A Brief Message To This Bundle of Benton’s Country Bacon

(Hat tip/possible residuals to Lucky Peach #2) 

Dear Bundle of Benton’s Country Bacon,

Right now, there are expectations. And as with many expectations, the chances of them being highly overblown or underblown are about even — thanks, in part, to lots of previously read press clippings — but nevertheless:

When cooking you, I will do everything possible to not mess you up.

Why?

Like with any good cured meat, 99 percent of the work’s already done — I just have to take you the remaining 1% without messing you up.

• I will not undercook you or overcook you until you become a bacon-shaped stick of charcoal.
• I will not attempt to TwitPic you or take self-referential/ironic photos about bacon or the eating of said bacon¹ — by the smell coming out from the butcher’s paper right now, you’re already well ahead of the over-salted Oscar Meyer/big box bacon that usually graces my college-budget fridge.
• And most importantly, if I venture outside of breakfast-based applications, you’ll only be used for meals that are fail-proof, interesting, or generally, not idiotic.

^{1 Enthusiasm for bacon tends to manifest itself in pretty weird ways. As ridiculous as something such as the bacon explosion is, it’s not impossible to follow the logical progression* there — I won’t rest until the people who made Baconaise and this tried in the Hague, though.} 

^{(*Sausage + Bacon + “Why not!” And if you’ve ever spent time around drunken aerospace engineering guys with access to power tools, the progression to ‘making a bacon explosion’ and ‘making a potato gun and firing it off the house roof’ is strikingly similar. Though that might say something more about the male id rather than bacon, admittedly.)}