Bacon, My True Love

Everyone has their own personal food hierarchy, or pyramid. Mine features Pork at the apex, then ice cream, fish, and chicken at the next level, and beef at the bottom. I love pork in all its manifestations: sausages, chops, roast, shoulder. belly. I also seem to be the only person who likes bacon rare. In fact, as a child I'd sneak raw bacon and eat it uncooked, choosing culinary pleasure over commonsense (raw pork can give you parasites, although I'm told this is happens much less nowadays with all the antibiotics and such pumpled into our meat supply). I also like to buy my bacon at the butcher's, since I like it thick cut and fresh. The best bacon I ever ate was on a trip to the Northern Kingdom in Vermont. The little stores often carried bacon hand delivered by local farmers, and it was delicious! I've never met anyone else who likes bacon as little cooked as I do, and I rarely order it in restaurants, because they always cook it too much for my taste, and it's the thin bacon usually, and I do prefer a nice thick strip. But as much as I like my bacon rare, I need my steak and hamburgers more well done. As a kid, any hint of red in my meat freaked me out. I've come down to medium well now, don't need every hint of red to be banished, and I can eat steak tartare well enough, just don't like my hamburgers rare (good thing too, a friend of mine got violently ill eating a rare hamburger, and almost lost his voice). Who knows how these things develop? The tongue wants what it wants.