Baconalia, Bacon Cologne, And The Official Death Of The Bacon Meme

It’s sad to watch people attempt to sustain the life of a once popular trend long after it has died out and everyone’s enthusiasm for it has dwindled back to normal levels of enjoyment. Such is the life of the great bacon obsession of 2010, when everywhere you looked on the internet there was some dude professing his love for all things bacon, or someone making a bacon sculpture, or someone creating elaborately insane meals centered on copious amounts of bacon. The bacon frenzy we saw last year highlights how quickly internet culture loses it mind over a new, hot trend, only to propagate it to the point of exhaustion.

There was once a time not too long ago when you could have hastily thrown together an article or picture gallery of bacon and your traffic would spike, as if all pigs had mysteriously vanished and all that was left of our porky soul mate was the greasy smell on our frying pans and a few pictures we had taken of our fallen friends. It’s like people were starved for something they could have gotten off their asses and purchased at any given moment of the day. After a while, though, people realized that looking at pictures of bacon and reading about bacon was a tremendous waste of time, because eating the stuff is a slightly more tactile experience than reading some guy blog on about how awesome bacon is.

We’ve now reached a point where most of us pretty much agree that bacon is a good thing, and we no longer feel we have to construct internet shrines made of that valuable natural internet resource called bandwidth to honor the greasy lord of breakfast meats. Yet, some people are only now catching on to the trend that died down some time ago, and these people are still attempting to cash in on the bacon cash cow by doing the very thing that caused the bacon trend to die down in the first place: 1) over-using it; 2) adding it to things that in no way require bacon.

Our two current late-to-the-partiers are Denny’s, with their Baconalia menu, and a fragrance company by the name of Fargginay, who has recently announced via corny video their newest cologne called Bacōn, which, as you might have guessed, smells like bacon.

Denny’s has always been known for only a few things: 1) large breakfast platters; 2) being stupid enough to have an unspoken open-door policy towards your city’s most belligerent, night stalking drunkards; 3) large breakfast platters you would only eat if you were a belligerent, night stalking drunkard. Yet Denny’s is always trying to reinvent itself, as if it were a Madonna doppelganger comprised entirely of runny eggs, sickly looking sausage links, and mounds of the hash browns nobody eats, because everyone treats hash browns more like a garnish than an actual food item. The only reason they’re served to you is because a plate with hash browns on it is what breakfast looks like, but doesn’t necessarily taste like.

The latest Denny’s reinvention has taken the form of the aforementioned Baconalia menu, which features a bizarre array of menu items that have had bacon raped in to them; for instance, the Ultimate Bacon Breakfast, which is a plate filled with all of the regular breakfast staples, along with something that looks like the severed hand of a genetic freak of a man that was crossbred with a hog’s ass. The menu gets even dumber with the Bacon Flapjacks (pancakes dotted with strips of bacon), and reaches full-blown retard with the Maple Bacon Sundae. (An ice cream sundee…topped with bacon).

Every single item on the menu is like Jeff Goldblum at the end of The Fly: it’s begging you to pull the trigger on that shotgun so it could stop being an ungodly affront to taste buds and cholesterol levels.

If Baconalia, which sounds like a disturbing pathological disorder involving cured meats and human orifices, is a tantalizing bacon experience for your mouth, Bacōn cologne is poised to do the same with your nose. The company behind the fragrance, Fargginay, which itself sounds like a fancy French way to call someone gay, recently put out this press release:

Bacōn is a passion project mirrored after one of the 20th Century’s greatest legends. The Legend of Fargginay began in 1920 when quite by accident John Fargginay, a Parisian butcher discovered the ability to dramatically elevate his customers’ mood with a secret recipe blending herbs & essential oils with the essence of…bacon. As the story goes, film stars & heads of state would frequent his shop to procure the magical elixir. With a wink of the eye and the secret code, “fargginay,” customers would be slipped a discreet pouch containing the formula said to trigger pleasant memories. After a massive fire on July 4, 1924, the business was lost and so was the formula…Until now.

I tried to look up this John Fargginay character using some Google-Fu, and I couldn’t find anything. Without even so much as a forum post discussing the works of John Fargginay, I’m going to assume he and his story are a work of fiction, like Aunt Jemima if she had a knack for creating products that are destined to be stocked on the shelves of Spencer’s Gift shops next to strawberry-flavored sex lube and various doo-dads that make fart sounds.

The only people I can imagine purchasing this cologne are those a part of that small yet vital demographic of consumers that enjoy having their balls licked by dogs, but have severe peanut allergies, and therefore cannot use a peanut-based product like peanut butter on their testicles to entice Rover.

Both Baconalia and Bacōn can be classified as novelty items, as even the various bacon-filled Denny’s dishes have that certain forgettable, silly, I’ll-try-it-for-shits-and-giggles kind of vibe. This doesn’t stop these items and their creators from seeming like they are putting these things out there in an attempt to jump on to a bandwagon that has not only long since passed them by, but has broken down and it’s riders have abandoned the wagon on the side of the road where it has been left to collect dust and become a new home for a few stray cats.

This move by Denny’s and Fargginay is eerily reminiscent of the old cliche of the dad that’s trying to be hip and cool to impress his teenage son. The dad says, “What is up, bros? How about us homies kick it old school today by munching on some totally rad strips of bacon?! We’ll put that stuff on everything, dawg!!!” And then he attempts to kickflip a skateboard while playing a wicked riff on an electric guitar. It all reeks of desperation – desperation to be cool and loved by youthful trendsetters that have already moved on from the trend you’re trying to sell them. And the simple fact that you’re trying to sell it to them highlights that point even more. When bacon became a meme, the meme, at its core, was simply about people freely expressing their love for a delicious meat product. Soon thereafter, small gag gift companies started churning out bacon themed products, like bacon mints; effervescent tablets that make water taste like bacon; and wallets that look like bacon. That’s what crafty entrepreneur do: they notice trends and quickly cash in on them knowing full-well the trend won’t last long. That’s when the trend started dying out: when people took this nebulous yet genuine love for for bacon and started slapping price tags all over it. Actually, I’m going to go ahead and say that’s exactly when it died.

Yet now, over a year later, we have two companies attempting to rekindle the internet’s love for bacon by making something that’s had its authenticity focus tested straight out of it.

Denny’s, Fargginay, please, I beg of you: stop trying to be cool. It hurts to watch.