Bacon is a subset of pork belly. I love pork belly. But there’s so many more ways to prepare it than curing it and optionally smoking it. Indeed my favourite way of eating it involves steaming it.

As for the marketing campaign, like the de Beers campaign, it dates back a lot farther than people think today. The beginnings of baconmania traces back to the 1920s. One of the pioneers of PR directed a campaign that included finding 5000 doctors willing to say that a “heavy” breakfast was healthy for you and that bacon and eggs were a perfect breakfast food. This was then presented in media as “scientific consensus” and thus began the age of bacon for breakfast.

That’s how things stood until the 1960s. Bacon and eggs was a standard breakfast food. Pork sales were doing well, and pork bellies were a nice piece of extra income. But then the reputation for red meat started to slide. By the '70s all red meats started to slide, and the added anti-fat movement cause pork sales to tank across the board. Various pork marketing boards started making deals with fast food restaurants to push bacon as a way to boost pork bellies at least. They partnered with restaurants to create recipes that involved bacon as a “versatile ingredients” instead of just breakfast food. Bacon on salads. Bacon on sandwiches. Bacon here, bacon there. And with this, paired with, naturally, a whole lot of money poured into marketing (costs split down the middle with the partnered restaurants) the beginnings of baconmania started.

By the mid-80s, with the establishment of the National Pork Board, baconmania truly took hold as said board pushed pork in all its forms (anybody remember “The Other White Meat”?) both as a “lean” alternative to beef and shoving bacon into anything imaginable (chocolate cookies, say) as some kind of “flavour treat”. This marketing campaign started to ramp up just in time for the arrival of public Internet and thus were the seeds planted for the bacon insanity today.

Baconmania is a cynically manipulated set of marketing campaigns that dates back a hundred years and is going strong, rivalling “A Diamond is Forever” for effectiveness and endurance.

I’ve played music for fun pretty much from my childhood and while now the nature of the fun is different, it is still fun and about as much fun as it used to be. (The secret in my case is to pick up new musical instruments along the way and rediscover the fun in new ways.)

Are you an ambi-turner?

I have had a crackpot theory since my 20s that the grand obesity epidemic of the Americas was caused by industrial food production, even of the supposed “fresh” foods. My mother has always been a gardener. When we lived in a nice bungalow in Edmonton she grew vegetables and flowers. When we lived in a short row house in Inuvik, she would garden in the very short summer and then take everything indoors using grow lamps and humidifiers to keep as much alive as she could. When we lived in an apartment block in Germany she’d purchased a bunch of planter boxes that hung on both sides of the railing to continue.

I lived my life with fresh, homegrown veg, in short. Until I left home and bought groceries from a grocery store.

What struck me most were the tomatoes. My mother’s tomatoes were smaller than grocery store “fresh” produce, but were a deep, blood red. The red continued to the inside where the grocery store ones were more yellow/orange on the interior. My mother’s tasted rich and flavourful. We’d cut them almost paper-thin to put on sandwiches and burgers, for example. The grocery store ones had almost no flavour at all. A bit sweet. A bit starchy. A hint of tartness. And that was it. To get even a ghost of the same impact my mother’s thinly-sliced ones had on things, I needed huge slices, 5mm or more thick. It was crazy.

And that’s when I got my crackpot theory that the techniques used to make large, even-looking, produce in huge quantities leached flavours out of things. The raw caloric content was roughly the same, but all the flavours were dilute. And since we evolved to desire required micronutrients by flavour, colour, aroma, etc. (lacking the ability to measure them in our bodies) the lost flavour, et al makes us eat more to get the same feeling of satisfaction.

And what happens when you eat more…?

(Now note: I identify this as a “crackpot theory”. As in I’m not saying it’s the truth simply because I lack the scientific evidence to support it and lack the time or energy to find said. I’m sticking with actual fresh, not factory fresh, produce and other foods because they taste better. I just think the issue might be a lot deeper than taste.)

I used shampoos and body washes. I had all the problems you cited. I switched to soap. They all went away. (“Body wash”, you see, is not soap. Nor is shampoo. Nor are “beauty bars” or any of the other terms the “beauty” industry foists off on us as cleansing products.

The issue, it turns out, is that most “cleansing” products are sodium or potassium (I forget which) laurel sulfate at their core (something that’s easier to make at industrial scale and to attach additives like scents and such), and that stuff is horrifically bad for skin in a wide variety of ways. All the other crap we add like “moisturizers” and “conditioners” and “rinses” and such is there to undo the damage that the cleaning product caused in the first place.

Soap (real soap) is chemically very different and doesn’t have the drying and damaging impact on skin that laurel sulfate does.

And same with the Korean girl K-pop bands, though with some of their fans I get a real sense of skincrawl.

Bacon.

I mean I get it. We studied the marketing campaign that led to baconmania in class. It’s one of the greatest marketing campaigns of all time, right up there with “A Diamond is Forever” from de Beers.

However in the end, bacon is … OK. But there’s many better ways to use pork bellies than turning them into bacon. Especially the over-processed stuff that’s used on foods in restaurants.

Can I massacre you with hugs for this? 'Cause that’s the only impulse I have for your saying it.

(I agree, if you haven’t spotted this. 😉)

Deodorant rocks are alum crystal. Alum powder is the same stuff ground down to a powder. It is a deodorant, not an anti perspirant. You do not stop sweating when you use alum. It just kills the bacteria that cause the odour (which is why you can use it to temporarily clear the gamy scent of clothing as well).

I use soap to clean myself. Every part of myself. Including my hair. Get a good, plain, unscented natural soap—and here I mean soap, not “beauty bar” or other such terminology used to disguise the actual composition—and you’ll save oodles of money while avoiding the laurel sulfates that are so damaging to skin. You can even splurge a bit and get an Aleppo soap or any kind of castile soap that’s ludicrously expensive for a soap and yet will be cheaper than having:

• shampoo
• conditioner
• rinse
• body wash
• facial wash
• facial rinse
• … and a cast of thousands of other expensive products the “beauty” industry foists off on you.

Then there’s deodorant. The last deodorant I bought cost me 20 bucks. For a supply that’s thus far lasted me five years and is about half-finished. This is because I use alum powder (ground-up alum crystal) as my deodorant. You’ll need the extra cost of a spray bottle too, so add a buck or two for the first use. But then it’s about 2-3 teaspoons in a 500ml spray bottle every couple of weeks, topped with water. It’s 100% unscented, will actually neutralize scents if, say on a really hot day of hard work, your clothes start smelling gamy, and works better than any commercial deodorant I’ve ever used in my entire life.

(If you want the same product for orders of magnitude more money, you can look up brands like “Crystal Stick” or the like, but you won’t be able to neutralize odours on your clothing with it.)

As a consequence of that rule, skip on meat. Too expensive and too big portions.

Or learn to use meat the way human being used meat before wannabe nobles deciding to ape their betters normalized a meal with over 50% of the plate being some kind of meat.

Asian cuisine (Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.) has, to me, the best balance of meat/eggs/whatever to vegetables. Proper home-cooked meals have maybe 10% of calories coming from meats. Indian cuisine is also pretty good at the meat/other balance. Europeans start going way too meat-heavy, and North Americans view vegetables as that little bit of colourful stuff around the rim of the plate that’s there for colour, not consumption (or so it seems to my eyes).

Dad is ethnic German, Mom is ethnic Chinese, that makes me ethnically confused. But I pass as slightly off-looking Chinese, yes.

<snob>No, I meant tea, not tea dust.</snob>

🤭

<snob>Where do you even get tea in the UK?!</snob>

😉

Born in Germany as a Canadian citizen and now resident in China.

Mine started fine.

Probably my bamboo scroll of 茶经 (The Classic of Tea). SO sprung that on me one day out of the blue. It’s been the centrepiece of my tea photo essays and of any fancy tea setups I have with guests ever since.

OK, this one is going to be tough to explain. I’ll start with pictures:

These are two variants of 陈年八仙果 (chén nián bā xiān guǒ or “Aged Eight Immortals Fruit”). Basically you hollow out a pomelo, fill it with a mixture of plum pulp, tangerine peel, assorted spices (including licorice), and salt. Then you dry it until it’s dense. You cut it up into those wedges you see above and … well … you eat it.

Or you make tea with it.

Or you chop it up finely and use it to flavour meat dishes.

But mostly you just eat it as a snack.

…

5:30 on workdays, anywhere between 7:30 to 11:00 on weekends.