by David Sax
The whole forum lasted nine and a half hours.
A month later DC City Council passed a revised set of emergency food truck regulations, which achieved the desired compromise councilor Orange had sought. The minimum required amount of unobstructed sidewalk space was reduced from ten feet to six, and the fine for expired parking meters dropped from $2,000 back to $50. Vending zones were still going to be implemented, but the truck-free buffer zone would now be limited to two hundred feet instead of the proposed five hundred feet. There would still be a lottery to determine spots, and some of the restrictions that the DC Food Truck Association had opposed would remain in the bill, but it was the kind of solution that left both trucks and restaurants equally unhappy, which, in its own way, was an ideal political solution.
Che Ruddell-Tabisola, who led the fight for close to three years, was relieved though still hesitant when I spoke with him a few weeks later. “We have to wait and see how it’s actually implemented,” he mentioned with a note of caution. “I’m optimistic, but I know there are no Waterloos in politics. I think there’s a good reason why we’re popular. If there wasn’t a trend, we wouldn’t have been successful.”
He was right. By fighting for their existence the food trucks in DC and elsewhere have changed something far more than our mobile lunch options: they had secured new business models, affected the very social fabric of our cities, and changed the law of the land.
When my taxi pulled up to the University of Illinois at Chicago Forum on the cold Saturday morning I flew in from DC, a crowd of several dozen people were already milling about outside, cradling coffees in their hands as they formed the start of a line. From a nearby tent the deli meat company Eckrich was handing out slices of five different delicatessen meats that had been infused with bacon. A banner proclaimed this “The Best Idea Ever,” and they were scarcely able to open the packages quick enough for the hungry crowd that rushed to devour them. Inside the doors of the building several dozen volunteers were lined up behind long registration tables, ready to process the thousands who would soon arrive, ravenous and ramped up for greasy delights at the sold out event called Baconfest.
The sprawling twenty-two thousand-square foot floor of the Forum’s event hall was abuzz with activity. Six long tables, each stretching the length of the room, had been taken over by eighty-two local restaurants and bars, beer and liquor companies, and other vendors. Another eighty waiters and bartenders, working for the catering company Sodexo, wandered like lost children in black shirts while chefs, cooks, bakers, and owners scrambled to get ready. Pallets of beer kegs were being pushed around to all corners of the room, as James Brown played over the sound system. Along the back wall a giant screen was flashing the Baconfest logo: Chicago’s sky blue–and-white flag with red stars, rendered to look like a strip of bacon. Everywhere I looked people were carrying in trays, casseroles, Tupperware containers, and pulling huge hand carts piled with mountains of cooked bacon. Michael Griggs, one of the founders and organizers of Baconfest, now in its fifth year, was busy running around with a walkie-talkie, trying to corral the activity into some semblance of order.
“Hey,” said one of the chefs from the restaurant Belly-Q, who literally stepped in front of Griggs’s path to get his attention, “we have a fryer going. Can we leave the hot oil in or take it with us?”
“Take it with you,” said Griggs over his shoulder as he blew past the chef and kept moving on to the next issue.
One by one the restaurants turned on their portable griddles and ovens, reheating their bacon creations, which ranged from simple candied strips of bacon to concoctions like bacon-spiked bloody Marys, bacon peanut butter macarons, bacon cupcakes, bacon pineapple donuts, bacon pizzas, bacon biscotti, chicken-fried bacon, bacon meatballs, and bacon cotton candy, to name just a few. Puffs of bacon vapor were visibly rising into the air, settling down a few minutes later as a fine mist of aerosolized bacon grease that clung to every possible surface. In the corner of the hall a chef from one of the restaurants walked up to a table run by Jones Dairy Farm, one of the few dedicated bacon producers attending Baconfest. They had hung a whole slab of bacon, several feet long, from a rack next to their table, while a glistening warm pork belly rested on a carving board, lit up by a heat lamp like a Broadway diva. “Look at how beautiful this is,” said the chef, who was tapping his fingertips together rhythmically like Mr. Burns plotting something diabolical. “I’m like a moth to a flame. Or a fat guy to a slab of bacon.”
At 11:30 the doors opened to 150 advanced guests. These VIPs had paid $200 each for tickets that allowed them to enter an hour earlier than the rest of the 1,500 Baconfest attendees (whose general admission tickets still cost $100 each). All of the event’s three thousand–odd tickets, for both the lunch session and the dinner session (identical format, but with different restaurants) had sold out months before, in just forty-one minutes, and others had paid even more for scalpers’ tickets. The VIPs quickly fanned out with their Baconfest program guides in hand, heading to the tables that most interested them. There were families in newly purchased Baconfest T-shirts (including one portraying the Blues Brothers as flying pigs), wealthy well-dressed couples, hardcore foodies with expensive DSLR cameras, and a lot of burly men in Chicago Blackhawks jerseys. I walked outside and looked at the general admission line, which now stretched all the way around the corner and down two full blocks. Inside Griggs gave the signal over his radio to unlock the doors, and when they were flung open a cheer went up from the line. One man shouted “BACON!” at the top of his lungs like a general leading the cavalry charge.
“Oh my god,” a woman said as she came into the hall and saw its sheer scope.
“Where’s the bacon?” asked another man in a panic, making a beeline to the nearest restaurant’s table, where he encountered the Signature Room’s smoked bacon bread pudding, with pork tenderloin stuffed with chorizo and wrapped in bacon and topped in bacon-braised red cabbage and a bacon ancho sauce. He ate it in a single bite, then packed away another.
Some people entered the room and bolted to a particular booth, while others just froze for a minute, drunk with excitement at the overwhelming sight of so much bacon. Two men stood at the entrance and slow clapped. Nearby a police officer turned to his partner and said, “If this crowd gets out of hand, we may have to use bacon spray instead of pepper spray.”
Baconfest Chicago was a display of the bacon trend’s culinary inspiration and scope, literally a giant buffet of every possible bacon dish that had wound its way into the American food chain over the past few years, from restaurant meals and sandwiches to drinks, desserts, and candies. If an economist wanted to examine the culture of a food trend, from the irrational exuberance of its core followers and what bacon represented in their lives to what the bacon trend said about the time and place we were living in, that economist could not choose a better place to start studying. I am no economist, but I am a journalist, and as much as I wanted to indulge in all the baconalia, I was here for the money. Of all the reasons food trends mattered, none was more important than their economic impact. Whether they were cultural or culinary in their origin, all the trends I had encountered—chia seeds, Red Prince apples, Indian cooking, food trucks—were ultimately motivated by commerce. What drove people to open one more cupcake bakery in cities filled with them wasn’t their desire to unleash the perfect strawberry buttercream on the world—it was to make a buck. Food trends were products of capitalism, the edible manifestation of the free market deciding what was valuable to eat and what wasn’t. The bacon trend, which began in the early 2000s and really hit its stride a decade later, was a powerful example of why food trends mattered economically. It took a food that was common but undervalued and raised its value significantly, affecting everything from farming practices to commodity trading while also generating economic opportunities worth billions, including jobs, investments, and tax revenues. In terms of a food trend having a financial impact, this one literally brought home the bacon.<
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There is nothing new about bacon. Salted cured pork bellies have been eaten for thousands of years, particularly in Europe. It is relatively cheap and easy to produce. Pigs will eat anything and don’t require much space, and you only need pigs, salt, and smoke to make bacon. Bacon travels well and can sit around unrefrigerated for long periods of time. Its high-fat content and dense flavor make it an ideal protein to use in cooking, even sparingly. A few cubes of cooked bacon can elevate the lowliest salad or plate of vegetables into something extraordinary. The experience of eating bacon is everything humans are designed to love: a crunchy, chewy, salty, smoky, fatty powerhouse of umami wallop. Nothing else comes close. Bacon’s smell is unmistakable. It seeps through doors and wakes up roommates, and when cooked in a house, the scent will cling to the walls for weeks. It is a powerful meat.
In North America bacon has long been tied to breakfast. That’s how I first encountered it, at Camp Walden, where despite the fact that most of the campers were Jewish and pork wasn’t served in the dining hall, when we went out on camping trips in the wilderness bacon was a constant presence. Before we would enter the park with our canoes and packs the camp’s school bus would stop at a supermarket in a nearby town so our counselors could go inside to buy the week’s essentials. We’d wait impatiently in the bus, and when they emerged they would hoist the supersized packages of bacon into the air triumphantly as we chanted “Bacon! Bacon! Bacon!” peering out the windows at the prized pig. On that first morning, when the mist rose from those pristine lakes, before our tents were packed up and we pushed off our canoes, a glorious sizzle would spread through our campsite, as strips of precious pink bacon popped and danced in the camp’s beaten skillets. We ate it with eggs, with pancakes, with French toast, and on the last morning, when nothing else was left, we just ate bacon on its own. Often the counselors would dare a camper to drink a shot of bacon grease. Someone always did.
The bacon business in America has been relatively predictable since the successful campaign of Edward Bernays and Beechnut to pair bacon and eggs at breakfast in the 1930s. Bacon consumption followed a steady, seasonal pattern. Throughout the year people ate a consistent amount of bacon for breakfast, with the bulk of bacon sales to restaurants destined for pancake houses and diners or hotels that served breakfast buffets. Then in the summer bacon consumption would rise significantly, in parallel with the availability of fresh tomatoes in supermarkets. During these months bacon branched out from a breakfast side into the anchor for club sandwiches, BLTs, and Cobb salads, then faded back to breakfast after Labor Day. There were geographic and cultural exceptions of course: most Jews and Muslims still didn’t eat bacon, whereas places like the Deep South practically put it in every dish, but for the most part bacon eating in the United States and Canada was based on steady breakfasts through the year, with a summer pop. Pork belly prices reflected this, ramping up at the start of summer, when the first tomatoes were coming in, and then plunging in fall, when the last tomatoes were pulled from supermarket shelves. For the hog farmer with a bunch of bellies in his hands come October, things were grim.
This created a problem. Hog farmers couldn’t easily breed more pigs for slaughter in the summer because the demand for other pork products (chops, sausages, hams) was steady year round. So what the farmers did was freeze their bellies in great quantities, stockpiling them for the spring, when they would sell them to smokehouses to make bacon, hopefully at a good price. Some savvy financial minds sensed opportunity in this latent demand, and in 1961 the first pork bellies futures contract was written up on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the world’s premiere market for trading commodities. Now the farmer could enter a contract with a broker months before the summer and secure a guaranteed price for their bellies. The contract would specify the price per pound and the total pounds in the order, the specific cut of pork belly the buyer wanted, and which months the contract would be in effect. The farmer would deliver the frozen bellies to the broker as they were processed, and the broker stored them in a warehouse, often operated by a third party, until the time was right to sell them.
This was where things got interesting, because the broker who now had a contract for forty thousand pork bellies at 40 cents a pound went out and tried to sell off that contract for more money, making their profit on the spread as well as hedging their risk by opening up the contracts to outside investors. Pork belly prices rose and fell based on a number of factors, from the related cost of grains that pigs ate, like corn, to weather patterns in pork-producing states like Iowa, available space in the warehouses where bellies were stored, and the fluctuations of the market. The pork bellies futures market also acquired a reputation as the cavalier corner of the commodities exchange. It was highly speculative business, as you can imagine a loud pit full of men shouting multimillion-dollar bets on slabs of pig would be, and it was central to the lore of the commodities trade, captured perfectly in the classic Eddie Murphy comedy Trading Places. Because they were so widely traded and because the belly made up nearly 20 percent of the hog’s weight, as went belly prices, so, too, went the price of the whole hog.
Throughout the 1970s pork belly prices—and the corresponding price of bacon—followed a relatively stable annual pattern. They rose and fell with seasonal demand, largely in a range that was between 60 and 40 cents a pound. By the early years of the 1980s, however, things got tough for bacon. The low-fat diet trend took off, and when it was combined with a health scare over the nitrates frequently used to preserve meats, the corresponding demand for bacon rapidly dropped. “That was really the first food scare,” recalled the aptly named Joe Leathers, now a retired VP of the National Pork Producers Council and a lifelong veteran of the pork industry. “I’ll bet you bacon sales fell off thirty-five to forty percent,” Leathers said. “I joined the National Pork Producers in 1985, and we were struggling with bellies then. I was on a trade mission to sell bellies to Poland and recall going to DC, and we just had freezers full of bellies. This was a government giveaway program to Poland. There was such little demand that the US was literally giving away bellies. They were cheap—I think about nineteen cents a pound.” Another industry veteran called the belly “a drag on the carcass” at the time, a marbled albatross that no one wanted because fat phobia was steering people away from bacon. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts were the hot meat to watch. Sure, people still ate bacon with breakfast and in club sandwiches, but the future was lean meats, and the pork industry had to get on board or get trampled by the latest trend.
“Back in 1985 we were right in the start of ‘lean lean lean lean lean’, and that was what we needed to be talking about—how lean it was,” said Robin Kline, a pork industry communications specialist in Des Moines, Iowa, the country’s pig capital, who worked for the Pork Producers Council for fifteen years. “Bacon was kinda something we didn’t want to think about.” The solution was a widely publicized marketing campaign to rebrand pork in the eyes of consumers that launched in 1987. It was called Pork: The Other White Meat, and it succeeded in shifting the consumption of pork to leaner cuts, such as the loin, chops, or roasts, essentially piggybacking off the success of chicken. This trend continued throughout the 1990s. Lean cuts of pork grew in sales, while bacon stayed at the breakfast table, and pork belly prices largely wallowed in the mud. “Pork took a real beating during that period of time,” said Stephen Gerike, director of food service marketing for the Pork Marketing Board. “That’s why we came out with the Other White Meat campaign … and the parts of the pig that were not white, middle meat, suffered from that period of time in the consciousness. Bacon was the big victim.”
Ironically, the lean trend was also a turning point for bacon mongers. Fast food chains across America were conscious of the same trends that pork producers were, and they began introducing sandwiches and burgers that they could sell to fat-phobic diners. Grilled chicken breasts, turkey subs, and low-fat hamburgers, like the McDonald’s McLean Deluxe, started appearing on menus of fa
st food chains across the world. At the same time fast food restaurants began cooking their burgers to well done, following a deadly outbreak of E. coli virus at a Jack in the Box in 1993, which was traced to undercooked beef. The result was lean meat, which began with less fat and moisture, being cooked to the point at which the sandwiches tasted so dry and flavorless that no amount of special sauce could salvage them. These chains didn’t care about people’s diets—they simply wanted to sell more food, and they needed something that would deliver a jolt of flavor to these cardboard specimens. They found it in bacon.
“There’s no good reason to eat bacon,” said Jim Sibarro, the retired CEO of Farmland Foods, a major pork slaughterhouse and meat packer in Kansas City. “It’s two-thirds fat with a bit of lean. Bacon is high in calories … it’s terrible for you. But it adds flavor. That’s all it does. It adds flavor to sandwiches. Bacon is the greatest thing in the world because it adds that smoke, hickory, juiciness to a product. It’s two-thirds fat!” By putting a slice of bacon on a very lean burger or a grilled chicken sandwich, you instantly improved its taste by leaps and bounds. Not only that, but restaurant chains could present bacon as an optional addition to a sandwich and then charge a handsome premium for it.
None of this happened by accident. In 1998, as warehouses of frozen pork bellies were languishing unwanted, the pork industry was compelled to take action. “The proposition was, why don’t we go to the foodservice world and talk about putting bacon on burgers as a flavor enhancer?” Stephen Gerike said. The Pork Board’s farming members funded research at Iowa State University on developing a circular bacon that could fit perfectly atop a hamburger, while Gerike and his colleagues reached out to the menu development departments of restaurant chains, offering to help them develop more bacon-centric sandwiches and entrées. “If you can focus on one big quick service restaurant, like McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s, everyone else will inherently follow,” Gerike said. If one of them managed to create a successful bacon burger, the resulting increase in pork belly demand and prices would grow exponentially. The pork board launched a Bacon Makes It Better Campaign and subsidized the restaurants with funds for market testing, product development, and advertising around these products.