The Week in Food--Again!

Or perhaps I should have entitled this, "The Culture Wars Come to the Kitchen." It seems some Christian fundamentalists are taking "we are what we eat" a bit literally. Joe Godlewski of Cresaptown, MD was fed up with all the salt he saw in supermarkets being described as "kosher salt." "What's wrong with Christian salt?" he asked. Perhaps worried that the Republic was being subjected to surreptitious Judiazation through the nation's salt shakers, he came up with Christian salt.

Yes, Christian salt. Every granule has been blessed by an Episcopal priest, guaranteeing that your sodium chloride is as Christian as the Bible itself.*

Of course, this is probably only the most blatant of the many attempts by Christian fundamentalists to save this godless country through its stomach. Haven't you ever wondered what's up with the bacon craze? The bacon martini.... Bacon bath salts....Chocolate cup cakes with bacon cream-cheese frosting....It's not just American excess. Pork has been identified with the Christian religion for centuries. As Jessica says in The Merchant of Venice, "in converting Jews to Christians, you raise the price of pork." Think--who are you if you're eating pork? You're not a practicing Muslim. You're not a strictly observant Jew. You're not a tofu-eating soy-drinking godless liberal. And what embodies the essence of pork more than bacon?

And do you think it's any accident that the most famous example of bacon excess is the product of Republican-owned Wendy's? If you're still skeptical, I remind you that the baconator was introduced as part of Wendy's CEO Kerrii Anderson's "back-to-basics" campaign for the company. "Back-to-basics" is an ideologically laden phrase: it was the name of the Tory party's 1994 moral crusade in the UK, and is the beginning of the title of a noted book about the Republican party.


Yes. There's no doubt: bacon consumption is some public-yet-secret celebration of Republican/fundamentalist Christian values. And once you've been lured over to some bacon fest by the thick, salty** smell of sizzling pork fat....there's no turning back.


*Or at least the New Testament part.
**And that's Christian salt, dammit.