Rath Thick-Sliced Bacon - Artery pron.

I'm not in on the "yay bacon" internet fad. I'm also not in on calling every fad a "meme". Richard Dawkins coined the term to describe cultural ideas and practices that live or die by their own merit, like organisms. A fad is a fad.

Still, there are those who are still shaking tambourines and blowing horns on the bacon bandwagon. I attribute this partly A) to the mischievous fun of liking something that runs contrary to what your doctor tells you, and B) to the tribal motivation of doing whatever your ingroup counterculture says you should do. For you guys, here is some bacon pronography. Enjoy.

Lest you forget, (unspoiled) cooked meat generally has two colors- red and yelllow. The red part is muscle tissue, and the yellow part is fat. I cannot believe how much of this bacon is pure fried fat.

This ad is a classic sales strategy for products that have limited range. Bacon is for breakfast, and Rath wants you to eat it for every meal. So, they launched this campaign to try and help their customers to get over their breakfast-only mental block. Thanks guys.

As a side note, it's a little odd that whoever lives in the cabin in this picture (for not much longer, I bet), doesn't seem concerned about hygienic food preparation. The breakfast is on a plate. The piggy-blanket whatchacallems are on a plate. The tomato slice is lying on the table. Oh! Wait! That's not a single slice. Now that I look clisely, the contour of the underside of the tomato shows us that it's half a tomato, not just a slice. That's a little better, I guess. I would be more likely to place a tomato directly on the table than a watery tomato slice. Still a little weird, though.


Here's a breakfast that I painted a million years ago at one of my old jobs. The boss didn't use it. Fine with me. Into the portfolio it goes.

The bacon in my breakfast painting is mostly fat, too, but it's still leaner than the Rath product shot. If you're painting bacon, you'd better have some obvious stripes of fat running through it, or people will assume it's ham. This is in accordance with Phil's Rule of Painting: people don't question a photograph, but a piece of art must match their expectations and assumptions, whether or not they are accurate or naturalistic. Now that I look at this painting for the first time in a long time, I realize that my parsley (which actually looks more like broccoli), has no shadow underneath it. I should have at least darkened the are under it a little bit. As it is, it looks like it's floating. That can't be right. Have you priced hoverbroccoli these days? I can't even afford to paint that stuff. Ah well. I don't think I'll be going back into the piece to fix it. Gotta move on.

Better to paint it than to eat it... unless it's on a club sandwich. I can't say no to a nice club, and once in a while a little bacon's not gonna kill me any sooner. And also, in a club sandwich, it doesn't leave a greasy film on my mouth, and I don't have to look at those hideous yellow fat stripes.

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