Thought for Food

The Bacon Takedown on Good Morning America

This is hipster heaven (or is it hell?): a beer hall in Williamsburg clogged with $900 strollers and more goofy uses of bacon than you can shake an iPhone at.  It was an absolute  mad house (the 300-person line wrapped around the place twice and took about 90 minutes to unspool), but Matt Timms handled it all with aplomb.

I wasn’t planning on it, what with the whole pseudo-vegetarian thing I’ve got going and the fact that the heaving plates made me want to heave — but I ended up taking nibbles of most of the entries.  I wasn’t terribly impressed; there was nothing you haven’t seen before if you’ve spent an even cursory amount of time on the bacon-crazed regions of Internet.

A lot of it felt like abuse of a noble ingredient.  Traditional preparations of bacon have earned their status for good reason.  Where were the interesting updates on the BLT or carbonara or bacon and eggs? 

What do we really gain when we combine bacon and cupcakes?  (That said, the fan favorite, a bourbon and bacon ice cream, was really yummy.)

PS: There’s a woman in this clip who’s identified as a “Baconographer.”  Excuse me?