Food more unhealthy than Bacon? Get outta here!

From the headlines over on the sidebar, here's a piece about how farm raised tilapia is a worse diet choice for those with heart disease or other inflammation-related conditions than "pork bacon". (As opposed to "hobo bacon", which melts in your mouth like veal, or so I'm told).

A food that's worse for you than bacon? That's a little like someone saying that any given activity is less safe than "riding a motorcycle blindfolded in LA traffic", or "standing between Chuck Schumer and a videocamera".

Yeah, I felt compelled to comment on this item, mainly because you retards mention my name every time the word "bacon" comes up in a story. It's typecasting, just like Bob Denver had to deal with as "Gilligan" or Charles Manson has to deal with when everyone refers to him as "that psycho whackadoo who told his "family" to slaughter all those people". Of course, unlike those two, this typecasting means that I get to eat more bacon, so in my case, it's a GOOD thing.

I'm not sure what to think about this issue.

On one hand, it's nice to know that bacon isn't the boogeyman that everyone makes it out to be. It's not as if you'll burst into flames upon eating more than four slices of sweet, sweet pork bacon in one sitting. All you have to do is consume bacon in moderation. Respect the bacon, and it will respect you.

Of course, if free bacon is offered as part of a bacon eating contest, all moderation is off for the duration of the contest. Free bacon, people!

On the other hand, bacon has a sort of outlaw mystique that those like me revel in as we enjoy the taste. Bacon is an evil repository of cholesterol, and you get bacon from feeding corn to hogs instead of feeding that bacon to starving third-world refugees. Considering that it takes about 3 to 4 pounds of corn to produce one pound of pork, you could argue (and believe me, those patchouli-scented eco-freaks never tire of making this point) that feeding corn to hogs is a waste of valuable natural resources. Of course, that's a moot point, since any Iowa corn that escapes the clutches of our hogs gets fed into the closest ethanol plant, in our worldwide plot to kill all third-world brown people.

If it turns out that bacon isn't Diet Enemy #1, that might cause all the health pussies to increase their consumption and ending the monopoly on consumption that dietary daredevils like me have had for years. What happens then? Do I have to watch Paris Hilton & the Olsen Twins chow down on double bacon cheeseburgers on Entertainment Tonight? Will amateur outlaws play dress up and go out to dive bars for "all you can eat Bacon Thursday"? I watched the gentrification of Harley riders during the 80's and 90's, and there's no way I want to see bacon-eating go down that road. Hell, if bacon weren't so damn tasty, I'd be sorely tempted to give it up so that I don't have to mix with all the posers.

At least my favorite dish will never suffer this fate. Not much demand for "Soylent Bart" out there right now, and that's just the way I like it.

posted by Russ from Winterset at 01:01 PM

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