My brain says give up the meat, but my mouth says bring on the bacon. What’s a girl to do? I cooked some bacon the other day and of course it was freaking delicious. Then I cleaned up the coagulated mess that was left behind from the congealed grease and I envisioned that pasty mess clogging up my veins and I was disgusted. But not disgusted enough not to cook some more bacon this morning. I am literally typing this post with a slice of bacon in hand. And again it’s freaking delicious. Besides, the world is in a financial crisis so who would I be to throw away perfectly good food.
Why does eating bad taste so good?
At any rate, I have been analyzing what the barriers are to my conversion to vegetarianism and I have found that there are basically two.
1) Meat is very delicious
2) Most vegetables are very non-delicious
I have yet to figure out a workable strategy to get around those two barriers.
Strategy #1: Make meat less delicious. This can easily be done with me at the helm in the kitchen. But as long as there are meats available that require little or no skill to cook …..like bacon….. this solution will always fail.
Strategy #2: Make vegetables more delicious. There are rumors going around that vegetables can be made very tasty. And for the most part I believe these rumors are true. I know for a fact that collard greens cooked with a ham hock can be quite tasty. But vegetarians would argue that collards prepared that way are not vegetarian. I also enjoy sweet potatoes with a lot of butter cinnamon and sugar. Fried corn with lots of butter is great too.* However a diet comprised of the approximately 5 vegetables that I enjoy would not a balanced diet make. Therefore strategy #2 also fails.
I will probably revisit the idea of vegetarian conversion another day. But this post has made me a little hungry so I’m about to go cook myself another slice or two of bacon.
*If you’re not from the deep south you have probably never heard of fried corn. But fried corn is delicious. It’s made by putting corn (preferably freshly shucked), butter, milk and flour in a frying pan and mixing in some southern charm and a little bit of love.
