skinny girls & mayonnaise

A friend of mine at a design firm where I do contract work a couple days a week makes herself some turkey bacon every morning. You can smell it when you walk into the break room.

I began referring to it as “fakecon” (as in fake bacon), which she objected to. “It’s not fake, it’s turkey.”

Mmmmm.

As far as my knowledge goes, turkeys do not have a bacon cut. (If they did, Thanksgiving might’ve been a more memorable meal.)

My friend, Stephanie, is not an aviaterian (or whatever term you use for those unique folk who eat chicken and turkey but not pork or beef). So I can only assume she eats fakecon for health reasons — i.e. she so loves bacon she would eat it every day if she could, but chooses fakecon five days a week to evoke the experience, however faintly, of biting into a real piece of bacon.

I began wondering what went into the making of turkey bacon, getting it to look like real bacon (sort of), with alternating veins of red (meat) and white (fat). I did some research online (where I found one confused soul at chacha.com asking the question, “Is turkey bacon made from turkey?”)… A seemingly well-informed comment at Yahoo offered that turkey bacon comes from the little-known “flank” cut of turkey, which is secretly removed before Thanksgiving turkeys are sent to market, as it is the most profitable part of the bird. I like that theory. The “real” answer is that turkey “bacon” is made from thigh meat and “by products” that are smoked, processed, mashed, binded, salted, reformed and dyed.

I think I’ll stick with regular bacon.

*   *   *

My skinny yoga teacher sister, she of gifting us food items she’s not going to eat (including quinoa), left a jar of some sort of whitish yellowish fat at our house. My wife and I puzzled over the stuff.

“Maybe it’s clarified butter,” I said.

I emailed my sister. “Hey, is the stuff you left in the jar clarified butter?”

A couple days later she replied: “No babe, it’s not. It’s ghee.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that clarified butter and ghee are the same thing.

*   *   *

I read an article recently about how the DMV tries to prevent people from having offensive vanity license plates, and all the creative things people do to slip their desired plate past them. A vegan woman in Tennessee was denied her request for a vanity plate celebrating her love of tofu, reading: ILUVTOFU (which also might’ve been interpreted as, well…) Another chap got busted for 3MTA3, which reveals it’s true message only when seen in a rearview mirror, while this one slipped through: 370H55V (read upside down for full impact).

I was out doing my marketing when I was cut off by a grouchy looking elderly couple in a Cadillac. I was about to call the guy a name, but then I realized that his license plate already said it all:

I nearly killed myself trying to get close enough for the photo. Not sure how that one made it past the censors.