The origin of the name.

Yesterday, my friends gave me a t-shirt for Christmas. It was January 11th, but that’s not important.

The shirt reads: “Bacon is a Vegetable.”

For the record, I’m a sometimes-vegetarian who likes the taste of hickory-smoked bacon

Today, as I was walking to work, thinking about the t-shirt, I finally figured out how I should identify myself, to those who ask.
I am a baco-vegetarian.

“Ha-ha. baco-vegetarian, that’s pretty funny,” I thought to myself.

But then I got to work and googled “baco-vegetarian”.
And wouldn’t you know it…Lisa Loeb coined the term first.
I bet she doesn’t even eat bacon. She was probably just trying to be edgy, to make up for song-lyrics like “You want me to dance with the angels? Then embroider me with gold, and I will fly with the angels.”

Anyway, nobody’s heard of Lisa Loeb, so I think I’ll still sound original if I call myself a baco-vegetarian.

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But how, sir, can you call yourself a vegetarian (even with a non-capitalized “V”) if you eat bacon?

Well, it all comes down to a little theory first put forth by an acquaintance of mine named Jim Pulluzi.

He figures that you can consider yourself a vegetarian, as long as you consume meat at a slow enough pace, that the animal could survive its removal.

So, say you imagine a large pig (we’ll call him Wilbur) roaming a hillock somewhere in the midwest. It’s sunny, warm, with a relative humidity of a manageable 60%.

Sure, there’s a fence around him. But he’s got enough room to stretch his stubby little hooves. And he’s happy.

Once every week or so, I come along with a stainless steel cheese-slicer.

“Hold still Wilbur,” I say.

And he does, because he likes me.

I gently carve off three thick slices of flesh (from his rump, because that’s the moistest).

He bleeds a bit, but within an hour or two he’s recovered, and climbs up into his pig-house for a little nap. (Oh, did I mention that he sleeps on the 2nd floor of a little wood pig-house? On the bottom floor is a small woodstove that is always burning, to keep him warm while he sleeps. Coincidentally, the woodstove burns only hickory.)

So, I’ve got my three slices of bacon for the week and Wilbur’s happily sleeping in a plume of delicious hickory smoke.

Am I still a vegetarian, even if I go home and make a WilburLT sandwich? Fuckin’ right I am.