Endangered species?
In our last post, I was busy relating the Bohemian Radio Institute’s latest findings on pointless fascination with things that never happened when I encountered an example of what the poets and travelling salesmen call serendipity – which seems to be a form of coincidence in which something pointlessly trivial becomes trivial in a much more meaningful way. Or so my gut tells me.
Many of you dear readers happened to remark that, just as I was conveying the magnificence of the never-to-have-had-existed Bacon Toaster of Future 1975, something was happening in our contemporary, real future in a way that may or may not actually happen in our actual future lifetimes: A worldwide shortage of the most important ingredient of our imaginary toaster: Bacon!
Also the main ingredient in canned emergency bacon. Because you never know …
Now, being somewhat a student of the science of circular logic and unfalsifiable propositions, I immediately became intensely suspicious and paranoid: Something was happening in the world that I, as an individual, couldn’t quite understand or control – elegant proof that someone or something ELSE was controlling things beyond my ability to understand or control things beyond my understanding or control, wouldn’t you say?
Resisting the temptation to immediately go off-grid, living out of dumpsters and public libraries while going under the nom de voyage Susan P. Bugblatt (long story), I instead settled down for some intense research on the subject of bacon. My first step was the laborious typing of the word “bacon” into the search line on Google. I was expecting to learn something, but … I wasn’t quite expecting this:
Something wonderful
“How clever,” I thought. “Devilishly clever.” A certain fast food restaurant had just introduced the brilliant and tantalizing combination of fried heavenly goodness and a vanilla-esque soft-serve iced cream-like substance, calling it the Bacon Sundae. And just as a years-long drought threatens the supply of feedstock that may or may not result in a shortage and slight increase in the price of the most important ingredient. I was deep in the rabbit hole, with no electric carrot to light the way.
Before I go on, a little history may be in order. I know most people, like I do, think of bacon as a carefully cultivated result of the Apollo astronaut programs of the 1960s, along with Tang, Velcro and Richard Nixon. But did you know that it was actually discovered by our ancient human ancestors of thousands of hundreds of years ago – serendipitously – that the giant monster pigs they had been spearing for food actually tasted like delicious fried bacon? Or, at least, they would when they eventually discovered fire and pan-fry cooking.
An animal that just happens to taste like delicious bacon, eh? Nice try, Evolution.
Bacon was so useful and greasy that the Romans paid their soldiers with giant slabs of bacon called petaso, which they mixed in a bag with wine, spoiled figs, spices and feral cats before drinking. And the ancient French, when not making up words far too complicated for modern Americans to pronounce without local anesthesia, eventually domesticated some wild Germans accompanied by their porcine lords and masters, thus acquiring not only the Germanic bakkon, which means “delicious treat from filthy swine,” but also the magnificent animals they would ride gloriously into battle during the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.
The history of the Norman Conquest.
During World War II, the U.S. government required all bacon aficionados to save their bacon grease and send it back to the Government Men to make into bombs. Just how many kitchen grease bombs were made is not recorded by the military – quite possibly because it was total bullshit – but my theory is that since Hitler was a vegetarian, he’d have been extra-offended by bacon-derived explosives. Who’s to say who hasn’t really bothered to look it up? Not me, my dear readers. Not me at all.
Even people named after the foodish substance were disproportionately influential on world history. Sir Francis Bacon not only invented the Declaration of Independence and Shakespeare, but his grandson Kevin Bacon is never more than six degrees of awesome away from anyone else on earth.
Is there any mane bacon grease can’t tame?
So, now that you know all these arcane, knowledge-like factlets, can you really believe that it is a coincidence that much of our most dearly delicious natural food resources – bacon, ham, pork chops, sausage, pizza, beef jerky – all come from the same amazing animal? It’s almost as if someone had planned the biggest mass dependency on a staple food item in the history of planned mass dependencies, only to then ruthlessly make it slightly less convenient to obtain.
There’s no telling how far this conspiracy of consumption goes. I’m not telling – mostly because I don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be a lot more on the Internet about the Great Bacon Conspiracy other than what I have just posted right now. Or did I just Blow Your Mind?
Just a brief note here to thank everyone who stopped to read, like, comment or temporarily glance at my blog over the last two days; it’s a been an overwhelming privilege to be Freshly Pressed. I hope you enjoy what’s to come. Also, an especially grateful and loving thank you to my wonderful friend and benefactor Courtenay Bluebird of Bluebird Blvd., whose brilliant writings are always a pleasure and an inspiration.
Bohemian Radio 