In the continuing saga of people who buy their food from big box stores, find it to be sub-par and then send us a picture, meet Simon. Simon is displeased with his bacon, purchased at Kmart and manufactured by the Smithfield corporation of the Commonwealth of Virginia, because it contains too much fat.
Your first instinct will be to say, “Simon, fat is the point of bacon.” Then you will look at the picture above and realize that your second instinct, to vomit, is in fact, the correct one. —MEGHANN MARCO
UPDATE: Additional glamorous shots of fatty bacon.
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That is the nastiest thing I have ever seen – I can almost imagine that’s what the contents of a liposuction procedure would look like.
That is so wrong. When I buy bacon I’ll take time to pick through the packages to get the one with more meat than fat. I’ve had good luck with Costco bacon.
Oh yeah, sure. Blame the faceless corporation that could care less if you died of tuberculosis in a gutter outside of their store so long as they still got your money for something that is completely within their power to not only prevent but to rectify, and should have caught in the first place. You have to ask yourself, who is the REAL monster here?
FMV brand bacon is actually worse. I picked some up when I was broke one day. I will never buy that crap again.
I just recently moved out of the city, and noticed that even the shit little stores (No Frills, in canada) have excelent bacon. Before I used to spend hours hunting through bacon tryin to find one with less then 40% fat, now its like most cuts are under 5% fat… Its great.
Oh gross. Didn’t the bacon have the little plastic window on the back to show you how it looked? I feel like an idiot looking at the back of every bacon package to find the best one, but now I know that it’s saved me from that unspeakable atrocity pictured I’ll keep doing it.
This is all one needs to know about the reasons for eating bacon:
http://www.errolmorris.com/commercials/miller/miller_bacon…
People seriously buy food at KMart? What’d he expect?
How do they even call that bacon??
Why is he buying bacon that expired in Feb when its May already?
Oh yeah… and ick. That just looks gross…
I’m used to seeing bacon that looks like that. Normally you see the meat when you flip it over.
Then again I haven’t purchaced bacon in years.
I always buy bacon that has a little “preview” window if it comes in a box, or bacon that comes in shrinkwrap such that you can see exactly what you’re getting. All bacon has SOME fat in it due to where it’s cut, but it should have nowhere near THAT much!
Reminds me of the bags of fat from Fight Club. Who wouldn’t want to eat that?
This is what happens if you don’t flip it over and check the bacon windows.
You get what you pay for.
In other news, meat-eaters show flawed logic by being irrationally picky about the animal parts they eat.
@oldhat: In other news, self-righteous vegetarians think they are better than everyone because of waht they don’t eat.
@oldhat: Meat vs. fat isn’t irrational at all. Lean meats like chicken and pork are very healthy.
Man I have to ask. Since this appears to be an unopened package, why did he put it in the shopping basket. The first bit of consumer advise anyone can have is ‘look it over’. Or to quote the knight in the Indiana Jones movie — “He chose poorly.”
Ummm.. I bet it tastes good though… Sure, it will kill you, but that would taste great!!!
Actually, I’d likely have purchased this. At $1.79, I think it’d be worth the novelty of saying “hey look at this!!” and posting pictures on the Internet of it. Second, after that being done, I’d go and, get this, use it.
Now, before you all freak out and say “OMG DISGUSTING!”, I’d use bits of the fat here and render them in certain dishes for oil/fat. Bacon fat is one of the tastiest cooking fats, and before WWII it used to be the most popular one. Of course, though, I wouldn’t be eating this as I would mostly lean bacon, but still, it’s not unusable, just for a different purpose.
@mewyn dyner:
Glad I’m not the only one thinking that SAME THING. So much better for you than shortening. At least it has natural vitamins in it. Good lard is hard to find!
Or you could render it and use it for soap.
this post needs to have that dog food “beggin strips” commercial played in the background…
“it’s baconnnnnnnnnnn!”
That is disgusting.
Oh and @oldhat:
Eat me, hippie. Would you like the to eat the little leaves on top of strawberries, or the strawberry itself? Maybe the pit of a peach instead of the flesh?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
This guy posted it to his blog in December ’06!
If you go to the original blog link, you will see that it does have a window, and it seems to be implied that the window was right over the “good” part of the bacon.
Ah well…just render it down and save the fat for later – $1.79 well spent.
Use by Feb 23 2007
Not that I’ve bought much bacon, but I’ve NEVER thought to check the little window for the fat content. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.
Bacon fat is awesome for browning firm tofu in little cubes…it tastes like a square of bacon, but not greasy.
yum.
Just mislabeled fatback… what’s the big deal?
That there’s the kind of bacon you drop in your pot of ham and beans and similar dishes for extra flavor. Personally, I’ll stick to my Burger’s Smokehouse bacon.
Course you’re only seeing one side of the bacon aren’t you? That’s just a layer of fat that didn’t get cut. Maybe he should get out the knife and slice off the fat instead of complaining about it. There’s lots of uses for that fat (i.e. seasoning, mixing it in with black eyed peas as a substitute for fatback, etc.)
But you haven’t lived until you’ve had some fatback, fried up into hard crunchy pieces. Right along with pork skins.
While I love K-Mart and Target (fuck you Wal-Mart), I still won’t buy food from there unless it’s boxed stuff like cereal ($1.67/box at K-Mart this weekend). All produce and meat comes from a dedicated grocery store.
Time to get out the bean pot! That would cook up a mean pot of pintos!
I can’t even imagine how horrible that must be for you. . . .
Kmart Bacon – I just wanted to comment that that brings new meaning to the phrase “chewing the fat”!
hmmm, I had no idea how passionate i was towards the topic of bacon until these idiots on this site started bashing what is probably a perfectly good (and normal) pack of bacon. now isnt all bacon about half fat? with cheaper bacon, they overlap pieces, but with higher quality bacon theyll just line them up side by side. most likely the other side of the package is perfectly delicious looking. have all these people never purchased there own bacon?
@Troy F.: i was just gonna say…i’ve been foiled by the bacon windows before.
@oldhat:
I’ll be as picky as I like in the meat that I eat.
Remember, dear hippie, that meat eating is partially responsible for us humans having these nice big brains. Don’t fight evolution.
@aaronhoffman: That commercial makes me want to cook up a nice BLT minus the L and T.
@joeblevins: Did no one follow the link?
Posted:
“Saturday, December 30, 2006
Best Bacon Ever!
Now I have purchased some cheap bacon in my life, but I think this one tops them all. I must say that it is mostly my fault because I wasn’t paying too much attention, but this should be illegal! “
Now here’s my question… how can fat stay “fresh” that long? Ew?
Bacon is disgusting. This might make me vegan.
(Haha, no. But close.)
In the immortal words of Emeril LaGasse, “PORK FAT RULES!!!!”
The bacon window is useless, as all you can see is the top or bottom piece and all the edges. Granted, you can assume some level of consistency, as the bacon is usually sliced from a single pork belly or back. Anyone remember getting that really good bacon at the butcher? It was a big slab they’d slice down for you like cold-cuts. Yummy!!! And the uses for rendered bacon fat are endless, and many of them are delicious, as long as you don’t think about it too much. I mean, how else are you gonna make decent biscuits and gravy? Finally, the hippie was obviously trolling, so we all know the rules, “DON’T Feed the trolls bacon!!”
now that’s what’s known as “chewing the fat”!
Bacon connoiseur here. Bacon is packaged with meat on the top, fat on bottom. I’d like to see the reverse of that package and suspect it looks like any old bacon. Higher end bacon is stacked perfectly vertical, and let me say, if you want pay the shipping, the bacon at grateful palate (google bacon of the month) is awesome. though i think they see your email address to spammers. Anyway, my 2 cents is this pic is unfair; i’d like to see the reverse.
That is definitely not kosher.
@Greeper: If you click on the link to the guy’s blog, you can view the backside of the bacon in all it’s fatty-licious glory.
@oldhat: I think it’s your logic that’s flawed. I’m a vegetarian and I love broccoli but hate bok choy. Is that irrational?
Beef bacon has more meat than pork bacon.
@Terminixsux: oldhat make a whole lot of Consumerist comments for a troll…
@Rectilinear Propagation: @Hexum2600: Amen to that! Don’t eat and don’t care what I’m missing. Mmmmmm, turkey bacon and chicken sausage.
@brbn_nattie: Oopsie! I meant “don’t eat it.” I LOVE eating, honest.
@k8supergrover: Wait, doesn’t frying Tofu in bacon fat sort of take away all the reason you eat Tofu in the first place? Isn’t that sort of like downing your 100% fresh organic salad with a chemical laden Pepsi?
The way to pick a lean pack of bacon is to lift the package and lightly squeeze or bend it – the leaner the bacon, the softer, when refrigerated bacon fat will be stiffer than the meat… though this was in a cardboard box, in Canada all bacon is in plastic packaging, they cover all of it with an internal “paper” wrap exposing only a small portion to look at…
Try it it really works.
I’d like to see the package opened. Is it that way all the way through or did they slice up a piece with a heavy layer of fat on top, and when it was packaged, all you got was the appearance of pure fat? There is muscle in there somewhere as we can tell. The question becomes: what is the cross section like?
…..My dad would have loved this pack! We had a deal when I was growing up: he’d give me all the lean parts of his bacon at breakfast. Mmm.
…..That pack pictured above is good only for cooking down and saving the grease. I’ll bet it would make great cornbread…
…..I don’t buy bacon but about twice a year when I’m on vacation. And then, I stick to stuff like Hormel Black Label, thick sliced.
Sounds like it’s time to get some red devil lye and whip up a batch of soap!
Once you’ve made a tidy profit at the crafts fair, you can order a whole carton of that fancy organic farmer bacon off the internets.
I’m completely disgusted, yet not at all surprised that that’s the kind of crap you get for buying food at a low quality big box chain like Kmart. Even more disturbing is that the company that produced the bacon actually thought it was supposed to be that way and that people would LIKE it?
Any animal with that much fat on it probably wasn’t very healthy or treated humanely either. If you want to see something interesting in relation to where meat comes from, check out the film Our Daily Bread sometime. I saw it at the Walker Art Center here in Minneapolis a while back and it was pretty powerful, at least to me. Not enough to make me a vegetarian or vegan… but enough to care about where my meat comes from and the process it goes through before it gets onto my plate and into my belly.
Peace