Stamps released in China to celebrate the Year of the Pig taste of sweet and sour pork.
If anybody out there is going to china this year, please, please, please bring us some of these……
Archive for the ‘Theology’ Category
Sweet and Sour Po(rk)stal Service
Friday, January 12th, 2007Blasphemy or WTF?
Friday, March 31st, 2006I don’t know about you, but I think I’d rather deal with the odd clogged artery, than eat pork spliced with earthworm genes, but for those of us more worried about the health effects of excessive bacon eating, perhaps this is the nicotine patch they’ve been waiting for?
Healthy Bacon? Let us know what you think?
Making Bacon That’s Healthier for You A team of researchers may have found a way to make bacon that’s good for your heart. This stunning achievement comes from a mixture of molecular genetics, cloning, and good old American know-how. The key to this delicious prospect? A modified gene that changes some of the omega-6 fatty acids — which pigs normally create — into omega-3 fatty acids.
bBacon – A review, and some theological musings
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006My wife, the Velveteen Rabbi, has been taking a course this semester (in her ultimate pursuit of a rabbinic degree) called “Deep Ecuminism”. The aim of the course is to recognize similarities between different faiths and open opportunities for dialogue between those who follow different belief systems.
In that spirit, I’ve been thinking lately about ways Bacontarians can reach out to our brothers and sisters who keep kosher or halal. How can we share our joy in the LARD with those whose forbids them to consume pork?
I think I may have stumbled upon the solution.
Beef bacon, or as we’ve been calling it around our house – bBacon (pronounced “buh-BA-con”.)
It looks like bacon. Certainly more so than turkey bacon or various forms of tofu-related “facon”. The main visual dissimilarity comes out when you try to separate pieces of the raw meat – the fat layer on bBacon is more fragile than on pork bacon, and tends to expand into fat lacework if you pull it too hard.
It cooks like bacon. It cooks slowly, evenly and isn’t prone to scorching, like turkey bacon. It gives off LOTS of fat, if you cook it long enough to get strips good and crunchy. (Conveniently, I’d just cooked a kilo of real bacon before cooking 340g of bBacon. I saved the LARD from the former and the suet from the latter, and the volumes of fat yielded appear to be roughly proportional.)
Observant jews will eat it. No observant Muslims were available for our tests, but Margaret, pictured above, described it as “sinfully delicious, yet halakhically correct”. (No, the Velveteen Rabbi doesn’t keep kosher. She, too, is an observant bacontarian.)
bBacon is described on the package as “cured and smoked beef plate”. Beef plate is also known as “flank” or “hanger” steak, a fatty cut of meat that tastes wonderful when marinated and served as fajitas. The high fat content makes it work as a fried meat – leaner cuts wouldn’t yield sufficient fat to cook properly. The bBacon I tasted was produced by Gwaltney, a proud old Virginia-based ham producer. Smithfield, Virginia, where the company is based, claims to have produced acorn-fed ham since 1627 – Gwaltney has been a going concern since 1870, and is part of Smithfield Foods, the only Fortune 500 company I know of whose web splash page is an attractively spiral-cut ham. In other words, these people understand bacon.
And they evidently understand bBacon as well. The bBacon I tasted was smoky, but not artifically so, pleasantly salty, much less sweet than many bacons, an excellent balance of meat and fat, and, frankly, pretty damned delicious. Given a choice between run-of-the-mill, storebought, presliced bacon and bBacon, I’d likely go with the bBacon, as it cooks more consistently than most cheap bacon I’ve sampled. It’s not quite the religious experience a hand-cut piece of expertly smoked pork bacon is, but it’s not even in the same ballpark as pale imitators like turkey bacon.
Which opens some interesting questions: if it looks like bacon, cooks like bacon, tastes a whole lot like bacon, but is made of cow, not pig… is it bacon? And if so, what does this mean for our faith – nay, for our very way of life?
Challenge: Airline Meals – Bacontarian
Wednesday, August 24th, 2005I’ll be teaching at a Wireless Workshop in South Africa next month, and am just getting my travel arrangements in order. I was e-mailing with the person in charge of booking my ticket, and one of the questions she asked (along with my passport number and full name) was whether I had any special dietary needs.
My obvious answer was that I was a Bacontarian, and would only eat meals that include Bacon, or in very rare circumstances pancetta or other forms of Pork. We quickly agreed that most airlines probably don’t recognize Bacontarianism as a proper special meal category, which of course can only be construed as a challenge.
After all, there are an almost ludicrous amount of special diet categories on most international flights, just get an idea, AirlineMeals.net lists the following: muslim, kosher, hindu, gluten free, lactose free, Low-cholesterol, vegan, seafood, diabetes, fruit meal, low-calorie, low-fat, oriental vegetarian, asian vegetarian, indian vegetarian and vegetarian…
and it has the pictures to prove it.
This is my challenge: For the Bacontarian community to unite, and set forth to spread the good bacontarian diet to airlines around the world. I hereby pledge 500g of prime, organic, danish bacon to whoever is first to get a Bacontarian special meal delivered by an airline.
Let’s do this.
Comments on strategies for achieving this noble and necessary goal are welcome in the comments section.
The Carbonara Compromise
Monday, August 22nd, 2005Brothers and sisters, we face a theological crisis, a test of our very faith in the LARD. As you’ve surely seen, there is mounting evidence that the world as we know it was created through a process called Intelligent Design, where an entity known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, through the manipulation of his noodly appendages, shaped our collective reality. Manifestations of the FSM are permeating the Internet and the ranks of so-called Pastafarians are growing.
Little is known about Pastafarian practices: we do know that they believe in wearing pirate garb, take Fridays off from work, believe in a moral code as flexible as the noodles they worship and believe that heaven features a stripper factory and a beer volcano… all theological principles compatible with orthodox Bacontarianism.
However, we do not know what Pastafarians believe about the LARD. We do not know whether they recognize bacon as a sacrament or whether they understand the importance of the Holy LARD in both religious practice and daily life.
Meditating on this issue over a bacon-laced Cobb salad, I realized that there’s a number of strong indications that our Pastafarian bretheren may, indeed, be our brothers and sisters in the LARD. The Pastafarian liturgy ends its prayers with a solemn “Ramen”. As we all know, ramen is generally served in a pork-based broth and usually features multiple slices of roast pork atop the noodles. At the very least, we know that the Pastafarians are not abstainers, or worse, vegetarians.
Furthermore, I realized that little is known about the trinitarian nature of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. We know that he is part pasta (the noodly appendages), but we know little about the meatballs and almost nothing about the sauce (including whether or not the sauce actually manifests, much like the Holy Spirit.)
I offer the following interpretation, which would allow us to find common ground between Pastafarians and Bacontarians, which I call “The Carbonara Compromise”:
We believe in the LARD, holy and eternal.
We believe the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a manifestation of the LARD’s earthly power.
We believe the meatballs of the FSM are made of, or certainly contain pork and most assuredly were fried in holy LARD.
We believe the sauce that tops the FSM is a Carbonara Sauce, made from the LARD’s own holy pancetta.
We believe that any bacon-eating Pastafarian who is willing to meditate on the nature of the FSM’s meatballs and the eternal mystery of the Carbonara Sauce should be welcomed into our midst as a Bacontarian.
My bretheren, I offer this compromise like Luther’s 95 theses, stuck to a church door with bacon grease. I do not expect them to be uncontroversial, but I believe our Bacontarian faith is strong enough to survive the debate that is sure to follow. Ramen.
Your servant in the LARD,
-EthanZ
