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The last few years have been good to bacon. Some time around 2005 or so it made the leap from guilty breakfast pleasure to restaurant staple, and soon after you could hardly find a soup or noodle plate or vegetable dish that wasn't studded with cured, smoked pork. Bacon salt, a kosher, vegetarian seasoning product, followed, then Baconnaise, bacon popcorn, bacon chocolate bars, bacon-topped pies, bacon-flavoured lip balm, and even bacon marmalade, which President's Choice has started hawking of late.
And yet all of those seem so quaint all of the sudden, now that a Seattle-based food company has launched Baconlube. That's right. Bacon-flavoured personal lubricant. The jokes pretty much write themselves.
"Should everything taste like bacon?" the company, called J&D's Foods, asked in a press release. "Yes. Literally everything," was its response. "No more horrifying bedroom experiments with bacon grease."
Taste-associations being as powerful as they are, of course, there's a good chance that this development will benefit the personal-lubricant industry far more than bacon producers. And it's still too early to say whether the product will ever catch on with the food elite.
Helen Redpath, the food manager at Vancouver's Gourmet Warehouse, said her shop carries most of J&D's products and they're popular with customers. "They actually taste like bacon, and without any funny aftertaste," she said.
She hadn't yet heard of company's latest, however.
"Oh my God," she said when told about the product. "Okay, that grosses me out a little bit – I'm a little old for that."
But would her store stock it? "No," she answered. "No, no, no – that's, ah. No!"