Sally Pollak

Free Press Staff Writer

WINOOSKI – Bacon is so hip, it's become its own food group.

Bacon is on T-shirts and doughnuts, served on a stick at Smorgasburg, the Brooklyn, N.Y., food frenzy, and it is the star of Bacon Thursday, when a Middlesex chocolate shop turns into a bacon party.

"Bacon is a simple word," said Frank Pace, who makes it. Pace is a meat-cutter at the Guild Commissary in Winooski. He took a break from butchering pigs to talk for a few minutes about bacon.

"It's so simple, people don't relate it to pork," Pace said. "It's in the hipster culture. And it's been made so mainstream, people think bacon is its own food. Not even part of the pig."

Bacon is a hot topic in Winooski — so hot some people won't talk about it. The controversy centers around a sign displayed in the rotary in the center of the city, above a plot of bright marigolds. The sign said: Yield for Sneakers Bacon. The message was posted by Sneakers restaurant, located on the rotary and known for its hearty brunches.

RELATED:Winooski cafe hires PR firm after bacon brouhaha

An online discussion about the sign — initiated on Front Porch Forum by a resident who identified herself as a vegan and member of a Muslim household — erupted into a digital war of words after Sneakers removed the sign, expressing regret for the circumstances. The response to the removal elicited hundreds of comments on the Internet and extended far beyond Winooski and Vermont. A Facebook page was created. The tone of the discussion was at times angry and offensive.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, a professor of religion at the University of Vermont and an expert in Islamic studies, characterized the online communication as a neighborhood conversation "run amok."

"It's part and parcel of the Islamophobia that I find rears its ugly head in online conversations," she said, noting the phenomenon is familiar to scholars of the media and Islam.

In this manner, a civil conversation can quickly become "uncivil and troublesome," she said.

RELATED:Bacon ad backlash floods Winooski restaurant

"Before the Internet, this might be an op-ed piece buried in the newspaper," Morgenstein Fuerst said. "But in this 24-hour cycle, you see these things ricochet in an echo chamber."

Food and religion

At the center of this debate is bacon, which Pace, the butcher, will tell you comes from the belly of a pig. The meat is cured and smoked before it is sliced and packaged.

By the rules of certain religions, including Islam and Judaism, eating pork is forbidden. In Islam, the Quran forbids the consumption of swine.

For mainstream Muslims, the prohibition is like a commandment, Morgenstein Fuerst said, and it is followed.

This doesn't mean, of course, that all observant Muslims and Jews forgo pork, Morgenstein Fuerst said. But many people practice these dietary restrictions as a matter of religion.

Among "food taboos," to use the words of Teresa Mares, a food anthropologist at UVM, those tied to religious practice and belief are particularly strong, she said. Mares this semester is teaching a class on food and culture, a course that includes a unit on pork.

"There are all kinds of rules about what we do or don't eat," Mares said. "Horses, bugs, worms and roadkill."

These rules have varied cultural meanings, from simple disgust to deep-seated cultural beliefs, she said.

"The consumption of pork and the religious rules around pork consumption are inseparable from religious doctrine," Mares said. "When it is connected to religious doctrine, that is a deeper and more meaningful set of rules. The deeper you go into the cultural meanings of food, the more potential debate and argument there is around the consumption of that food."

Cafeteria food

Institutions in Vermont, from schools to prisons, have adapted their menus to serve people who eat a range of foods.

In Burlington, the school district serves about 6,500 meals a day to a diverse population of students.

No pork products are served in the elementary schools, said Doug Davis, the district's director of food services. For middle and high school students, a limited amount of pork is available — typically in the form of a ham sandwich.

Pork items are marked clearly, and school menus show a picture of a pig (or a cow or a chicken), so it is clear to students what the food is. Pepperoni and sausage are made from turkey. Hot dogs are beef. No pork is used in dishes such as pasta sauce, soup or stew, where an ingredient might be mistaken for something else, Davis said.

"It's vitally important to respect people's culture around food," Davis said. "For us, it's about giving our customers the best opportunity to make a choice."

At the Integrated Arts Academy in Burlington's Old North End, students come from countries around the world, including Bhutan, Nepal, Senegal, Sudan, Somalia, Vietnam and China, principal Bobby Riley said.

His pork-free cafeteria has "expanded its repertoire" in the past couple of years to include dishes such as lentil dal and hummus, and cooks are using spices such as cumin, curry and cinnamon. For the first day of school Wednesday, the chili was flavored with cumin.

"The children have, at least from what I can tell, sort of assimilated to the western style of food," Riley said. "We do a lot of cultural celebrations at the school. Food that is a traditional part of a culture is celebrated along with their journey to Vermont."

No pork products are served in Vermont prisons, said Michael Touchette, director of facilities for the Department of Corrections. It was an "uphill battle" trying to manage kitchens and cook for a diverse group of inmates who might have dietary restrictions, Touchette said.

"It's very difficult," Touchette said. "Our kitchens were not designed to prepare multiple types of food based on religious standards."

Islam Hassan is the imam, or religious leader, of the Islamic Society of Vermont, based in Colchester. He drives around the Winooski rotary every day, and he said he found nothing offensive about the Sneakers bacon sign.

"It doesn't tell you to go inside and eat," he said.

"The life of a Muslim living in the West, we go to restaurants that serve pork," Hassan continued. "We're very careful not to have any pork on our plates." How, he wondered, could that sign "be offensive to us?"

Taking offense with the Sneakers bacon sign is equivalent to being offended by signs that say "bar," Hassan said, as Islam prohibits drinking alcohol.

The woman who started the conversation on Front Porch Forum, the online newsletter, does not represent the local Muslim community, Hassan said.

"Islam forbids eating the flesh of pork," Hassan said. "But it never said to insult or offend the people who are consuming it."

Contact Sally Pollak at spollak@burlingtonfreepress.com or 660-1859. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/vtpollak.