A friend made a graph comparing how much folks talk nonstop about bacon to the number of damns the rest of us give about how much any of them like bacon.  He noted, "What really makes the bacon thing (and other such things) annoying to me is that by the time they attain 'thing' status, they no longer seem to be about loving whatever it is—it seems to be more of a fetishization and status marker (i.e., the status of someone duly participating in whatever the zeitgeist has determined his/her demographic should participate in). You and I love cheese because, well, we really love cheese—not because the concept of 'cheese' has become a totem or a meme!"

Flirting with bacon as a status marker goes back at least to the mid-1800s, as we see in this illustration from The Oxford Thackeray.