this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Looking over your comments, you've fallen prey to crappy industrial food practices. And it's hard to avoid tbh. Most of the bacon out in stores doesn't have much flavor. You have to either research brands to find a good one, or live close enough to where someone makes bacon the right way so you can get out while bypassing the bullshit. Mind you, just because someone is making bacon on their own farm, that's not a guarantee it's good, but it's likely to be better than the crap in most stores.
Good bacon is very flavorful. Yeah, there's salt to it, that's part of making bacon. But you get a lot more than that assuming the person making it stays fairly free when curing. It doesn't have to be just salt. But smoking rather than using liquid smoke is the real flavor power. Liquid smoke tastes anywhere from just fake and off to outright unpleasant.
Unfortunately, the ability to be certain of a local producer is long gone. Even butcher's shops are harder to find in populous cities. And it isn't like us rural and rural adjacent folks van guarantee access to local goods just because we're near a farm. Industrial food exists for a reason beyond just profit (though that's why it's usually not that good), and keeping a supply chain going means that most farms, even those that are family owned and operated, don't sell to the public at all, even if they do make some product for themselves.
Like, the guy I get most of my pork products from is a rarity. And he doesn't sell openly, you have to know him already, and be aware that he's not a grocery store. You get what you get, when it's ready, and not one damn day sooner lol. Same with the cousin that I get beef from.
Seems like the best type of people to get food from
Man, it really is. There's drawbacks to living in a semi rural area, but the ease of obtaining fresh foods is nice, albeit not always possible due to needing to know someone to get some foods because it's more profitable to sell it off in bulk.
No bullshit, im so spoiled with beef now that it's absurd. Having access to reasonably priced (essentially at cost) meat that I know how the cattle are fed and treated, and has amazing taste has ruined me for grocery store beef. We don't even eat beef often, because of a combination of ecological impact and price (even at the family discount, it ain't cheap).
Pork products, I can't say that every product is automatically better than store bought, but anything processed will be unless you pick brands very carefully.
And don't get me started on how much better chicken is when the breed isn't so focused on time to market. I just don't have a good relationship with the locals that sell chicken lol. So it's a less frequent thing to have the better meat.
We have our own eggs now, after having adopted the first chicken last year. Our little marans hen lays almost every day, and they are soooo good. Rich, with a superb white. She's almost totally free range since our birds are pets, so there's a distinct shift in flavor from egg to egg sometimes. And that's a plus, imo. The depth of flavor is amazing compared to caged hens, but it isn't so strong that you can't bake delicate things with them too.
Legit, making friends in a community shared with farmers is always going to benefit you. And, when you treat them like a friend and neighbor, you end up learning more about the foods they raise in conversation, as well as sometimes getting a call for help and doing some work. That's a good thing as well, imo.