of bacon and beef steaks

During our Close of Service Conference, we had a goodbye party at our director's, Kris Besch's, apartment, and as a sort of parting gift, she gave us a choice between cheddar tortilla chips or bacon. I chose the bacon. Now to truly appreciate the bacon, you have to realize that the closest thing that people in Kazakhstan have to bacon is something called sahla, which is basically big chunks of smoked pork fat. It was difficult to explain that Americans have a severe aversion to fat, and that the best bacon has as little fat as possible. It was even more difficult to explain what Americans do with the fat that they apparently cut off of the bacon. I really just don't know. They have a word bekon, which is the same as sahla, from most Kazakhstani's reckoning, but I've discovered that they don't really know what bacon is. In fact, any thing having to do with meat is general and muddled. There is no such thing as a good cut of beef - there is beef. There is no such thing as a pork chop - there is pork. There is no such thing as a chicken breast, or leg, or thigh - there are butchered chunks of chicken meat and shards of bone. British and American butchers - I assume from the apprentice system popular in Britain in the 16th-20th centuries - have perfected the cut of beef, best exemplified by the colorful language that we use, simply for names of different steaks: T-bone, New York Strip, Rib-eye. In Russian, they have a borrowed word beefshteks, to represent, as far as I can tell, anything from a hamburger to a cubesteak. There are no sirloins, no rib-eyes, no filet mignon. It's sad.