You know it’s time to stop blogging about bacon…

When people start handing you clippings from the newspaper and say things like, “This story about chocolate-covered bacon made me think of you!” So this will be the last bacon post you’ll read on this site for awhile.

But let me go down swinging. When I was a kid my parents would take my Halloween candy away to have it X-rayed to be sure there weren’t any razor blades or samurai swords hidden inside my Reggie Bar.  Now our children face the terrifying reality that their candy may contain [gasp!] bacon. Is this not kosher? Certainly not. Is it dangerous? Only if you are genetically pre-disposed towards high-cholesterol. Is it gross? Depends on what you think is gross (gribnes anyone?). So why do I raise the alarm about bacon nation?

It’s not that I advocate strict observance of kashrut or even that I think Jewish culture is mortally threatened by bacon consumption. When a culture has survived dispersion, persecution, genocide and the abomination that was Chicken Soup (Jackie Mason’s sitcom), then it can probably outlast pork bellies.

No, what causes me such great concern about bacon is that for a long time it has been trying to gain a foothold outside its traditional domain as breakfast food (along with the occasional lark in a BLT). Perhaps bacon started getting fancy notions when orange juice ran the “It isn’t just for breakfast anymore” ad campaign. Perhaps bacon thought, what’s o.j. got that I don’t have? That’s when it started showing up in cheeseburgers. Pretty soon it was in potato chips, salads–okay, we said, we can see the logic of why someone might want bacon in that.

But now, it has run amok. Bacon coffee. Bacon Candles. Bacon Ice Cream. Bacon Mints. Bacon Bubbles. Bacon Vodka. And yes, Bacon Chocolate. All these bacon products are undoing all the cultural good worked by Matisyahu. How can we respond? How do we hold back the bacon deluge? What are you going to tell your children when they look you in the eye and ask, “Daddy/Mommy? What did you do in the Bacon Culture Wars?”

That is all. The rest, is up to you.