guide to the jewplexed

Marriage to Bacon Ends in Divorce


Sometimes, television presents us with a slice of life that just isn't kosher.

In a TV commercial for the fast food chain, Jack-in-the-Box, that first aired during the Super Bowl, and is now in regular rotation (At least here on the west coast), a dewy-eyed young man announces to his mother:

"Mom I'm getting married..."
"Who's the girl?" asks the excited mom.
"It's not a girl," responds the son, "It's bacon."



Yes, I know it's just a silly commercial promoting a bacon cheeseburger (Complete with wedding ceremony), and part of a trend in American cooking (Paula Deen et al.) of putting bacon in everything, but I wonder how Jews who have chosen not to eat "the other white meat," or even more so, have made the commitment to keep kosher, feel about being eye-bombed by this type of message.

Though the commercial's voice-over tells us, "If you love bacon, make it official," some of us have already walked down that aisle, and this thirty second spot just reminds us of a love that has lost its sizzle.

You see, I once had a thing for bacon too, the attraction was its crispy flavor, baconbut at an early age we had a divorce. The breakup happened in Boy Scouts one morning on a weekend camping trip, when one of my fellow scouts was frying the strips up in a skillet over an open fire. Though I was hungry, it seems my Hebrew school education, and my new found awareness of the Jewish dietary laws of Kasruth suddenly took over (Also there was an older Jewish boy there who I looked up to who wouldn't eat it). Instead, I ate bread.

At times, when I have mentioned to friends (Jewish ones too), that I have permanently broken off the affair with bacon, and ham, the pronouncement is met with concerned and hungry eyes. The looks seem to say, "How can you live without it?"

"Life goes on, without regrets," I tell them.

Yet, if you were once married to bacon, does a commercial like this one stir up old emotions? Is it like seeing your ex, larger than life, up on the screen looking better than ever? In a weak moment of hunger are you ready to renew your vows? Snap out of it. Remember: if your heart skips a beat, it's just in anticipation of all that salt and potential hypertension.

Expressed in Hebrew, the married to bacon commercial is trying to make a shidduch, a match, one which many Jews have already rejected. Still, I wonder if in a loopy kind of way, whether bacon has made strange bedfellows after all.

Today, in addition to many Jews, a very mixed multitude is taking a pass on porky. Por qué? Some people I have spoken with cite health reasons (Kosher food industry web sites often cite this as a reason for the growth in their business). For many Hindus and others, abstaining from pork is related to vegetarianism. For some Christians, like many Seventh Day Adventists, it's about acknowledging the teachings in Leviticus. And for Muslims, it's about halal, their dietary laws which also forbid eating oink.

Instead of swallowing what Jack-in-the Box is feeding us, how about a new commercial? Could we instead get hitched to hummus?

Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate. In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."