Frazz by Jef Mallett for January 20, 2020

Definitely not Kosher. But surely that wouldn’t matter to a random white dude… (like me).

If ‘pork snob’ wasn’t already a thing, it is now.

When I became a vegetarian for a couple of years, the only things I really missed were bacon and sausage. And being able to fix a very tasty medium-fat, high-protein meal in just a few minutes. Then I fell in with people who thought inviting a vegetarian to a meal didn’t mean they had to actually prepare anything without meat. And I had to be polite… and pretty soon I was back to eating steak. And salmon. And broiled chicken. And…

I haven’t had bacon, on purpose, for over 30 years.

Whoever does the PR for bacon is the one I want to hire to do my PR.

Somehow in the last few years, it’s become a given – almost a cliche – that bacon is the Greatest Thing Ever. I have no idea where that came from, I always preferred steak or chicken.

Scherzo was in fine form yesterday…..must be back in his den recharging his batteries…

ask anyone in a diner in NJ what their preferred breakfast is and the response will be Pork Roll [Taylor Ham if in the north of the state] Egg and Cheese on a hard roll. Bacon would be a distant second.

What’s telling is when self-labeled vegetarians or vegans add, “But I eat bacon.” Consume it or not, but stop talking about it. :-P

Baconivore or Baconarian?

Next, look up the word cholesterol

Bourdain said that bacon is the gateway meat. It can bring vegetarians back to the other side.

I’ve heard of a sandwich called a “hypocrite”. It’s a veggie burger with bacon.

OK, I’ll bite: How is this supposed to be ingenious?

Proof enough that bacon is its own food-group.

Ah C’mon, Pork comes in several tasty variations. Plus I heard he likes Chicken too.

Start with “hypocrite”.

PostsFrazz20 hrs ·

I do, in fact, know this guy. Whoever said that vegetarianism, or a whole lot of things, have to be all or nothing? My hunch is that all-or-nothing policies yield more nothings than alls. My other hunch is that the reason so many widely varied diets, however sensible or wacko, work for a lot of people because the one thing they have in common is getting people paying actual attention to what they eat. It’s funny, bacon is high on the list of foods I can take or leave, but I still think my friend’s approach is simply brilliant.

To this day, my own favorite diet plan remains Michael Pollan’s. He put the simply in simply brilliant with his three rules of 1) eat food, 2) mostly plants, and 3) not too much. A little over a decade ago, my doctor didn’t like my total cholesterol numbers — boosted over the threshold because of high levels of the so-called good cholesterol, but medical trends were going through a phase where that was less of a mitigating factor — and wanted to put me on statins, or, as they’re known in the running community, muscle destroyers. I bargained for 3 months of trying to get it down via diet, and after trying hard to make it complicated, I settled on the Michael Pollan approach. Three months later, I astonished my doctor, dropped 10 pounds (and we’ll note that when I made the deal and started the dietary changes, I was 2 weeks out from Ironman Louisville, so I wasn’t exactly portly to start with), began a long streak of way-beyond-expectations athletic results, and just plain felt great.

I’ve kind of — and by “kind of,” I mean “dramatically” — fallen off that wagon in recent years. I eat too much stuff I shouldn’t, a little too thoughtlessly. Which is really dumb. I should reverse that trend, especially since that extra fat doesn’t seem to be doing a smidgen of its promised thing keeping me insulated on long, cold swims. Yeah, I should get back to the better-diet side of things. Even if “simple” doesn’t at all mean “easy."

I have long said that bacon isn’t meat, it’s a condiment!