Bacon Gumballs

Bacon Gumballs are a product of Archie McPhee/Accoutrements Inc. and there is no doubt in my mind that the folks at McPhee dreamed them up as a gag gift. They taste like cigarette butts and sugar - absolutely vomitous - and it astounds me that so many bloggers have treated them as an actual, viable confection.

In fact, the more of these "bacon flavored" novelty foods that I sample, the more I discover that none of them are worth a dead rat's ass.

Bacon mints? Smell like smoke, taste like Alka-Seltzer without the fizz. Bacon Salt? Mediocre smoke-flavored salt loaded with artificial flavors that manages, with the help of marketing and imagination, to taste vaguely bacon-ish. Baconnaise? If your idea of "bacon" is liquid smoke and artificial flavorings, then yes, Baconnaise tastes like bacon too.

Thanks to the Internet Bacon Meme, however, I'm quite certain we're going to be plagued by crap like this for years to come. So, in order to be prepared, I'm just going to write this bit of boilerplate and paste it into future reviews of bacon-flavored junk :

Bacon - real cured-and-smoked-pigmeat bacon - is a delicious food and a tasty ingredient that can add marvelous dimensions of flavor and texture to all sorts of other foods and dishes. "Bacon flavored" foods - however well-intentioned - are generally pretty disgusting, and this is no exception.

There. That should do it.