissociation
Not sure about that, there should have been about 50 if so and from the readme provided by the census "To safeguard privacy, we restrict our list of names to those with at least 5 occurrences."
My guess is that there's similar stories to be told about coffee and chocolate - both of which now have fanatical followings. I'm sure they've been been told, but I have not yet read them.
On a related note, This American Life recently did an interesting item on the birth of the artisnal toast - well worth a listen.
The "artisinal toast" aspect is the least interesting. It's an amazing story about a person dealing with their own mental illness, with some good startup advice mixed in at the end.
"Just get some cups. Brew some coffee. When you run out cups, close the door, and go get more cups."
In my experience, Zingerman's is overpriced and overrated. That isn't to say bad by any means, it probably still makes the cut for "great", but honestly I had better experiences at Bread Basket for much cheaper (with the caveats that this was years ago, and I've every expectation it'll vary depending on what you're getting).
Incredible, a product that nobody wanted became a success.
I wonder how much products failed because people haven't found their real function. They did just some adjustments on bacon and it became a success as a flavor enhancer.
Well remembered. I also heard a history about chicken legs years ago.
I also worked on a firm, in Brazil, that make a ERP software for Chicken producers. Some of our clients told me all chicken legs was separated and send to Asia (I think it was Japan), where it is a really appreciated product.
Wow I didn't know it was such a big deal like that.
I always wondered why Religious people are against Pork and most Holy books forbid eating pig? Yet is so popular to eat? Confused on that.
Pork can easily carry diseases that humans are susceptible to. Not such an issue these days with modern food processing. Bacon and other processed/preserved meats are loaded up with sodium nitrite, which also helps.
I myself have never had Pork. Just Chicken and Beef. A study by the Cancer Research Center of Hawaii and the University of Southern California suggests a link between eating processed (sodium nirite) meats and cancer risk
Most Christian denominations have no rules or biases against eating pork, so there is still a rather large market for it (not even counting those who are non-religious or non-observant).
I'd like to posit a far more insidious impetus: Xenophobia.
Yes, most of the people on the bacon bandwagon just enjoy the stuff. It's tasty, and bacon-flavored ice-cream is a great joke. But there's also a vein of white-supremacy, anti-semitic, anti-muslim sentiment in America, and some of the people enthusiastically pushing to put pork in everything under the sun might be doing so because they know it'll make others uncomfortable. A subtle way to assert that "they don't belong here, in the land of bacon", basically.
Is it a tiny minority? I certainly hope so. But I think there's a larger overlap, of people who don't think of themselves as actively racist, but who just go along with the bacon-everywhere mantra because they don't mind rubbing it in.
Imagine if your favorite restaurant had a barbecue special every friday, and that coincidentally meant there were no catholics around the place. Okay, no big deal, just eat somewhere else. Now imagine if every restaurant in town adopted this schedule, leaving catholics feeling pretty unwelcome. A lot of us non-catholics would never notice, and probably just go along with it, hey, tasty food on fridays, right? Until someone mentioned it...
I think that's where we might be on the bacon thing. Folks affected by it are a minority, and hesitant to say anything for fear of sounding whiny and further marginalizing themselves for their beliefs. And it's tasty enough that most folks going along with it might not realize they're playing into an agenda. And it would be impossible to prove that such an agenda even existed. Which I can't prove.
But I do know that the bacon-fever makes some of my friends and coworkers feel just a little uncomfortable, a little unwelcome here. Food for thought.
Speaking as someone you might consider xenophobic -- in that I think the set of opinions that constitute Islam are pretty awful, particularly in regard to apostates, women, and homosexuals -- I've never considered bacon to be an avenue to white supremacy. Then again, I'm not white.
There are significant ethical hurdles to eating bacon, but Islamophobia isn't one of them.
But then you get into the meat of it (sorry) and find that the root of the turnaround is an actual technical accomplishment -- a method to cook and distribute pre-cooked bacon that wouldn't rob the bacon of its flavor:
> The early 1990s was a time of great advancements in precooked bacon technology. Pork producers, food labs, and agricultural schools such as Iowa State University began investing substantially in precooked R&D. Hormel and Swift worked on microwaveable precooked slices for home consumers, while Chicago’s OSI and the now-defunct Wilson Foods poured their efforts into bacon spirals that would fit perfectly atop a hamburger.
These technical innovations turned out to be the key, because the pork marketers were pitching bacon to fast-food chains as a "flavor enhancer," but the chains that tried it mostly came away dissatisfied: the hassle of adding bacon-cooking to their highly regimented kitchens created expense and added time to the burger-assembly process, while existing methods for pre-cooking bacon yielded a tasteless product. Pre-cooked bacon with taste intact (that came in shapes ready to plop on top of a hamburger patty, no less) took all that friction away.
My only regret is that the whole thing is written from the perspective of the Pork Marketing Board, which funded the research into pre-cooking bacon, but doesn't really tell you much about the research itself. That seems like it'd be an interesting story, for those of a technical bent; here's a problem, how do you solve it?