How far will I go to avoid B word, you ask? Extremely far. I have a thousand things I would rather talk about than my extreme dislike of B word. But you, B word truthers, forced my hand here.
You think I want to talk about it? I avoid it at all costs. But inevitably, it comes up. Because people have opinions about B word, and need me to know why mine are wrong. B word enthusiasts are almost even worse than B word itself. Stringy, sinewy, and likely to get stuck in your teeth. And there's that smell as it cooks in the pan, which to me is the least appetizing thing in the world, but seems to turn capable adults into drooling Neanderthals.
Or how about the milky liquid that seeps off it as it fries? Another tick for gross. None of this is easy for me write. Along with tea, royalty, and fighting in the street, bacon is stitched into the very fabric of our culture, tangled up in fusty notions of patriotism and class. Poor ex-Labour leader, Ed Miliband, never recovered after being pictured awkwardly eating a bacon sandwich in the lead-up to the General Election.
The incident came to represent his ineptness. Because, while not eating it for religious reasons is fine, if you can eat bacon then you bloody well will eat bacon!
In a full-English breakfast. In a sandwich. With tea. Eat it! The average Brit reportedly consumes bacon three to four times a week, which is more frequently than they have sex the two are indisputably linked. For not liking it, you become the guy who likes Coldplay in a room full of hipsters: a source of mocking, pity, and downright fury.
Few meats, let alone foods, inspire as much fervor and excitement as bacon. I mean, can you even name another food item that has a big enough fan base to justify festivals across the country, or even a whole summer camp? Probably not. And that's why I figured the best place to find the reason why people like bacon so much was the source: Camp Bacon , a weeklong celebration of all things porky, in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan.
It's a full day of bacon tasting, bacon demonstrations including a live butchery lesson , and lectures from bacon experts. We're talking bacon makers and pig farmers, butchers and chefs, food writers and journalists, even a market-research expert. A study from the Monell Chemical Sense Center, an independent nonprofit basic research institute based in Philadelphia, showed that small changes in a single olfactory receptor gene can greatly impact how strong and pleasant a person finds an odor.
These receptors in the nose encode information about what a smell is before the information reaches the brain, and humans have around different types of receptors. One molecule of odor can activate several receptors, while a single receptor can be activated by several different odors. In many cases, these receptors are super useful—they tell you immediately if a smell is toasting bread or a burning kitchen, for example.
But the Monell Chemical Sense Center researchers found that just a single receptor being changed was enough to change a person's odor perception. A study out of Duke University Medical Center found that 70 percent of people have two functional copies of a gene linked to an odor receptor that can detect androstenone, a compound common in male mammals and present in pork.
People with one or no functional copies of the gene can tolerate the scent of androstenone much more easily.
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