Here is the thing about bacon - it is salty, greasy, crunchy, and when marinaded in maple syrup and baked in the oven it achieves sweet. It covers all the food groups of the tongue*, and you get to eat it with your fingers. It's a wonder food.
Which makes it amazing that I've stopped eating it.
I got sick in college and lost the ability to easily digest red meat, and when I got healthy enough to eat it again I was on the my boyfriend lives in New York and I'm in California and I'd rather talk to him on the phone than spend money on food diet, and meat just cost more. And after graduation, when I had a job and money for exciting things like all the groceries I wanted, avoiding red meat had just become a part of how I define me.
Except... We were visiting a friend I've known since junior high, and her kids wanted bacon with breakfast, so she started frying some up. And, after giving both the kids two pieces of bacon each, she and I stood in the kitchen talking and finished off the pound of bacon. Her husband freaked a bit, because in the more than twenty years he has know us, my friend and I don't eat bacon. And we don't. Except, apparently, when we get together and suddenly become the twelve year old girls we were in seventh grade, because way back then, we loved bacon.
Bacon, the time traveling food.
Oh, and there was the New Year's morning at the neighbors with movies and breakfast snacks and bacon, and I ate it, and it was years ago, and I remember how salty greasy crunchy good it was. Which I would feel worse about, since I now have a more clearly defined food ethos that is firmly against eating things I wouldn't want to kill, and pigs are large animals that might be intelligent. Unlike chickens which are small and annoying and several of whom live next door and there have been many early mornings that I would have been happy to hop the fence and kill the feathered alarm clocks by hand. So I'm okay with eating chicken....Um, I got distracted by my chickens are bad neighbors rant... where was I? I think I was going to include some sort of rational about why it was okay I ate the bacon. But there isn't one. I just did, no one cared, and I don't eat it anymore.
I clearly have fond memories of bacon. So you can see why wandering through a bookstore the title Sex and Bacon: Why I Love Things That Are Very, Very Bad For Me would have caught my eye. Plus a heavily tattooed bleach blond woman holding a frying pan is a pretty eye catching photo. Even if it is just to think ouch or does that make it hard to get a job?
The back covers promises that the book is about the intersection of food and sex. Which might make it sound like a sociological study, until you read further down and see that the author is an actress/model/dancer bisexual who loves meat. At which point you can probably assume that the tattoos aren't interfering with any career prospects.
And that is not how I ended up reading this book. I never ran across it in a bookstore. A friend lent it to me. Months ago. And right after she did we had in-laws coming over to visit, at which point I edited the house, and clutter and provocatively titled books were tidied away. I saw her last week, and was reminded that I still had the book unread in my house. And that is how I ended up reading this book - because it goes against my nature to borrow a book for this long and to not actually read it.
*Right, officially the tongue also perceives sour, bitter and savory. And crunchy isn't exactly a taste. So we'll go with the emotional food groups of the tongue. Happy now?
