"FakeBacon" news and stories

Looking back across the years, there are a lot of things that I remember fondly about Boy Scout camp. Food, however, is not one of them. While servings were plentiful, they were also clearly designed to save money and, even at the age of ten, I could tell that the powdered eggs, watery Kool-Aid (aka "bug juice"), and gristly burgers were only a small step up from prison chow. Over the course of the week, I used to load up on the occasionally palatable entree, but usually relied on bread, butter, and fruit to get me through.

While many of the dishes at Camp Rock Enon represented the culinary arts version of crimes against humanity, the worst, by far, was the fake bacon. Designed to resemble weather stripping, it was clearly artificial, with stripes that looked like they were painted on by Willy Wonka's employees and a scent that tried to approximate pork, but was actually redolent of a chemistry set. The "fakie bakie" was so bad that it actually turned my campmates and I off the real thing. I don't know what everybody else did with their pseudo-bacon, but my buddies and I used it in a collection of initiation games that bordered on cruel and unusual punishment.

It's been a few decades, and I'd almost completely forgotten about the utter horror of camp bacon. However, I happened across Eat Me Daily's review of Morningstar Farms' Bacon Strips and, in an instant, I was hurtled back to my childhood bacon hell. Basically, it seems like they've found the same hellish junk that still haunts my nightmares. On the bright side, the writer managed to perfectly capture the revulsion that this stuff evoked in me; this is nice because, although I have been forced to relive a terrifying period in my life, I am comforted by the knowledge that I am not alone.