Healthy, ethical, and sustainable food for all. You’ll find summer recipes for these cruciferous stars, sure, but no weeklong vacation event dedicated to them. With speakers, cooking how to make tempeh bacon, panel discussions, butchering demos, and even a bacon film festival, Camp Bacon caters to one of the hottest foods of the past decade. And that’s just the tip of the strip, if you will.
US restaurants have bacon on the menu. 36 pounds to keep the average up. There’s a National Bacon Day in the US. These days, whenever an animal-based product becomes hugely popular, plant-based versions aren’t far behind. Thanks to a growing market, new technologies, and social media experimentation, there are now plant-based bacon alternatives that are getting closer and closer to the original.
And it’s a good thing, too! And that’s not even mentioning the health effects of bacon, which is a highly processed meat. So in this article, we’ll take a look at vegan bacon: why it can be a much better alternative to the stuff that comes from pigs, how you can make it yourself, and recipes that use plant-based bacon. Saying No to Animal Cruelty First of all, vegan bacon doesn’t arrive on your plate with a heaping side of animal cruelty. In an average week, more than 2 million pigs are slaughtered in the US alone, for a rough total of 129 million deaths per year. Globally, the number is close to 1.
But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The pig’s lives are arguably more miserable than their deaths. Female pigs are first impregnated at 7 months of age and live out their lives in a cycle of pregnancy, birth, and nursing until they are eventually sent to slaughter. To ensure fertility, they are drugged with hormones. And these are highly sentient and social beings we’re talking about.
Pigs who are allowed to live out their lives in farm sanctuaries are playful, affectionate, and highly intelligent. In fact, despite the stereotypes, pigs are very clean and hygienic creatures by nature. Wilbur and Babe would not appreciate. When you replace bacon with vegan bacon, you eliminate all this cruelty completely.