A case of bacon

One of my colleagues recently resigned to go travelling for a year. He and his girlfriend will be visiting pretty much everywhere but Antarctica over the next 12 months. At one of his myriad leaving dos, the subject of food and the availability, or lack thereof, of familiar food products in various parts of the world inevitably made its way into the conversation.

Now. I'm not one of these people who travels but eats at McDonald's. I have made a genuine and modestly successful attempt to enjoy all that the local cuisine has to offer no matter where I am. I've eaten jellyfish and chicken feet in Hong Kong, pigeon and snails in France, Wiener schnitzel and bratwurst in Vienna. I've eaten curry at a gas station. And I like most of the food here, too. Sausage and mash and a pint of bitter (warm nd flat, thank you very much) is one of my favorite meals.

But while I believe that a certain flexibility and adventurousness of palate is a vital attribute for successful travelling, I do confess a longing for certain American-style items. Bacon is one of the biggies. The bacon here is thick and fatty and salty, more a fried slab of ham than anything else. So it was with a good deal of surprise when Steve, the aspiring world traveller, said that among the things he'd miss were being able to get a decent cup of tea and a rasher of bacon. This wasn't a case of Steve never having had American bacon - he had - he simply preferred British bacon. I was shocked, partly at the realization that there are people who actually like the bacon here, but largely because it hadn't occurred to me that anyone would like the bacon here.

It's obvious that our tastes are predicated at least in part by what we're accustomed to, but I think I really thought that once someone tried American bacon, they'd just realize what they were missing all these years and become an immediate convert. Clearly this isn't the case. There's nothing inherently superior about American bacon, just as there's nothing inherently superior about cold beer, or French wine. The percieved superiority of any one thing over any other rough equivalent is entirely subjective.

There's some evidence to suggest that people's appreciation of wine is directly proportional to its price; a more expensive bottle is judged to taste better. Clearly there's more to our tastes than just, well, how it tastes. I'll try to bear this in mind next time I'm feeling that sense of culinary superiority. In the meantime, though, I'm glad to know that our local Morrison's supermarket sells Oscar Mayer American bacon. Yum.