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.
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.