The opposite of bacon

By Todd Stadler · Friday, February 9, 2007 10:48pm

Our house has smelled like bacon for the past week, since Julia and I made some very tasty bacon-wrapped cream-cheese jalapeños for a Super Bowl party, then decided to use the leftover bacon for spinach salads this week.

This is all well and good because, hey, it's bacon. However, it being winter, we also have most of the doors in the house shut so as to keep the hot rooms hot and the cold rooms cold (sort of a McDLHouse, if you will).

The upshot being that, if you visit a non-kitchen room that has had its door closed, you suddenly find yourself smelling what can only be described as the opposite — or lack — of bacon.

Have you ever stared for a long time at a simple image and then looked at a blank wall? Because your eye has become accustomed to looking at the image, you see a negative version of it where there is actually nothing. It's like that with this smell. You've been walking around so long smelling bacon and (sadly) getting used to it, that when you walk into an unbaconated room, it smells wrong.

Anyhow, in case you were wondering, in an olfactory sense, the opposite of bacon is apparently some kind of sickly-sweet strawberry. Now you know. And science takes a step forward.