For some odd reason, I found myself reading the “Cooking Guide” label on my microwave oven. Here’s what appears in the list of foods that a few clever minds think you might want to cook:

– Rice
– Fresh vegetables
– Frozen vegetables
– Canned vegetables
– Bacon

Rice, vegetables and… bacon? Lately, bacon seems to be the hottest food trend around. But my microwave is almost ten years old, so the manufacturer surely couldn’t have anticipated the sudden surge in bacon’s popularity over the last decade. Unless they had a time machine, how did they know that bacon would be such a popular microwave meal?

Perhaps the list was organized to contain popular, healthy items first, and they threw in bacon as a guilty pleasure at the end. Maybe all of these items are frequently cooked at the wrong power and duration. Or perhaps they did a survey of customers and asked them which foods they cook most often, so it’s entirely a popularity contest. Either way, I find the selection of microwave-friendly foods to be quite interesting, and I’d love to see the criteria that appliance vendors use when deciding which foods earn the scarce space on their products.