The Bacon Boom Was Not an Accident
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
But then you get into the meat of it (sorry) and find that the root of the turnaround is an actual technical accomplishment -- a method to cook and distribute pre-cooked bacon that wouldn't rob the bacon of its flavor:
> The early 1990s was a time of great advancements in precooked bacon technology. Pork producers, food labs, and agricultural schools such as Iowa State University began investing substantially in precooked R&D. Hormel and Swift worked on microwaveable precooked slices for home consumers, while Chicago’s OSI and the now-defunct Wilson Foods poured their efforts into bacon spirals that would fit perfectly atop a hamburger.
These technical innovations turned out to be the key, because the pork marketers were pitching bacon to fast-food chains as a "flavor enhancer," but the chains that tried it mostly came away dissatisfied: the hassle of adding bacon-cooking to their highly regimented kitchens created expense and added time to the burger-assembly process, while existing methods for pre-cooking bacon yielded a tasteless product. Pre-cooked bacon with taste intact (that came in shapes ready to plop on top of a hamburger patty, no less) took all that friction away.
My only regret is that the whole thing is written from the perspective of the Pork Marketing Board, which funded the research into pre-cooking bacon, but doesn't really tell you much about the research itself. That seems like it'd be an interesting story, for those of a technical bent; here's a problem, how do you solve it?
Some macho people proudly eat pounds of it, claiming that it is a manly/american food- see for example this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8u8Z3bUQfs . In stores, you can find as many items with bacon texture on them as you can find items with prints of the US flag. "Bacon bowls" are a thing.
It's really more than just a food in the US- people are obsessed with it. If you spend time on reddit, you can get a glimpse of that through the ever recurring bacon posts in the mainstream subreddits.
I mean, seriously.
One of my earliest memories at the tender age of 3 (very early 1980s) was wearing one of those blue anoraks with a fuzzy collar and being wheeled to the greasy caf'[1] in a buggy and fed bacon, beans, chips (French fries) and tea. This was in Islington in London. I can't think of a single week I haven't eaten bacon since.
That's just normal here. No crazy or macho rubbish. Food staple.
And as I've had this argument before (on reddit...), to the Americans, we don't eat that shitty Canadian bacon or the streaky stuff you get in the US here. We use the latter to add flavour to other foods and eat the nice lean back bacon: http://www.clancysofchester.co.uk/back%20bacon.jpg . The streaky stuff is kind of horrible and clogs up your arteries.
[1] Not café. Caf' innit (local dialect)
I feel like I'm letting a secret out, but if there's any crowd that we want to be healthy and productive, it's HN. Eat fat. It's great for you. What's important is to remove sugar from your diet in all its forms.
Everything in moderation is probably better advice than a single fact.
A lot of nutritional fads are indistinguishable from religion. Scales are always balanced, not necessarily visibly.
Wholemeal toast would he a complex carb. White bread would be a complex carb in the form of a refined starch - still not a simple carb.
If I had to guess, your family's health problems weren't with lard -- they probably resulted from the companion toast and french fries. Any calories you eat will be directed to storage if your insulin is spiked... which happens when you eat carbs like those found in wheat and potatoes.
That's not to say that glucose, which you find in potatoes, is necessarily awful. I don't eat it, but Dr. Robert Lustig (an incredible font of knowledge) thinks glucose can be a valuable part of a diet. What's particularly important is to eliminate fructose and sucrose. They're toxins with no redeeming qualities except making fat-free foods palatable.
eliminate fructose
I'm not opposed to the occasional fruit. But given your tone, I rather suspect you think Jamba Juice is healthier than a steak. Go ahead, I'm not here to save your life... but you may want to read a bit on the subject. I'd start with Gary Taubes, Peter Attia, and Robert Lustig.
No their problems weren't just the lard. It was derision pointed at the unfounded basis of your analysis and the complexity of the human diet, metabolism and relatively limited knowledge of nutrition we have.
/r/keto isn't a valid citation, well no more than /r/spacedicks (NSFW) or the pope. Neither is you losing weight.
Eat sugar, dude. I'm not here to save your life. But if some of the awesome nerds who read HN decide to get healthy, I'd really recommend eliminating sugar from your diet. Life is so much better without it.
Recommended introductory reading would be Gary Taubes, Robert Lustig, and Peter Attia. The history of nutrition over the past fifty years is absolutely shocking.
However, I rode 59 miles from London to Brighton on my nice Dawes Ultra Galaxy a couple of months back without any trouble. Last month I had a medical and am, according to doctor "in wonderful shape". Go figure.
Oh right, everything in moderation. That's the win. I eat that stuff when I need it.
I wouldn't cite a bunch of random popular reading health authors and an endocrinologist incapable of using the scientific method in his work. Go read some Feynman and apply some critical thinking and get back to me.
Dude, your antagonism has no place here. You're not helping your argument, you're just making HN worse.
I'm calling up hokum and bad science, nothing more.
i'm not sure if i'm interpreting this correctly, but it sounds like you essentially admitted that you're really fat, despite being active. while i agree that the BMI system is very flawed especially when it comes to measuring the health and fitness level of active people, but for the typical non-active keyboard warrior (which statistically HN would probably have a very high percentage of relative to the whole userbase), the BMI is a decent gauge of health.
simply put, what i'm saying is, unless you're telling me you're in fact a massive 250-lb muscle-bound beast, the BMI reading is probably quite accurate that you're overweight and not healthy at all.
you can convolute the argument as much as you want, dropping names and terms like "critical thinking" and "Feynman" etc, but ultimately there is no denying the reality that is your body.
I'm an outlier. I'm well built but thanks to BMI, I'm classified as obese. I eat a lot of crap as well, probably more than most. That doesn't affect my general health at all.
I'm referring to scientific integrity and application of the scientific method which this entire thread is devoid of. One poster posted with citations from known crackpots and a reddit group of obsessive religious dieters.
Nutrition is complicated. Everyone has an answer. I'm saying there isn't one. Life is a race to the finish line. Whoever gets there last with the most bits still attached wins.
Great to hear that you feel well though. But please avoid the opportunities to convert heathens on the Internet, if you can. Some of us are skeptics by nature and will never be persuaded by anything less than full scientific studies (especially with areas as complex as the human physiology).
Being healthy and athletic in the short-term is one thing, living a long and happy life is another. I always feel that the Paleo/low-carb communities focus on the former, but if you can believe the gist of The Blue Zones, then happy centenarians have very "boring" eating habits (statistically speaking): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071648
If you say "eating fatty things will give you heart disease", most people will blindly agree with you. In actuality there is very little valid basis for making that claim.
(Edit, and this is a parenthetical because I do not believe anecdotal evidence is useful for arguing for general cases: My personal n=1 experiment: I have comprehensive blood panels done every three months. Over the past four years I adopted a diet that is high in healthy animals fats and proteins, high in vegetables, low in fruit, and devoid of grains. As in: 3 eggs plus sausage or bacon and a salad for breakfast. Every day.
Prior to starting, I had mediocre to bad cholesterol. My numbers are now: 105 LDL, 70 HDL, 52 triglycerides. Superb by all measures.)
Given you eat sausage and bacon every day, I wonder what you'd classify as an unhealthy animal fat or protein and what your rationale is?
Grassfed beed, pasture raised pork, wild caught seafood.
So has the belief that all fat is all good for you, to put it lightly. Human nutrition is a lot more complex than that. Unless you like experimenting with yourself for the sake of it, go with a balanced diet.
Despite this we've been strongly indoctrinated with the idea that fat == unhealthy. It has caused us to change our behavior by avoiding foods that our parents and grandparents have been eating down through the generations. We've moved away from the default "balanced diet" on bunk data.
I think we don't really know enough about health to have a comprehensive answer, sp. regarding long term effects, so the best thing may be just to be conservative.. i.e. don't each much of anything that our body may not be wired to (like you said, processed sugars, but also deep fried precooked bacon)
Omnivores like humans evolve with broad, shallow nutritional optima. Humans are happy with a diet of simple starches (metabolically almost indistinguishable from refined sugars) or a diet of fatty meat, and do pretty much the same on almost everything in between. There are statistically measurable variations, but the optimum is so broad and shallow--as our evolutionary history would predict--that it is full of really shallow local optima that are due purely to noise. Crypto-creationists glom onto these shallow local optima and make out like they have incredibly deep minima hidden in their midst, which is utterly implausible unless you reject evolution as the force that shaped us as species.
In fact, Jared Diamond quite convincingly demonstrates that hunter-gatherers, with their meat-and-vegetable diets, were far healthier than their agricultural cousins. But the abundance that resulted from agriculture (along with the perils of nomadic hunting) allowed farmers to have far larger families and eventually drown out hunter-gatherers through sheer demographic superiority. It doesn't mean that grains are ideal for human consumption, only that agriculture allowed population growth and urban density that eventually crushed the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
We could live on Twinkies if required. We are, as you pointed out, omnivores. The relevant question is what diet is most optimal for human health.
Obviously don't do sugars, but a piece of bread or pasta is just going to give you energy. Which you will use in your exercise. Do eat fruit and plenty of vegetables. They have different types of fiber which does different things to your intestines.
I have been lardon myself most of my life and now I am going thru a change. Took me years, took me meeting some very smart people whose only hobby besides technology/work is exercise. I have also met some crazy illuminati believing, LSD loving, psychedelic trance vegans who spend most of their day looking for healthy stuff. Met overweight vegetarians, some of who only ate fruit.
For some reason people think food is the only saint thing they are allowed to imbibe on. The disappointing truth is that you have to be starving a bit. That's it.
What was even more shocking was recent article about how fasting forces revival of your immune system. Or that yoga moves some of the muscles that normal exercise wouldn't move, hence removing more toxins from there. Or that meditation is one form of natural high and there is nothing esoteric about it.
Citation needed.
It generally looks like this. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Made20ba...
It's different than the kinds of bacon you'll find in parts of the U.K., Ireland or Canada which usually serve a more hearty cut of meat that's processed differently and can include back bacon, or middle cuts from the pig.
For example, an American might not recognize the bacon in this picture https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Englishb... as "bacon" and would probably just call it "ham".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Techniques
The idea that it is "breakfast meat" is probably his making.
[10:49 video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQX44THWIyc
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=australian+full+ras...
http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/chapter-3.htm...
I think you also need to accept that most people don't care that it was a living, intelligent, conscious creature. I know plenty of people who will vocally celebrate a meal with bacon (or steak or whatnot) with a blatant reference to the animal that died to be on the plate. I hope this attitude changes in our time, but it is the current reality.
My understanding is that the difference is because at one point in England the nobility (who ate the animals) spoke something closer to French while the peasants (who raised the animals) spoke something closer to German. So we get beef on our plate but a cow in the field, pork versus pig or swine. It wasn't to distance the food from the animal, but the lower classes from the aristocracy. Whether it now serves that role is another question.
Pigs are incredibly intelligent, comparable with dolphins and dogs. The way they're raised and slaughtered is awful. The only reason I can continue to eat bacon is because I refuse to acknowledge the suffering behind food that I believe provides essential animal proteins and fats to my diet. Even so, I should switch to chicken or fish rather than continue my support for pig slaughter.
We need cloned meat to arrive yesterday. The current industry is unsustainable and absolutely brutal to captive animals -- and incapable of scaling to the needs of the 7-12 billion people who will demand meat over the next several decades. Bacon is delicious and wonderful, but let's not lie to ourselves about the cruel conditions that produce it.
There are plenty of languages in which the name of a meat product isn't an indirection. Do those speakers treat animals any better? IIRC stronger forms of Sapir-Wolf are more or less discredited nowadays. Even in English, we're happy to refer to "chicken," "turkey," and "fish." They're not treated particularly well.
Supposedly the demarcation line in English has to do with class and our Norman overlords in 1100. Rich folk ate in French, and that's why we get terms like pork (porc), beef (boeuf), veal (veau), and mutton (mouton). Poor peasants stuck with their poor peasant words when eating their poor peasant foods, so those foods retained the reference to the source when moved from field to table.
I don't know how true it is--if it were that uncomplicated, why do we have pollo and gallina?
And regarding "discredited", it seems (http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Sapir%E...) that various strong forms of the hypothesis don't hold but there is support for a weak form (that linguistic differences have some effect on cognition).
I also have never heard a pig called smart. They're dirty, and the mothers sometimes eat the young. I thought Octopus was the animal of the week to defend.
Apparently ranked #4 in animal intelligence according to some random non factual comic
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/pigs
And the whole dirty thing is just wrong. Naturally they choose not to soil where they sleep or eat.
Granted spending their lives in a 6' pen they'll root it up and make a right mess, but then I expect anyone would.
Unless you mean the religious connotation, but then that is unclean rather than dirty, because it "has cloven hooves but does not ruminate"[1]
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unclean_animal
I've never farmed Octopus..
I'd be curious to know if "savaging" (eating/killing their young) occurs outside of factory farms. I imagine if it does, the likelihood is a lot lower.
You don't really need to read too much into it. I doubt folks refrain from referring to couscous as "wheat" because they're ashamed about the factory cultivation and wholesale destruction of this noble plant; we just like having specific names for specific preparations.
my point is that when you think about 'bacon', what is salient are only qualities related to it qua food -- that is to say, how it tastes, how nutritious it is, what to eat it with, etc.
bacon denotes only the food. but of course the fact that bacon is also an animal is relevant. i would argue, that is much more important than the qualities of it as food.
so here is the distinction with wheat: if i ground you up and put you on a bun, technically that would be a 'burger'. but there is something more we want to say about it -- sure its a 'burger', but it was also shog9!!! so in that sense, it seems like a trick to call the ground up shog9 merely a burger instead of 'ground up shog9 on a bun'. i feel this way about the entire meat industry.
You might, once in a while, go to a good restaurant and order a meal in which you specify in excruciating detail what you wish to be served and how you wish it prepared. But most of us, most of the time, are selecting common ingredients and common preparations from a very limited set of options. Being excessively detailed in this context is just a waste of time.
Most places that serve burgers offer one option: beef. Ground-up cow or steer. You don't even get to choose the cut - the flesh is likely a mix of cuts, blended to a consistent flavor profile and fat content, pre-measured and machine-formed to ensure consistent results and fast preparation. You might, if you go upscale a bit, have the option of a burger made from turkey or buffalo, or perhaps even one that doesn't contain meat at all; you'll indicate your desire for these with a convenient prefix: "turkey burger", "buffalo burger", "walnut burger", etc. If folks at some point developed a taste for gamey Coloradoan, you might briefly have the option of ordering a "shog9 burger"...
...all of these would be shorthand for "ground-up, seasoned patties of [prefix], served on a bun".
At some point, you learned this. Hopefully, you learned it young, from your parents or caregivers, who taught you where the meat came from, how it was prepared, showed you the cost to all involved in transforming a beast of the field into a meal... Hopefully you learned before you'd built up too many false assumptions about what food is.
Many, sad to say, do not - there is a troubling breakdown in our culture that distances folks' notions of sustenance from the knowledge of the cycles and processes that are prerequisites to sustain life - whether the meal consumed is a burger or a cabbage.
And that is truly disgusting.
Yeah, who'm I kidding...
usa$ grep -i bacon yob????.txt | wc
0 0 0 usa$ head -5 yob2008.txt
Emma,F,18791
Isabella,F,18598
Emily,F,17419
Olivia,F,17066
Ava,F,17024
On a related note, This American Life recently did an interesting item on the birth of the artisnal toast - well worth a listen.
The "artisinal toast" aspect is the least interesting. It's an amazing story about a person dealing with their own mental illness, with some good startup advice mixed in at the end.
"Just get some cups. Brew some coffee. When you run out cups, close the door, and go get more cups."
* cured, thin cut
* cured, thick cut
* smoked, with 3 or 4 types of wood
* uncured, thick and thin and smoked
* cured with lower sodium
* flavored with some kind of liquid smoke type stuff
* pre-cooked
also i've seen bacon clubs (like they do with wine) popup on the internet lately. so great.
http://www.zingermans.com/Product.aspx?ProductID=G-bac-3
From a great deli in Ann Arbor, MI
In my experience, Zingerman's is overpriced and overrated. That isn't to say bad by any means, it probably still makes the cut for "great", but honestly I had better experiences at Bread Basket for much cheaper (with the caveats that this was years ago, and I've every expectation it'll vary depending on what you're getting).
I wonder how much products failed because people haven't found their real function. They did just some adjustments on bacon and it became a success as a flavor enhancer.
I also worked on a firm, in Brazil, that make a ERP software for Chicken producers. Some of our clients told me all chicken legs was separated and send to Asia (I think it was Japan), where it is a really appreciated product.
Yes, most of the people on the bacon bandwagon just enjoy the stuff. It's tasty, and bacon-flavored ice-cream is a great joke. But there's also a vein of white-supremacy, anti-semitic, anti-muslim sentiment in America, and some of the people enthusiastically pushing to put pork in everything under the sun might be doing so because they know it'll make others uncomfortable. A subtle way to assert that "they don't belong here, in the land of bacon", basically.
Is it a tiny minority? I certainly hope so. But I think there's a larger overlap, of people who don't think of themselves as actively racist, but who just go along with the bacon-everywhere mantra because they don't mind rubbing it in.
Imagine if your favorite restaurant had a barbecue special every friday, and that coincidentally meant there were no catholics around the place. Okay, no big deal, just eat somewhere else. Now imagine if every restaurant in town adopted this schedule, leaving catholics feeling pretty unwelcome. A lot of us non-catholics would never notice, and probably just go along with it, hey, tasty food on fridays, right? Until someone mentioned it...
I think that's where we might be on the bacon thing. Folks affected by it are a minority, and hesitant to say anything for fear of sounding whiny and further marginalizing themselves for their beliefs. And it's tasty enough that most folks going along with it might not realize they're playing into an agenda. And it would be impossible to prove that such an agenda even existed. Which I can't prove.
But I do know that the bacon-fever makes some of my friends and coworkers feel just a little uncomfortable, a little unwelcome here. Food for thought.
There are significant ethical hurdles to eating bacon, but Islamophobia isn't one of them.
When we want to be Xenophobic with our food, we rename French Fries to Freedom Fries. See? All obnoxious-like.
I think we just like Bacon.