I’m blessed to live in a town with not one but two large gourmet grocery chains. Even so, it’s a rare shopping excursion when I find more than one or two varieties of bacon that don’t fall into the familiar sliced-and-shrink-wrapped name-brand category. For a guy who eats the stuff approximately 6.5 days a week, that’s not much pork to pick from. Thank goodness, then, for the tastebud thrillseekers at the Grateful Palate, which offers not only the jellies, syrups and fancy salt you’d expect from a foodie retailer, but an entire category labeled, simply but enthusiastically, “Bacon!” Following that link, you’ll enter a world celebrating the pig: There are novelty gifts like butter dishes, bath soap and spoon holders (pictured) shaped like bacon (warning: at $40, $25 and $30 respectively, they ain’t cheap — or even reasonable); there are ideas for cooking the stuff you probably haven’t considered (who’s up for bacon tempura?!); and of course there are the little fleshy strips themselves. Grateful Palate divides the stuff into nine categories (hickory smoked and peppered, for instance) with examples from all over the U.S. The most expensive ones we found were around $15 per pound, or nearly a buck an ounce; the cheapest we saw, this jowl bacon (offering “smoky, chewy, rich and intense pork and earthy flavors”) was $8. For the indecisive, deep-pocketed and seriously pork-addicted customer comes the grand finale: a Bacon of the Month service that for $150 offers not only 12 varieties but a T-shirt, a rubber pet pig and a little strap-on pig snout. You may never have to be disappointed in your grocer’s butcher section again.