Here’s a subject line I never expected to read in an email from Niman Ranch: “new bacon flavors.” I clicked the thing open with dread — were they shilling strawberry-taco-Ranch, perhaps? But it didn’t even have to be that bad. Has this country really advanced so far in these last few years that American palates are not still reveling just in the astonishing difference between true bacon and industrial garbage? Do they really need maple and chipotle? I just hope heritage turkeys don’t take the chemical bait and start arriving with cranberry-sage-butter self-basters. Didn’t some brilliant guy once say cuisine is when things taste like themselves? And why do I suspect he would be extraordinarily renditioned if he spouted that stuff at immigration today?Here’s a subject line I never expected to read in an email from Niman Ranch: “new bacon flavors.” I clicked the thing open with dread — were they shilling strawberry-taco-Ranch, perhaps? But it didn’t even have to be that bad. Has this country really advanced so far in these last few years that American palates are not still reveling just in the astonishing difference between true bacon and industrial garbage? Do they really need maple and chipotle? I just hope heritage turkeys don’t take the chemical bait and start arriving with cranberry-sage-butter self-basters. Didn’t some brilliant guy once say cuisine is when things taste like themselves? And why do I suspect he would be extraordinarily renditioned if he spouted that stuff at immigration today?