The $475 Bacon of the Month Club

If there’s one food trend that dominated 2010 it’s bacon, and a few savvy butchers are hoping that you’ll continue replacing your cheese or other gift-of the-month presents with a little bit of pork.

We’d call the Bacon of the Month clubs crazy, but with everything from bacon-flavored drink syrup to bacon chocolate (vegetarian, even), they’re probably more savvy than silly.

So while the “Bacon is Meat Candy” Bacon of the Month Club offered by Bacon Freak isn’t surprising, we have to say the price is, and certainly hints at a fanbase that goes beyond your casual supermarket enthusiast. For $475.95, you can get 12 months of gourmet bacon delivered directly to your door.

That’s a little more than $39 for two packages of gourmet bacon each month. Flavor rubs include cajun, apple cinnamon, jalapeno, honey BBQ, maple, brown sugar, vanilla bourbon, sun dried tomato and pepper – and a free t-shirt. For $80, you can add a Pancake of the Month subscription, and we assume suggestions on which pancake compliments which bacon flavor. As a bonus, if you’re a naked chef the Bacon Freak website advertises that their bacon “doesn’t shrink, it doesn’t splatter and when you cook a pound of bacon, you get a pound of bacon. That is why our Bacon Freak Bacon is the only bacon you can fry naked.”

We won’t go as far as calling bacon and pancakes the new wine and cheese, but creative chefs are finding that bacon is, well, bringing in the bacon. Inc reports that Rocco Loosbrock, who actually started the bacon club as a companion to a wine of the month club, found such success with the bacon that it eventually outpaced wine sales. Candied bacon macarons were a best seller for Macaron Parlour and we previously reported that Chocomize’s vegetarian bacon was one of their most frequently requested ingredients.

Tasty as it may be, and as much as macarons could make us love almost anything, for close to $500 we can think of other things to spend the money on, and chances are they’d leave you looking better naked in the long run anyway.