Bacon: The Guiltiest of Pleasures? - Dispatches from Maine

Those who know me know I like bacon . . . a lot!  Perhaps you are familiar with the popular shibboleth “I love you more than bacon.”  I don’t know if that applies to me or not.  All I know is that I love bacon.  How much?  A lot!!  I especially enjoy the apple-smoked bacon I can find so readily here in Maine.  Nothing tastes like it.

The other day I was looking through one of our weekly newspapers up here and I came across an unattributed story under the title “Bacon - The Next Health Craze.”  Noting that bacon can be the “ultimate food indulgence” and the “guiltiest pleasure possible,” Dr. John Salerno, the author of The Silver Cloud Diet and a protégé of the creator of the Atkins Diet, has posited that bacon is one of the healthiest foods one can eat.  Well, I am no board-certified family physician or dietician, but hell . . . I could have told you that!  Salerno goes on to say that the consuming of high protein bacon, free of nitrates and full of amino acids, can aid in body metabolism while assuaging the ill effects of diabetes, heart disease and strokes.  Salerno also points out that bacon, while low in carbohydrates and with a 4:1 ration of protein to fat, is full of mono-unsaturated fats containing vitamins and minerals and the good kind of cholesterol.  OK, this all may be true and I trust the good Dr. Salerno.  But he left out the most important reason to eat bacon . . . it tastes so damned good!!   And if it didn’t, why do so many dishes taste so much better with a piece or two of bacon wrapped around it? 

I live by the adage, “If it tastes good, eat it.  If it doesn’t, don’t.”  It’s that simple.  And it even says so in the Bible. “And make me savoury meat, such as I love, and bring it to me, that I may eat; that my soul may bless thee before I die” [Genesis 24:7].  What more needs to be said?

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