A Culinary Outrage.

In this time of conflict between organic and natural food stuffs, the old stand byes and processed foods of our youth, the clamor for free trade coffee and cocoa and grass fed beef and free range chickens and a tofu alternative to every single meat option there is (and I say what the fuck is the point?  tofu is never going to taste, feel, or look like turkey or bacon or beef, why do people choose to be vegan/vegetarian then clamour for a tofu replacement?  So typical of the human spirit to abstain from a perceived health threat only to recreate it in a perverse and deranged image).  We are affronted with a growing assault on our culinary sensibilities: turkey bacon.

I had thought that chicken sausage was perverse enough.  That beyond turkey burger we could stoop no lower.  But tofurkey signaled the death knell for the purity of food and now we have to cope with turkey bacon.  There is a watery argument (much like the flavor of said abomination) that it is similar to the bacon I know and love, that it has the same flavor and texture with fewer health risks.  Turkey bacon is championed as something from the hills, something pure and good and wrapped with old-timey graphics.  It is everything bacon with the notable exception of being bacon.

In our exuberance to denounce everything grown, raised, butchered, or otherwise produced using chemicals, hormones, corn, or cages--in effort to take marbled beef off the shelves, make sausage healthy, and wage an ideological campaign against the traditional American farmer--we have wrapped ourselves into a very real but vague moral outrage against whatever we think maybe different from what we want.  Within the campaign to make produce natural (I've always been drawn to the inorganic plastic fruit from the popular children's kitchen toys) factions have emerged and our strength has become divided.  Is this organic grass fed or organic corn fed? Did it ever have a shot to keep it from getting sick?  If so, why didn't you take the loss and destroy your income, I mean livestock?  Did someone ever pee on your garden and chemically taint the soil?  Were the worms in these apples ever in fertilized apples?  And on and on and, as a wise consumer populace, we have become as week and divided as the political parties under pressure from the tea party.

Our guard is down and we are vulnerable and the result is turkey bacon.

I, for one, am outraged.  Who will join me in attempt to quash this attack on our culinary consciousness?  Is there anyone else not afraid of the powerful poultry lobby?  Is anyone else willing to help me put turkey back where it belongs, shunted to its day of glory towards the end of November?  If we don't draw the line here, what is next?  Turkey Bratwurst?  Turkey chicken breasts?  Turkey prime-rib?

We must act now, before it is too late.