Post
by maladroit » Sat Jun 13, 2015 10:14 pm
Bacon is a cured meat, it keeps better in your cooler than plain raw meat. It's easy to cook on a camp stove or campfire with minimal cooking utensils. Once cooked, bacon is finger food...great for sharing. Bacon is a welcome addition to almost any other type of meal. Bacon is ready as soon as it's cooked, it doesn't need to be marinated, sauced, or seasoned in order to taste great. Frying bacon smells great and the smell carries pretty far, so it's easy to identify what someone is cooking. Bacon grease can be used for cooking other things. Bacon doesn't need to be peeled, sliced, trimmed, marinated, or tenderized before cooking, the only preparations are heating up the pan and opening the package. A strip of bacon is eaten completely, it doesn't leave a wrapper, core, seeds, skin, or bones behind to pose a garbage / moop problem.
The main reason you run into it all over the playa is because, for the above reasons, it's just a really practical food for a week of camping. Couple that with the fact that for many, it'll be the first "real" cooked food they eat after a couple days of Clif bars, and it was bound to obtain mythical status.
Here's a hint...hot dogs also taste really, really good out there, and many people bring them. Still, they're messier and more inconvenient than bacon.