Bacon Ipsum: A Meaty History
Created by Michael Bevilacqua-Linn in 2011, Bacon Ipsum and its full meat lexicon. Why food brands love it and how it became one of the most-imitated ipsum variants.
Bacon Ipsum: A Meaty History
Origin
Bacon Ipsum was created by Michael Bevilacqua-Linn and launched at baconipsum.com in 2011. It arrived at precisely the moment when bacon had become something of a cultural meme in early internet culture — a period when "everything is better with bacon" was a reliable joke, and the pork-belly fixation of food media was at its peak.
The premise is simple: replace the Latin word pool of lorem ipsum with a lexicon drawn entirely from meat cuts, charcuterie, and butcher terminology.
Sample Text
Bacon ipsum dolor amet spare ribs ham tri-tip andouille. Chuck tenderloin ground round, turducken pork belly brisket pig sausage. Salami swine shankle strip steak tongue, pastrami jowl flank prosciutto drumstick doner corned beef.
Shankle sirloin landjaeger cow meatloaf fatback frankfurter. Tail short loin cupim tongue ribeye. Beef ribs drumstick ball tip jowl burgdoggen, t-bone boudin pork loin frankfurter tenderloin biltong corned beef.
The Lexicon
The Bacon Ipsum word pool draws from a surprisingly wide range of meat terminology: common cuts (brisket, sirloin, ribeye, chuck), pork products (prosciutto, salami, pancetta, andouille, bratwurst), processed meats (frankfurter, bologna, hot dog, corned beef), less familiar terms (burgdoggen, landjaeger, cupim, boudin), and the occasional portmanteau absurdity (turducken). The breadth of the lexicon means it generates text that is recognizable but genuinely varied across paragraphs.
Why Food Brands Use It
Bacon Ipsum has a genuine use case beyond humor: food service brands, restaurant websites, recipe platforms, and food delivery apps find it more contextually appropriate than standard latin placeholder text. A mockup for a barbecue restaurant that uses standard lorem ipsum feels detached from the product; Bacon Ipsum keeps the vocabulary in the right register, even if the sentences themselves are meaningless.
It is also simply more engaging in design review sessions — reviewers pay attention to the layout rather than puzzling over Latin, but still read placeholder text that fits the general vibe of the product.
The Template for Everything After
Bacon Ipsum's structure became the template for the first generation of themed ipsum generators: take a rich lexicon from a specific domain, use it to construct grammatically plausible but semantically empty sentences, serve via a simple web interface. The pattern repeated with Hipster Ipsum, Corporate Ipsum, Pirate Ipsum, and dozens of others.
Generate Bacon Ipsum in any format from the flavor selector above.
Key Takeaways
- Bacon Ipsum was created by Michael Bevilacqua-Linn in 2011 at baconipsum.com
- The lexicon spans meat cuts, charcuterie, and processed meats — wider than it first appears
- Most useful for food service, restaurant, and food media mockups where the vocabulary is contextually appropriate
- Its structure — domain-specific lexicon in placeholder sentences — became the template for all themed ipsum generators