I had one of the Big Realisations of my life this week: up there with “It’s OK — no one has a clue what they’re doing,” and “Put the fez back on the shelf — you will never be the kind of person who can style out a hat”. And it is this: bacon is the single most important thing in the world today.

This is not, you must understand, some ludicrous thesis that popped into my head, which I then worked backwards to try to prove. On the contrary — looking at it now, I can see that it was a fact that had been startlingly obvious for some time, but which I had simply chosen to ignore: much like Terry and June having had sex, or David Cameron running the actual country my life is in.

It started with Bacon Salt. Some friends of mine heard of Bacon Salt.

“We must get the Bacon Salt!” they shouted. “We will order the Bacon Salt, from America, and when it gets here — all covered in foreign stamps, in a brown cardboard box that’s a slightly and excitingly different brown from the brown of British cardboard boxes — we will have a Bacon Salt Party! Awl-right!”

Bacon Salt is, as you have correctly guessed, some salt that tastes like bacon. No calories, no fat, entirely vegetarian and kosher — it is a product that both believes, and makes possible, its mission statement: “Because everything should taste of bacon.” Mashed potato, chicken sandwich, macaroni cheese — even a cup of tea, I suppose, if you’re deeply perverted for bacon. It can all be hogged-up in a second. With one shake, everything can taste of smoky pig.

Well, I can’t say that I wasn’t amazed. I was amazed. It’s almost as if for the world that has it all — penicillin, Mozart, an ability to leave rubbish on the Moon — we’ve had to think of more bizarre things to give ourselves on our birthdays. We have, finally, almost in desperation, given ourselves the Universal Bacon Facility.

But you know what? That Bacon Salt amazement was a false amazement. I should have held my amaze. Because the next day, tootling around the internet, I found a website that was as if I were falling down a rabbit-hole. But a rabbit-hole made of bacon. The Bacon Hole.

This website made Bacon Salt seem as nothing. For this was a site that sold almost every product you could conceive of — but with the implicit understanding that the most important thing about the construction of an item should be that it encompass bacon. Bacon-scented candles. Bacon vodka. Bacon chocolate. Bacon coffee. Bacon-flavoured toothpicks. Bacon rolling-papers. Bacon mints — “How do you know you don’t like it if you haven’t tried it?” Bacon-print dresses. The bacon bikini — the Bac-ini. Bacon tattoos. Baconnaise — the mayonnaise/bacon hybrid child the 21st century has been waiting for. It even included recipes for Bacon Martinis, meaning that there could now be a third option: shaken, stirred — or crispy.

The website is a terrifying, telescopic reveal of one species’ hog-based insanity. Because, according to a 3,000-word entry on Wikipedia, America — and, therefore, the world — is officially in the grips of “Baconmania”; making bacon the Meatles, I guess. The per-head consumption of it has shot up in the US in the past ten years, with Americans embracing bacon not just as a foodstuff, but an entire way of life. “Bacon is America!” salon.com claimed.

More cynical hands might suggest that it’s less that “bacon is America”, and more because, in an era of endless stupidity, bacon is basically Meat Toast — you can’t screw it up. It practically cooks itself, if you leave it on a windowsill for ten minutes.

But while America — in the dying days of its global supremacy — loses its mind to bacon, the keener observer may begin to notice how bacon has power and influence stretching over the millennia.

Consider, for a moment, the things forbidden by major religions: adultery, incest, murder — and, for nearly two billion people, pork. Yeah, well, I think we know what’s going on there — the whole pork thing is just a sledgehammer to break bacon! No one gives that much of a toss about pork chops — it’s bacon that’s the will-breaker. It’s what always gets the vegetarians. Clearly aware of the siren-call of bacon, a prehistoric organisation of Jewish and Muslim elders — the Grilluminati, perhaps — put in place laws that would stop their people from perishing in a hoggy fug of bacon abuse, rind-fatigue and fannying away colossal technological advances on inventing the Bacon Bra. Poor, sweet, stupid Christians, then. For without the fear of eternal damnation, bacon has a clear, unimpeded expressway into our souls. We are helpless in its presence.

As America’s bacon-frenzy illustrates, when culture, technology and economy allow mankind the option of unlimited bacon — for bacon to fill every moment and aspect of its life — Mankind will hit the “Bacon Me” button like an unhinged mandrill. In David Lynch’s Dune, when Kyle gnomically insisted: “The spice is the worm! The worm is the spice!” we can see, now, that both worm and spice were, in fact, bacon. Bacon is the Dark Matter that holds together the Universe. Richard Bacon has just taken over from Simon Mayo on BBC 5 Live*. We are stardust. We are bacon.

Anyway, yesterday, my friends finally got their Bacon Salt. “We’re having that Bacon Salt party!” they cried. “Come over! Bacon Salt all round!”

It was at that moment that a towering disdain for the whole concept of bacon finally overwhelmed me.

“No thanks,” I said. “I want to live in a multiflavoured world. I don’t want to be the generation that forgets what non-bacon popcorn tastes like. I believe the flavour of bacon should be kept exclusively to the foodstuff, bacon — and not allowed to blot out every other thing, like some rampant culinary knotweed. I draw a line in the sand, here and now. I reject bacon! IT LOOKS LIKE PRINCE CHARLES’S EARS, FOR GOD’S SAKE.

“And, besides — if you sprinkle smoked paprika on stuff, it does the same thing.”

* Although, of course, had the station controller known about Baconnaise, the entire day-time schedule could be different.

Times Recommends

• The ghost of Robin Cook haunts Chilcot’s feast
• The truth shouldn’t need oaths
• Violence: let’s separate the men from the boys