Listen. I love bacon as much as the next fat chick, but . . .

. . . you'll not find me posting links to "guy food" or "extreme cuisine" or even bacon-centric sites.

I do love me some bacon. I use it in a LOT of my recipes. And I love fat. If it comes from an animal and will conspire with my beloved bourbon to put me in an early grave, then by gods, my food is full of it.

But that's the thing. For my money, you have no business making chicken piccata without using AT LEAST a stick of butter. When that's your idea of a light pasta dish, then you just don't crave a three-pound quadruple-bacon cheeseburger. (A simple quarter-pound double will do.)

I saw a recipe a few weeks ago for some dude-food blogger's version of a "walking taco" (Frito pie if you're not some pansy-ass pasty-faced city boy whose momma probably fed him whole-grain bread. Please.) that called for multiple pounds of meat and A WHOLE GODDAMNED ROTISSERIE CHICKEN. This is just wrong on so many sad hipster levels .

First off, NOBODY EVER NEEDS THAT MUCH MEAT AT ONCE. Fucking KEVIN SMITH does not need that much meat at once, and I'm pretty sure that his entire creative process is fueled by pot, meat, and the pent-up man-boob sweat of a thousand adolescent nights spent wet-dreaming about female X-Men.

I know, it's about EXCESS, about how much you CAN eat, not how much you SHOULD eat. And here I blame a lifetime of being told that bland shitty food is a forbidden pleasure. Also the Food Network. When you combine fond childhood memories of Happy Meals snuck to you by Weekend Daddy with a constant barrage of OMFG LOOK AT THIS GUY EAT NINE POUNDS OF CORNED BEEF THIS IS TOTALLY WORTHY OF AIRTIME, you get these guys who think that stacking five Big Macs on top of half a dozen Egg McMuffins is the height of edginess. It's the Hot Topic T-shirt of rebellion cuisine.

Listen, posers. You can wrap your ground beef in ham and bacon up your sausage all you want. Some of us learned to cook with MOTHERFUCKING LARD and didn't even KNOW about this thing called "vegetable shortening" until we were in college. I'm betting you wouldn't have this obsession with ultra-fatty, ultra-meaty, ultra-MANLY food if you'd grown up with a can of bacon grease as a staple in your family fridge.

Tell the truth. Your mom made you eat organic bean sprouts, didn't she? Sometimes, late at night, when she'd had just a little too much Chablis and Ambien, she'd sneak into your room after your dad was asleep, silently pull down your comforter, and balance your chakras? It's okay. This is a safe place. You can say it. "My mom was a goddamned smelly hippie and I eat to fill the patchouli-scented hole she gouged out of my soul with her deodorant crystal THAT DIDN'T EVEN FUCKING WORK, MOM."

Interestingly enough, the American culture of fatty fatty boombalatty fried food is a Scottish import. Yup, back in the good old days when men were men, women wore crinolines, and dark-complected people sang rousing harmonies while being beaten like rented mules, the South was importing white trash from Scotland, and slaves and crackers alike were learning how to make damn near anything palatable through the judicious application of hot hot fat. And the idea that it maybe wasn't a good idea to bread and fry fucking EVERYTHING was laughable, because when you have two chicken livers and a piece of hog intestine to feed your family with, you kind of don't mind piling on the hunger-satiating fat and delicious fried calories.

So yeah, the next time you stand around with fried Twinkie crumbs in your ratty-ass ironic beard, you can thank the noble (ahem) Scots for your cuisine of choice. Not that they'll accept your gratitude, of course. You'll be lucky if they chuck a deep-fried sausage-coated egg at your face and mumble something completely unintelligible but still indicative of their conviction that your mother blows goats on her day off from the donkey show (these are the people who use the word "cunt" as a synonym for "person," after all,) but at least you can rest easy knowing that you've been all mannerly and shit. If you really want to show your gratitude, you can hook them up with some of the Percocet you've been prescribed to combat the crippling pain you're now suffering from that nasty case of diverticulitis resulting from the mind-rending constipation brought on by a steady diet of meat, meat, and lameness.

Fucking hipsters.