Winning streak: American-style
would go vegetarian, but I just couldn’t give up bacon.’' It’s something we often hear from would-be vegetarians. Giving up bacon is often the biggest and final hurdle to ethical eating, and can be the undoing of many a vego.
Gardening personality Lynda Hallinan attests to this. She planned for it all along, after deciding to eat ‘‘mostly vegetarian’’ as part of her New Year’s resolution. The ‘‘mostly vegetarian’’ diet’s exceptions are when her husband cooks, when she’s out for dinner, and bacon.
‘‘There’s nothing quite as easy and delicious as a bacon sandwich. It’s the go-to thing on the weekend,’’ Hallinan says.
Hallinan lives rurally and has ‘‘too many eggs’’, which inevitably end up paired with bacon for breakfast.
‘‘There’s something about bacon. I don’t like pork at all,’’ she says.
Giving up other meats is easier for her, she says.
But with young children and a meat-eating husband, she’s now abiding to a reducetarian lifestyle. Hallinan has gone through stages of being vegetarian or giving up red meat, but finds it easy to cook a roast and stick to the vegetables.
However, that smoky, fatty and sometimes sweet smell is too much for Hallinan.
Bacon is seemingly endless with eye, streaky, shoulder and even jowl varieties, appearing in breakfast, lunch and dinner menus, as well as in desserts and sweet baking treats. In fact, there’s a kilogram of manuka-smoked streaky bacon sitting in Hallinan’s fridge at all times.
She’s slightly ‘‘ashamed’’ of her go-to sandwiches, but reckons it’s hard to go past it with a $1 loaf of white bread with butter.
She refuses to cook pork, but can’t go past a four-rasher buttie with butter. No sauce, she says.
‘‘You don’t mess with your bacon. A good bacon sandwich will keep you going half a day, so I consider it diet food.’’
And when it comes to the unhealthiness of bacon, that’s half of what makes it so good, she says.
Although Pork New Zealand’s chairman Ian Carter might be biased, and not an aspiring vegetarian, he is a real fan of bacon, so understands the struggle many might have in giving it up.
‘‘It’s the hardest thing for them to stop eating. It’s probably one of those things that they find might compromise their beliefs,’’ Carter says.
The North Otago pig farmer reckons bacon is as popular as ever, but demand for Americanstyle streaky bacon is increasing.
Hellers, which sells a major portion of the country’s bacon, has seen steady in-demand over the past three years, a spokesman says.
‘‘As for the most popular cuts, streaky is by the far the biggest cut, and has been trending upwards for a number of years. Middle eye is another popular cut but there has been a dramatic fall in shoulder, and middle is also in decline.’’
Director of NZ’S first Beer and Bacon Festival, Mark Jackson, says bacon is ‘‘just one of those things’’ that sneaks into plenty of meals. The restaurant makes its own bacon.
‘‘There are people who are a bit precious about bits and pieces,’’ Jackson says. ‘‘But bacon is bacon.’’ He says a bacon eating competition will be part of the festival in Auckland this weekend. Competitors will be asked to eat 500 grams of the stuff – as fast as they can.
On top of that, beers will be matched with bacon and the porcine treat has inspired several cocktails for the event.
Beer and Bacon Festival, Saturday, September 30, noon6pm, Sweat Shop Brew Bar, 7 Sale St, Freemans Bay, Auckland. Admission $10.