Aaron.

Thank you again for writing about this! I hope you’ll see Merlove, as it really is so great, plus (!) the people who made the film are actually in the industry and are passionate about what they do - it is NOT some Hollywood film but a totally realistic look at life here. There are some truly wonderful people involved in this film, and it’s a privilege for me to support their work. Here’s the url! http://www.merlove.com/ Happy Merlot Drinking!

Jessica, NYC
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Bacon as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

By Arun Gupta, The Indypendent

Among my fondest childhood memories is savoring a strip of perfectly cooked bacon that had just been dragged through a puddle of maple syrup. It was an illicit pleasure; varnishing the fatty, salty, smoky bacon with sweet arboreal sap felt taboo. How could such simple ingredients produce such riotous flavors?

That was then. Today, you don’t need to tax yourself applying syrup to bacon — McDonald’s does it all for you with the McGriddle. It conveniently takes the filling for an Egg McMuffin, an egg, American cheese and pork product, and nestles it in a pancake-like biscuit suffused with genuine fake-maple syrup flavor.

The McGriddle is just one moment in an era of extreme food combinations — a moment in which bacon plays a starring role from high cuisine to low. There’s bacon ice cream; bacon-infused vodka; deep-fried bacon; chocolate-dipped bacon; bacon-wrapped hot dogs filled with cheese (which are fried and then battered and fried again) … bacon mints; “baconnaise,” which Jon Stewart described as “for people who want to get heart disease but [are] too lazy to actually make bacon”; Wendy’s “Baconnator,” six strips of bacon mounded atop a half-pound cheeseburger, which sold 25 million in its first eight weeks; and the outlandish bacon explosion, a barbecued meat brick composed of two pounds of bacon wrapped around two pounds of sausage.

It’s easy to dismiss this gonzo gastronomy as typical American excess best followed with a Lipitor chaser. Behind the proliferation of bacon offerings, however, is a confluence of government policy, factory farming, the boom in fast food and manipulation of consumer taste that has turned bacon into a weapon of mass destruction.

To read the entire article exposing how the pork and food processing industry have teamed up to spoil our environment and ruin our health by becoming the “manipulator of the consumers’ minds and desires,” visit http://www.indypendent.org/2009/07/23/bacon-as-weapon