Turkey Bacon for Teetotalers

Get organized this New Year by mechanically separating your meats.

No one knows how to talk about temperance anymore, but God knows we try. Every January, we renegotiate the cultural conversation around restriction (distasteful!) and indulgence (also distasteful!) and come up with fewer things to say.

We are going to exercise more, but we are going to do it in a way that will not change our bodies. We are going to lose weight, but we are not going to diet. We are going to prioritize “health” and “eating real food” and we will not be answering any follow-up questions about what those concepts mean.

It is in this season of confusion that I think of turkey bacon.

The first thing to know about turkey bacon is that it is not technically bacon. I am required to tell you this lest someone tedious write in. In the United States, “bacon” means pig belly, and anything carved higher off the hog has to be labeled as such. As a nation, we believe in consumer protections largely to the extent they protect us from consuming alternative meats.

What turkey bacon is is a long strip of mechanically separated and reconstituted meat sludge. Or, to borrow from a 1984 Wendy’s commercial: “pieces-parts.”

I never saw that commercial—my atoms had not yet congealed into their current, terrifying form—but I remember my mom quoting it. For most of my childhood, I was at least 10 percent “pieces-parts” by volume. Many of my breakfasts involved dewy slices of turkey bacon that had been microwaved on a hard plastic tray—ridged for no one’s pleasure—until they were not crisp so much as warm and wet.

To be fair, I don’t think the turkey bacon was meant to taste like bacon. It had a flavor all its own: flabby, metallic, bologna-esque. It was everywhere when I was a kid, and I assumed this meant it had always been everywhere.

But turkey bacon—“facon” to its myriad haters—turns out to have been a relatively recent invention. It wasn’t a matter of technology. We’ve been mechanically separating meat with a prospector’s zeal since the 1960s. We simply lacked the will. What about bacon could science improve?

Enter the low-fat, low-sodium, low-taste craze of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

A Terse Timeline of Turkey Transitions

• 1974: Sizzlean, a brand of lower-fat “breakfast strips” made from assorted meats (including turkey), enters the market with a series of commercials riffing on “bringing home the bacon.”

• 1979: Oscar Mayer acquires Louis Rich, a turkey processor, to expand their meat empire and experiment with new turkey products.

• 1987: Armour Golden Star releases “turkey breakfast strips” with stats comparing their calories relative to regular bacon as well as to Sizzlean.

• 1989: Louis Rich debuts the first official “turkey bacon” in a few test markets, including Ohio, Louisiana, and Texas. The facon goes national a year later, captured in ads such as the one below from the Scottsbluff, NE Star-Herald.

Doesn’t shrink and curl! Stands for the flag and kneels for the cross!

The low-fat craze couldn’t last forever, of course. Before I started researching the history of turkey bacon, I assumed it was just another ‘90s fad, like body glitter or D.A.R.E.

But facon has had more staying power than either of them.

If you look at USDA charts, you can clearly see a spike in turkey production during the 1980s and 1990s, when turkey bacon entered the market. More puzzling—to me, at least—is that production never really came back down. It’s not just because we’re eating more club sandwiches. A 2020 Purdue study found evidence of stronger consumer demand for and perception of turkey bacon than deli turkey. And Butterball added a dedicated production line for turkey bacon to a North Carolina plant as recently as 2018.

The modern-day audience for turkey bacon may not be loud, but it’s surprisingly large: dieters, heart-disease battlers, people who don’t eat pork for religious reasons, people who don’t eat pork for climate reasons.¹

I think I was surprised by turkey bacon’s popularity because the dominant culture has so soundly rejected it. We are supposed to sneer at turkey bacon the way we are supposed to sneer at Snackwells or Sean Lennon. We have moved on from caloric consolation prizes into an era of anti-Puritanical purity: whole milk, real butter, Bagel Thicks.

On the whole, I think this is the right balance. But there’s something I admittedly find snobbish and preening about our criticism of faux-foods. The usual line is something like, “I’d rather do without than have a pale imitation.” It is almost exclusively uttered by people who have never had to do without.

Plus, I have a genuine love for some of of those imitations! I didn’t taste real crab meat until I was in my 20s—which was also when I saw the ocean for the first time—and I’ve been fortunate enough to have it many times since. I’d still rather pluck a cold, rubbery hunk of imitation “krab” from a packet than dig a feather of crab from its shell-shard cave. I don’t care that the krab is made from Pisces parts. To me, it tastes like luxury.

Could I have forgotten turkey bacon’s similar pleasures? I went to the grocery store to search for a pack, but nothing looked the way I remembered it. The turkey bacon of my youth had been tantalizingly, unnaturally striated with layers of dark meat and white meat masquerading as fat. My modern-day grocery store sold only “natural,” unmarbled turkey bacon the shade of NARS Orgasm. I suppose this is a sign of the times: the people inclined to buy turkey bacon in 2025 might find mono-hued meat more wholesome. But I missed the streaky simulacrum.

I brought my Pink Meat home and decided to treat it the way I’d treat any good bacon: I heated it gently in a cast-iron pan. Every few seconds, I prodded hopefully at the strips, searching for some evidence that the fat was rendering (forgetting, of course, that there was nothing to render). The turkey bacon never got crisp so much as it eventually turned to leather. I struggled to cut it with a knife and fork. It did not taste like bacon. It tasted like deli meat someone had singed in a pan.

Long-time readers know that I would never serve Wet Egg.

In hindsight, I was a fool to go off my childhood script. The best preparation for turkey bacon is the one I grew up with: microwaved on a plastic tray until dewy and limp, each strip flexible enough to be accordion-pleated on the tines of a fork. It’s not good. It’s not bacon. But it’s good for what it is.

A friend and I sometimes joke that we plow through life at “one speed”—fast—but this is of course an exaggeration. We can move at whatever speed we will. We have more choices than all or nothing, full-fat or an empty plate. We are a people of degrees. We can have a little pleasure, as a treat.

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1. I suppose there are other advantages. Bacon size is limited by biology. Until we slaughter Okja, no one gets to eat bacon the size of a car. Not so with turkey bacon, which can—and has—been piped into a 17-foot-long strip.