I was twigged to this particular Food Fright by my lovely wife, who spotted it at the QFC a few days previous:

Yes, you read it right: Bacon Salt™. When your creme brulee simply doesn’t taste sufficiently bacony.

Now it must be said that, as an avowed carnivore, I have no quarrel with the concept of bacon in general, nor bacon-flavored seasoning in particular. If creators Justin and Dave manage to make a living off of this product, more nitrites to ’em. The mere existence of this product doth not a Food Fright make.

No, the only real stumbling block for me can be found on the display rack pictured above, around the end of the first line of text under the logo: “vegetarian“.

To begin with, while a cursory Web search was unable to confirm this, I can only assume that the chief flavoring agent is something incredibly, overwhelmingly artificial, something inherently non-bacony in origin. After all, if the creators could have made this product from ingredients that would allow them to include the phrase “all natural”, don’t you think they would have? (Amusing side note: Proving once again that the science of sponsored search-query-driven advertising is still in its infancy, check out the ad I got back when doing a search for “artificial flavor bacon”.)

Secondly, while this may be excessively vindictive, there is some part of me that wants very much to deny those who spurn meat the ersatz trappings of a carnivorous/omnivorous diet. It seems somehow unfair that vegetarians should be given the opportunity to sup at the banquet of flesh rent asunder without getting blood on their hands. After all, I’m not scrambling to add artificial quinoa essence to my hot dogs, so why should my herbivorous brethren—these dietary dilettantes—be free to avail themselves of my kind’s dead-animaly goodness? As my brother-in-law once said, “vegetarians eating fake meat is like monks having sex with blow-up love dolls”. (Ironically, he has since gone veg, and is known to bring soy bratwurst to our barbecues, which I do my best to rub up against a burger or two whilst grilling.)

But beyond these arguments is a simple, axiomatic principle: I’m sorry, but much like alcohol-free beer, meat-free bacon flavoring is a crime against Nature, a perversion of the basic underlying principles of the Universe. In fact, I’m fairly sure that it is one of the signs of the Apocalypse. For is it not foretold in the Book of Revelation:

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood, and the bacon became as broccoli.