Putting a Full Nelson on Bacon

Mike J. Nelson of RiffTrax, Film Crew, and MST3K fame is eating bacon for a full month. Nothing but bacon. As fans of Mr. Nelson, the RiffTrax/Film3K gang, and bacon, we wish him all the best success in his enviable task.

For those who are interested in Mike's daily reports and gastric events, he's keeping a journal of sorts on the RiffTrax blog. It sounds like everything is going smoothly.

(No, that wasn't a bowel joke.)

However, as someone who has consumed quite a lot of bacon myself ,* I know that a month of bacon-eating is not a sprint but a marathon ...a glorious, streaky, smoky, salted marathon, but a marathon nonetheless.

So, with Mr. Nelson's kind indulgence, I offer the following advice:

1. Stretch a lot and randomly jog in place. This actually won't help you consume or digest the bacon any better than normal. However, it might convince people that you're a fitness nut and get them to stop starting at you and your shopping cart full of slab bacon. If that doesn't work, mutter some nonsense about "low-carb dieting" under your breath.

2. Vary your bacon-cooking techniques. Variety is the spice of life, at least where food and television are concerned. So, don't just settle for medium-crispy bacon all the time. Your bowels will get too comfortable and that's precisely the moment that the nitrates will jump them. I personally fancy bacon that is extra-crispy (or as Mrs. Fando puts it, "burned into Kingsford") but when eating massive amounts of bacon, I mix this up with medium-crispy and the mildly-crispy, slightly soggy variety. I do not personally consume the very soggy, hardly crispy bacon, as I am highly paranoid about underdone bacon and pork-related diseases.**

Under no circumstances should you prepare your bacon ala Mignon, as found around steaks, as this is just nasty.

3. Read about bacon. I think that when one is undertaking a challenge like Mike's one should take the opportunity to educate themselves to the fullest extent about the subject. I'm sure there are some fabulous histories of bacon and bacon-production on Amazon. There are probably books about the endless varieties of bacon, just like cheese. The Wikipedia entry on bacon is thin but enlightening, except for the bit that defines Canadian Bacon as "bacon from Canada." (However, I see you've wisely decided to avoid that psuedo-bacon.) Books by Francis Bacon should also help, I would think.

4. Use bacon lingo. Nothing makes a task so grueling as dwelling on the limited cultural ontology of the subject ad nauseum. So, spice up your all-bacon days with a full range of bacon-related language. As a writer this should be a piece of cake for you. You can rhapsodize about rashers, pontificate about picnic cuts, castigate about collops, and harangue about hocks. After all, why speak of slabs when one can speculate about samgyeopsal?

5. Finally, pray a lot and consult a good cardiologist. Sure bacon is great, but why take chances? After all, you want to be around another few decades to enjoy even more bacon don't you? I'm certainly looking forward to my first Bacon Explosion!

* I can easily do about 15-20 pieces in a Furr's breakfast buffet, with a full breakfast included. Also, FWIW, I think fried salt pork is a tasty snack. Amazingly, I only outweigh Mike Nelson by about 15-20 punds, but it's all muscle, I assure you.
** Especially the kind that turn your heart into a worm-ridden sack of pus. Thankfully, those are quite rare.