Hey! I own bacon mints, now. That’s a thing that happened to me that can’t be undone.
You’re all like: “What’re bacon mints, Grant?” I’ll tell you what they are, dear reader: bacon mints are the absolute worst.
AN INTRODUCTION
They are godawful. There is no need for them to exist. They are a smeary output of a civilisation allowed to travel too far in a given direction. These mints are a modern echo of the wild-eyed bacchanals that heralded the fall of Rome. These mints are the end times.
Why are bacon mints? This is simple to answer: idiots. Idiots are why bacon mints exist. Idiots like me, who will try anything once. Idiots who see the prefix “bacon” before any item and immediately ascribe value to it, as though bacon is some modern panacea, some ambrosia, some gift from the gods.
Here: bacon, actual bacon, is nice. It does not need to be in everything. You do not need to replicate whatever flavours and scents it produces using industrial chemicals and then spray that around, skunk-like, onto and into other foodstuffs. Much like banana-flavoured things don’t taste like banana, and body pillows aren’t actual people you can have relationships with, bacon-flavoured things do not taste remotely like bacon.
THE WEBSITE
The website that sells bacon mints, by the way, is a multi-storey Golgotha of a thing, an endless treasure trove except instead of treasure it’s reprehensible shite; it is the dandruff of capitalism. They have a category for things that are somehow related to bacon; bacon mints, of course (and I will get to them in a second, dear reader, let me assure you), and bacon stickers, bacon gum, bacon plasters, bacon fucking air fresheners, which is a contradiction in and of itself, because I struggle to think what a room would have to smell like before filling the air with this would make it better. Perhaps, I dunno, if a load of goats had died in a hot car? Maybe then. But then the smell is probably the least of your problems, if it’s your car, and anyway why are you transporting goats in a hot car, have you not seen the goat safety awareness ads on television
The website has the following claims about bacon mints, which I will briefly discuss now:
Each one of these mints tastes like a delicious slice of crispy bacon with just a hint of mint flavor to give it that extra punch!
LIES. VICIOUS AND DISGUSTING LIES. I have had delicious slices of crispy bacon. I will get onto what these taste like in due time, but: it is not the future, MINTS, we do not have bacon in pill form.
It may sound weird but once you taste it, you’ll see that mint and bacon is a match made in heaven.
Heaven had nothing to do with this, MINTS. Each day we move further from God’s light and it is your fault.
THE PACKAGE
These mints are brought to you by Uncle Oinker, a pig who is illustrated on the front of the tin. Uncle Oinker wears a hat, so you know he’s on the level (“You can always trust a pig in a hat,” my grandmother would say) and he is just overjoyed for you to eat these mints that taste of his smoked brethren. That’s his bag.
It may seem weird to have a pig selling pig-flavoured products, but then again, Accoutrements has really rolled with this theme in their other products, and has a wide variety of self-dissecting animals that would probably make fine evidence in the eventual murder trial if you found them hidden in someone’s house, car, or victims.
The tin is otherwise fine; it is metal, it has a sort of bacon-themed pattern on the rear. Moving on.
THE SMELL
These mints smell like cheap cat shit.
Not expensive cat shit, from young healthy cats with good diets and active lifestyles, but the sort of furball-hawking shivering arthritic overweight lumpy bagpipe-lookin’ motherfuckers who spend their entire lives, now, ambulating between bowls of Tesco value-brand cat food and almost, but not quite inside, the little tray, where they expel vast quantities of hell-grade liquid feces in an act that is not quite, but the closest thing they now have, to a show of enthusiasm.
These mints smell like salty turds and you are supposed to put them in your mouth. I am going to, now.
THE TASTE
Oh god I can’t
THE TASTE, COME ON
Okay! So – at first – the taste is the least reprehensible part of this, I think. They do not taste of much at all. They taste chemical and unreal, which is to be expected, and every time my saliva unwillingly strips a layer off the innocent-looking tablet I get a fresh wash of the vileness again.
The mint is struggling to keep up.
Oh, wait – I am a minute in, now, and I can feel my mouth being coated in this stuff with a sensation not unlike that experienced when you eat a cheap sausage roll right out of the fridge; cloying, hanging, insidious, grim.
At present it tastes like the bottom of bins smell.
I’m scared that this is it for my mouth, you know? That this is what I’ll taste, from now on, that this will be the option I have, that I have tattooed this awfulness over my gums forever. That it is a stain.
I am chewing it to get it over with quickly, and – that is worse. Something dark and hamlike emerges from the centre of the flavour palette; something wrong, incorrect.
THE AFTERTASTE
It is over. My tongue feels vaguely minty, but my breath smells like I’ve just sucked off a barbecue, and that cloying texture is still there. It has furred over my tongue. It has hit my mouth like an oil tanker hits an arctic beach.
IN CLOSING
Do not give these mints to anyone, even someone you hate.
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