Bacon

This is an odd photograph of bacon. Bacon usually looks much more appealing than this particular piece. It's as if this one was soaked in extra grease and barely done, like it's still all wobbly. That isn't how I like my bacon.

For approximately 3 years, I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian, induced not so much by ethical concerns as health concerns over dorm food as well as the price of meat. I stopped vegetarianism for 3 reasons (importance increasing with list decreasing):

1) Kept losing weight. At one point I found that I had a BMI of 17.1, which is apparently really bad. Now, about a year later, I'm up to a BMI of 19.6.

2) Missed fried fish.

3) Missed bacon.

At first I just started back up with the fish. And then it progressed to white meat (pork is not white meat), thus: turkey bacon! When I first had bacon again after all those long years, it was as if a long-suffering void within was suddenly filled and I became instantly happier.

So it set off the question:

What is it about bacon that makes one happier?

Is it the lipid soaked protein?

Is it the burnt crunchiness? Yes, I like my bacon slightly burnt.

Is it the salt?

It is probably a combination of all of the above. Nonetheless, bacon got me thinking a bit about how it influences science. No bacon results in crankiness and feeblemindedness. As such:

The Scientific Bacon:

1) James D. Watson - clearly his bacon consumption fell off over his lifetime. It must have been at its highest when he "co-discovered" the structure of DNA, and clearly has recently reached record lows.

2) Dr. Hwang Woo-suk - clearly a conspicuous lack of bacon led him to falsify his research results for the greater honor of South Korean science.

3) These people clearly weren't getting enough bacon.

4) This person seems to be eating bacon daily (hint: he can read his own genome).