Bacon is popular. How popular you ask? Well, Americans eat nearly 18 pounds of it, yearly. Our English brethren, the Brits, consume an equal amount each year. Supposedly, bacon is addictive because it contains six types of umami, which produces an addictive neurochemical response.
Don’t tell that to President Obama. He’s made a point of denying bacon to all prisoners locked up in federal prison facilities. Does our brilliant president not realize that he’s going to cause a whole lot of jonesing in federal jails?
Actually, the feds have removed bacon, along with pork chops and ham, along with all other pig products from menus at 122 federal prisons. That means the nation’s 206,000 federal inmates won’t be tasting savory bacon until they’re back on the streets.
It’s not clear what’s behind this ban of pork in the nation’s jails. According to the Bureau of Prisons and their spokesman, Edmond Ross, the decision is solely based on a “survey of prisoners’ food preference.” Apparently, they just don’t like pork.
Not to get all conspiratorial, but something seems odd about this. I tend to concur with the National Pork Producers Council and their spokesman, Dave Warner, finding it hard to believe inmates said, “no” to bacon.
And of course, this has gotten conservatives’ dander up. Jihad Watch, in an article by Robert Spencer, intimated that there was more to this than pork being pooh-poohed by prisoner consensus. Or better, maybe pork isn’t popular because more and more of federal prisoners happen to be of Muslim persuasion.
Muslims make up significant portion of U.S. prison population.
Did any enterprising reporters at the New York Times, or the other mainstream mouthpieces for progressive propaganda dig a little deeper on this? I think you know the answer to that one. Spencer asks, “does the increasing number of Islamic jihadist and other Muslim inmates account for this? “Apparently Dana Williams, another BOP spokesman didn’t’ say and no reporter bothered to ask him.
So, could the pork ban be bogus? It’s a possibility, especially when there have been grumblings from inmates’ families that the ban is due to complaints by Muslim inmates.
Spencer finds it interesting that their (the BOP’s) decision “just happens to coincide with Sharia at a time when the Obama Administration and Islamic advocacy groups are actively working in numerous fields to make special accommodation for Islamic laws and mores, and when some Muslims around the world are becoming increasingly aggressive in demanding non-Muslims conform to their ways of living.”
Your blogs always make me think or learn about things. I really like that. I look for your blogs every week.
Wondered the same. Supposedly the inmates were surveyed and pork was not popular because of taste. I can certainly understand the usual factory pork chop overcooked to kill all the diseases not being a winner, and by the time it’s cold it’s inedible.
But it’s hard not to overlook what I saw in the military–it’s really easy for SJWs to ram a policy down the throat of people who can not fight back, either due to military discipline or imprisonment. Executive order, lump it or go to Captain’s Mast. Prisoners don’t even get that. I wouldn’t doubt that Muslims are the most influential gang (that’s really what they are, gang writ large, imagine Hell’s Angels-ism) in Federal prisons and it’s really much easier to just tell the rest of the prisoners to live with it.
@Sally Thanks. I’m glad the JBE delivers value.
@LP While there are those who oppose prison labor and see it as exploitation, inmates have to do something when they leave. How about providing marketable skills, while also benefiting them while doing time? Prisons, growing and producing their own food, is one way of addressing that. Why couldn’t they produce beef (and pork)? Organic vegetables?
A great example of this is being done in Colorado. Granted, the article’s focus is on a facility that is state-run, but it could be a model for federal facilities, also. It was interesting how the prisoners interviewed, were positive about their experiences.