Bacon is dead! Long live bacon!

It's hard to find anyone in the commodity meat business eager to say that uncooked bacon is slumping outside of the fast food market, but there's enough incidental evidence (like the excitement over new packaging and precooked bacon) and market evidence -- the price of pork bellies has limped along over the last decade, even as things like bacon band-aids have made it onto our fingers -- to indicate that that is the case. Still, whether we're frying it at home or getting it from the drive-through, the National Pork Board's statistics show that per capita, bacon consumption has been remarkably steady over at least the last decade, at about 18 "eatings" per person per annum.

Last summer, New York magazine's food blog, Grub Street, commented that the arrival of a packaged product called bacon salt was the sign that bacon, as a foodstuff, had finally jumped the shark, that it had finally strayed into a new and unseemly level of self-parody, that it was being touted as much for its ironic or comic value (insert Homer Simpson slobbering sound here) as its flavor.

But after a few months passed, there it was again: bacon where it shouldn't be. It was in a cocktail, in a recipe for bacon-infused bourbon, right there in the pages of New York. Wasn't it supposed to be over?

The original charge missed the point, as did my hope of pinpointing a spot on the horizon when baconmania would shrink from our national consciousness like it does in a hot pan.

No amount of shark jumping will ever tank bacon's status, because bacon is the Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli of the meat world. Personified, it would be Henry Winkler, not James Dean: popular but not quite cool; desirable but not unattainable; not bland but not challenging. It's not dangerous at all to like bacon or the Fonz; it's a family-friendly pose but it's not as vanilla as pulling for Ron Howard, who would almost certainly be the skinless chicken breast of the "Happy Days" universe.

And as the Fonz did on "Happy Days," bacon can jump the shark literally and still not land in the same also-ran, has-been pile as, say, blackened redfish or unironic fondue or, though I'm sad to predict it, bacon's noble relative from the face of the pig, guanciale, will someday. The Fonz was an outsider scrubbed and designed to appeal to the masses; bacon is safe, institutionalized rebellion on a plate.

It is at once trend-proof and trend-prone. Bacon always seems to be on the cusp. On the verge. Suited up in a black leather jacket and blue swim trunks, ready to ham it up and make the jump. I guess Captain Bacon had it right: Bacon is bacon. Long may it sizzle.