Bologna gets a bad wrap. I'm here to stand up for it and, hopefully, reinvent how we look at that pink little snack meat. Everyone associates bologna as a lesser meat. It's made of the parts we don't want to eat. Usually, if we do buy it, we don't really eat it. It just sits there in the meat drawer for a couple of months until we find it caked with white mold and throw it away in disgust. When we do use it, we slap it into a kid's school lunch sandwich, spray some yellow mustard, and never give it a second thought. While we, the unfettered adults, go out enjoy a delicious turkey panini with chipotle sauce. Mmm. I mean, seriously, you would choose a roasted turkey panini over a white bread bologna sandwich just about any day, right? Right. No, one is going to deny that bologna sandwiches are a terrible tasting, especially when you compare it to an angus beef sandwich oozing of provolone topped with Portobello mushrooms on sourdough. Or a barbecue chicken with jalepenos dripping with caramelized onions on honeynut bread. Oh god, the possibilities are endless! I digress, you are not going to find many sandwiches that are lesser than a bologna. Maybe, the tired pb&j, but you can really class that up if you add some craisins, bananas, and sliced almonds.
By now you're probably thinking, okay, we can't make the bologna better tasting, let's make all the other sandwiches worse! Add some Habanero sauce on every type of meat in the deli showcase. Really shame that maple smoked ham that everyone likes by sprinkling some ground up moth balls onto each cut… Wrong! And to be frank, that's a little preposterous to bring up. Not to mention a little unsafe. So here's my pitch, let's advertise bologna as an environmental friendly meat. It really is made of the scraps of various meat parts we'd usually throwaway, we can't change that. But- hear me out - we will call it recycled meat! Let's embrace what makes it gross and turn it into something that people can stand behind.
Shoppers are willing to buy earth friendly products over earth deadly products because, let's face it, guilt. Example? Recycled toilet paper. It feels super rough on your nether regions, but, hey it's environmentally friendly so we use it. The public will wipe themselves with recycled newspaper as long as they know those sweet little pine trees are safe out there. Now if people are willing to choose sandpaper over the angelically soft Charmin's, than we are in business. Guilting consumers to buy a recycled meat should be and is just as easy. People already feel guilty when it comes to meat. PETA's images of hormone pumped cows in over crowded stalls and beak-less chickens have done that. So I say, let's push people a little further, and see if they are willing to contribute to a worthy cause and eat recycled meat. Then all those weary eyed pigs will at least be used in totality and not just for their delicious parts, like bacon. Then we can sleep with a clean conscious for doing the right thing; buying bologna.
Bologna, the earth conscious, environmentally friendly meat, the meat that not only saves you money in your bank account, but saves your children's future. Bologna looks pretty good now, doesn't it? Heck, we can even market an organic brand, too. The recycled, organic bologna for the true heros. Buying that will definitely make you a better person.
