Macaroni and Glue-On Sparkles

Macaroni and cheese is appearing in all manner of inappropriate situations: deep-fried snack foods at the supermarket, on pizza, on a patty melt at Denny's, and now on hot dogs.

Mac 'n' cheese is delicious. (Well, the stovetop kind, anyway; the baked casserole version is merely a waste of good macaroni and cheese.) So is bacon. Both are delicious in their own right, but they are strongly divergent in extended usages. The smoky, salty, umami taste of bacon can increase the deliciousness of other things. Mac 'n' cheese, however, is blander than bacon: its creamy, fatty deliciousness dilutes more robust flavors. This is why mac 'n' cheese's own inherent deliciousness is increased by adding other things to itself: ham, onion, pepper, even—dare I say?—bacon. Yes, one can successfully add bacon to mac 'n' cheese (as to so much else), but one does not add mac 'n' cheese to bacon.

Bacon can be a condiment. Mac 'n' cheese cannot. Bacon is the glue-on sparkles of the food world. Mac 'n' cheese simply is not bacon.