American culture: dog bakeries

When you’re a sucker for something, you’re particularly attracted to or you like a specified thing. It’s informal English, for example:

• Marco is a sucker for barbecued ribs.
• Matteo is a sucker for Ray-Ban sunglasses.
• I don't know why Debbie never takes a vacation. She’s a sucker for punishment, I guess.

For me, I’m a sucker for bakeries. I love the smell of freshly baked bread or simply looking in pastry shop windows. Most of all, I love eating pastries.

Americans often look for opportunities: If they like something, they feel others might like it too, including their pets. With this attitude, the dog bakery was born.

Do dogs have a weakness for bakeries? They must, because canine pastry shops have sprung up (grown) in cities all across the US. They have very funny names too, like Doggie Bistro, Petlicious Dog Bakery, The Barkery, and more.

Pet owners care more about the quality of food they feed their animals because often store-bought treats have a high amount of sugar, preservatives, and chemicals. Dog-friendly ingredients are typically natural or organic products, such as peanut butter, oats, whole wheat flour, or carob (no chocolate for dogs), so this is the main reason for the popular dog bakery trend.

In addition, there are some very attractive choices to treat your pet. Think doggie donuts, birthday bones, doggie cannoli, or puppy peanut butter cups. Who can resist?

Bacon mania

People are attentive to their diets more than ever these days, trying to eat in healthier or more thoughtful ways and making food choices that reflect nutritious, personal, or religious beliefs. Here in the USA there is one puzzling exception that has a strong presence in the American food scene and it’s called bacon mania.

Mania means to have an excessive enthusiasm or desire for something, and the use of this tasty pork product in an increasing variety of recipess correlates with its growing demand. The more creative you can be with bacon, the more people like it, and food producers have become quite imaginative! There’s bacon gum, bacon-wrapped hot dogs, bacon chocolate bars, bacon cupcakes, and bacon ice cream.

If you’d rather look at bacon instead of eating it, consider a bacon watch for yourself,
bacon air freshener, a bacon wallet , or clean your teeth with some bacon toothpaste.

I personally haven’t fallen for (I’m not captivated by) the current bacon mania trend but I think I’d like to try bacon ice cream.

Pretty Bombs

As I drove through my city one afternoon I saw a public garbage can entirely wrapped in red and blue yarn; I thought it was for some special art appreciation day. A couple of weeks later I was walking on the street and saw another garbage can covered in colored yarn and, as I looked around, I saw street lamps with colored yarn wrapped around them too. I really thought this was particular to my city until I read about yarn bombing.

Yarn bombing is street art and graffiti, a form of gentle, pretty, artistic vandalism, whose main purpose is to transform cold, hard urban fixtures, such as lampposts, mailboxes, trees, benches, bicycles, parking meters by wrapping them with knitted covers and wraps.

This colorful practice originated in Houston, Texas a few years ago when a shop owner knitted a pink and blue cover for the door handle of her boutique and now yarn bombing is becoming an international sensation of pop art. These secret graffiti knitters are taking on bigger challenges by covering cars, buses, statues, and tree trunks. That’s a lot of knitting! Have you witnessed yarn bombing in your city?

Tiny Houses

When I was a little girl, I used to read a fairy tale called Teeny Tiny, which was about a little woman and everything in her life was small. Teeny and tiny are synonyms for small, which explains the title of the story. She lived in a teeny tiny village. She wore teeny tiny clothes. She slept in a teeny tiny bed, and so on. It was a strange story that scared me a little bit.
Anyway, of course she lived in a teeny tiny home, which reminds me of a new, growing trend here in the USA, which is tiny houses. To save money or simplify their lives, a small but growing number of Americans are buying or building houses that could fit inside many people's living rooms.
Measuring 8-15 square meters, these tiny houses are on wheels so some people put them in their backyards to use as offices, studios, or extra bedrooms. Others use them as mobile vacation homes that they can park in the woods or by a lake. There are increasing numbers of adventurous people that live in tiny houses full-time, with only their basic and most necessary possessions.
Could you live full-time in a tiny house, keeping only your most important things?