I have no idea how many words I’ve written over the last twenty years. Between newsletters, books, blogs, articles, and assorted other activities, it’s a lot! Because all I do is non-fiction, pretty much everything I write about is real (or at least I really believe it’s real) and pretty much has already happened—mostly my writing work is an attempt to bring to life food history, eating experiences, and traditional cooking techniques. Stuff about visits to artisan cheesemakers, the history of rye bread in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe a century ago, or how to cook all sorts of traditional Tunisian dishes here in the States.

Camp Bacon is an exception. I wrote about it long before it actually existed! In fact, I actually just made it up one night while I was working on writing Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon. Just seemed like a fun idea to get all the brilliant bacon luminaries of the world together in one place to talk, eat, enjoy and even play with bacon. So in this case . . .

And now, I’m excited to say, we’re taking Camp Bacon out of the context of camp, and actually turning it into a real thing—getting real people together to talk, eat, enjoy and . . . Actually play with bacon. While we don’t have everyone in the book—a lot of them live overseas, some passed away a few centuries ago, some had other engagements, one had to go to a cousin’s wedding—we do have a pretty cool collection of bacon oriented experts. Pete Sickman-Garner, the Camp Director, has taken to calling this “the Davos of Bacon” and . . . I’m down with that. If you want to be in on the bacon world, learn about the past, take the pulse of the future, hear some poetry and eat a whole lot of great bacon from all over the world . . . This is the place to be. Between the music, the meat and the expert men and women we’ve got coming . . . No hype . . . I truly think this is a once in a life time opportunity. If you love bacon, you love to learn and you love to eat . . . . You get the idea.

Hope to see you at Camp!

Ari Weinzweig