Bakker Bugle Blog

Okay, Farmer Billy’s slow killed bacon, Farmer Billy’s bacon fed bacon, Farmer Billy’s travel bacon. Mr Simpson if you really want to kill yourself I also sell hand guns. — Apu

I was about fifteen. I stood in front of the pantry, hanging from the door and staring into shelves devoid of anything that a teenage runner’s body needs. I just ran ten miles and what, I’m supposed to heat up some Cream of Mushroom soup?

My eyes scanned side to side, back and forth, looking for a genuine snack. Something processed, something salty and oddly, slightly, sweet, something crunchy and immediately satisfying.

Bac-Os. That would have to do. I upended the little bottle and bit down on a mouthful. The chemical taste wasn’t repulsive so much as off-putting. The texture of the bits was hard and gritty at first, and then broke down into a featureless mush.

I wasn’t going to do that again. Even my adolescent hunger wouldn’t drive me to chugging Bac-Os. I’d eat an apple or something, first.

The BB Procurement department recently returned from the supermarket with two products that attempt to improve on that formative experience.

With Sansabelt pants, cold fusion, and near-beer, snacking-bacon is among the great aspirations — and disappointments — of humankind. Beef jerky, my friends, is no substitute for the real dream: a bacon-product that one can eat in a manner befitting the modern man: directly out of a foil-lined bag.

Two nations with proud traditions of commercial innovation — Germany and Great Britain — are making another noble attempt to bring our species to the nutritional pinnacle of portable bacon. It is too late for me, my gentle readers, to benefit from such an achievement. At fifteen, I could eat ten-thousand calories of Bac-Os and still lose weight. Now, anything less wholesome than a quinoa-tofu salad, and I gain a stone. The hope that our children might be saved from Bac-Os by long-hoped-for attainment of snacking-bacon led me to put my HDL and LDL on the line and taste these two promising candidates.

Both products were bought from a British grocery store. I suspect that Bacon Pep may be a British product masquerading as an artisanal creation of the famously pork-loving Deutsche people. The snack’s full name, as printed on the bag, appears to be an insensitive caricature of the beautiful German language: “Weizen-Kartoffel-Snack mit Paprika-und Schinken-Geschmack”

Conspiracy theories must be laid aside. I shall let the taste speak for itself. And the taste of Bacon Pep says, “Pork rinds?”

Alas, the creators of Bacon Pep are not the only well-meaning experimenters to take the road to Pork Rind-land, thinking all the while that they were approaching the promised land. Bacon Pep is made of wheat and potato, and, like any of God’s highly processed snacks, it has the blessed uniformity of industrialised food. Nearly every piece of Pep resembles the Platonic ideal of a pork rind. If one considers Bacon Pep as an alternative to pork rinds, then it offers freedom from the unnerving soft spots and disagreeable hairs that one finds with the genuine article.

But pork rinds, ladies and gentlemen, will never be mistaken for bacon. No more needs to be said.

Tesco’s Bacon Rashers, by its name, announces that it will avoid the Scylla of pork rinds. It will attempt a synthetic substitute for real bacon. But can it also avoid the Charybdis of Bac-Os?

My answer, alas, is that eating Tesco’s Bacon Rashers was like a trauma-induced flashback to that horrific afternoon almost two decades ago.

Every unit of the putrid-yellow coloured snack is disturbingly flat, and the insulting imitation of streaks of meat look like they were drawn on by an automated red Sharpie pen. In one’s hand, the “Bacon Rasher” is gritty. In one’s mouth, one learns that the grit was a warning, unheeded, of the extreme saltiness to come.

Salt is the flash-bang grenade of the SWAT-team-incursion that is Tesco’s Bacon Rashers. You are overwhelmed, unable to detect, let alone resist, the swarm of chemicals that have shouted “Clear!” in every corner of your mouth and zip-tied your taste-buds’ hands behind their backs.

For the next several days, Tesco’s Bacon Rashers will be holding your mouth and stomach in their secret detention facility. Your digestive tract has been lawfully confiscated and placed in the rasher’s custody.

It’s not difficult to synthesize a pitiful imitation of the taste of bacon. The triumph of this product is that it recombines in one’s mouth and stomach into a substance that withstands those environments for several days.

Whatever Bacon Rashers become, once chewed and swallowed — it is impervious to repeated toothbrushing, stomach acids, and the myriad of enzymes that millions of years of evolution developed to break down just about any other food.

The effect is that the most artificial of the original chemical flavours will taint your every waking moment, for at least 18 hours. You will taste it along with any other food your consume. When you do not consume food, your stomach will re-introduce the flavour in small burps. There is no escaping the long, long aftertaste of Bacon Rashers.

My fellows, we are no closer, as a species, to the realisation of the long-lived dream of snacking-bacon. I do not, however, write these words in sadness. My hope is that these honourable attempts will spur the next generation of food scientists and amateur experimenters alike to find this grail of human nutrition: bacon you can put in your pocket!