by David Sax
Surrounded by bacon maniacs downing shots of bacon black bean stew, bacon cotton candy, and bacon root beer floats, it was impossible not to get caught up in the infectious exuberance of Baconfest. There were people like Jeaneed Kalakr and her grandson Parker, who wore matching, homemade T-shirts printed with a poem written for the occasion: “From one porker to the next / Don’t give me no fat / I squeal for bacon / One good snort deserves another / I am a bacon lover … undercover.” The miraculously petite sisters Christina and Danielle Wade were dressed in matching bacon earrings, socks, and T-shirts made for their 2011 Bacon Takedown Tour. “It’s not a trend for me,” the enthusiastic Danielle said. “It’s a way of life.” There were dudes wearing muscle shirts that said, “Bacon Gives Me a Lardon” and “Drink First. Pork Later”; babies in little pig outfits; a man wearing a homemade matching hat and shirt that displayed a peace sign made up of strips of bacon he’d ironed on; and my favorite, a T-shirt of a cat surfing a strip of bacon in outer space. “That’s the coolest T-shirt here!” I told the owner and then immediately regretted it, as I saw someone with a T-shirt that had two bacon-surfing space cats. Yes, the bacon trend was about food, but it was also a money-making meme, like a live version of an online joke that just gets spun round and round and round until you wonder where it will end.
“Before the bacon bubble came into being it was very niche,” said Aaron Samuels, who had bought VIP tickets with his wife, Charlotte, as an anniversary gift. The two of them were decked out for battle, with pink headbands, backpacks, and a studied knowledge of what was on offer. Samuels, who had a giant beard and was decidedly zaftig, wore a T-shirt that proclaimed “Man Boobs Are Sexy,” while Charlotte’s shirt featured an angel pig with wings and a halo floating above a plate of bacon, with the caption “It’s what I would have wanted.” “If the bacon bubble bursts, we’ll still be fans of bacon,” Samuels said. “Most people at Baconfest are the O.G.s of bacon”—meaning its original gangsters, bacon’s most hard-core fans.
Nearby I overheard a man ask a group of strangers in full-on bacon regalia whether they were baconheads. “No,” said one of them, hoisting a bacon bourbon cocktail, “we’re Chicagoans. Other cities do marathons. We do Baconfest.”
The overall economic impact of the bacon trend is difficult to quantify, but it is undoubtedly substantial. The bacon trend created small businesses—restaurants, smokehouses, festivals, food trucks, surfing bacon cat T-shirt conglomerates—that each generated jobs and tax revenues where none had previously existed. Since 2011, when Wesley Klein opened his New York City bacon bakery, the Baconery, which sells bacon-laced brownies and cookies, the business had already expanded to a retail location, with plans afoot for four new Baconery stores and warehouses around the country to service a growing online business. Klein expected the Baconery to make over $400,000 in sales during 2013, quadruple what the business made the year before. A constant stream of requests for franchises around America and the world led Klein to believe the businesses growth was far from limited. “We can probably wrap the world in bacon,” Klein said when I asked about his potential market, noting that there are many countries that love bacon that are so far untouched by the trend. J&D’s is an even more dramatic example: in their first year in business they went from a garage startup with a tiny investment to a million-dollar company with international sales. Though Esch would not reveal exact figures when we spoke in 2013, he hinted that the company now generated over $10 million in annual revenues. “I mean, Dave just bought a new sailboat yesterday and I bought an Audi,” Esch told me when I asked about their economic output. “The bacon business is good.”
The bacon trend’s financial impact was really felt in the pork business. Starting with the increase in bacon consumption the fast food chains and their use of precooked bacon had driven, the demand for pork bellies increased steadily from the late 1990s, and the value of the belly grew with it. “Now spare ribs and bellies are the highest-priced cuts in a pig carcass,” Stephen Gerike told me in February 2013. “You’re getting right now thirty-five cents per pound more to make bacon from bellies than pork loins to make chops”—almost the opposite of decades before. Pork belly prices rose as high as $1.89 per pound and regularly hover well over $1. They are now more valuable than the boneless, skinless chicken breasts that once drove belly prices so low. Although a lot of that increase was driven by a parallel rise in commodity prices, especially the corn that pigs eat, and an upswing in pork exports to Asia, much of it was credited to the trend known as bacon mania.
At the retail level there are now more people producing and selling bacon at every price and quality level and more lines within those companies. Where supermarkets once carried three to four brands of bacon, now they sell fifteen to twenty. “In Texas HEB [a large supermarket chain] buys twenty-four brands of bacon—all different varieties,” said Joe Leathers. “I mean, that’s a bunch of bacon.” There is more bacon being sold to restaurants and more bacon sold to diners at those restaurants in different dishes, bringing more money into the pockets of smokehouses and distributors, restaurant owners, chefs, waiters, and busboys, whether they are small independent operators or publicly traded chains. “At retail,” Leathers said, “you’re looking at a thirty-five to forty percent profit margin for selling bacon. Foodservice is much higher: fifty to sixty percent margins, because they sell by the slice.”
All of this shifted the bacon market cycle. Suddenly, the seasonal habit of freezing pork bellies throughout the winter, then smoking them for the summer tomato season was replaced by a constant, year-round demand for bacon. “There’s a bacon shortage,” said Sam Edwards III, who runs his family’s traditional smokehouse S. Wallace Edwards & Sons in Virginia, which is highly regarded for the quality of its bacon. “We buy from six suppliers of bellies, and a lot of the time we just don’t get what we order because there’s so much demand for it. We were joking that what needed to happen is that people needed to breed pigs with three bellies on them.”
As the price of a pork belly increased, it elevated the overall price of the hog, which put more money into the hands of pig farmers. Steve Meyer, the pork economist, estimated that the increase brought on by the bacon trend added roughly $20 to the value of each animal. “That’s a bunch,” he said. “That’s over a ten percent increase in value of the animal. That’s twelve percent more revenue for the farmer. It’s twenty thousand dollars if you’re raising a thousand pigs a year. It’s been a tremendous contribution to the value of the animal, this new interest in bacon.” Farmers responded by breeding their pigs to have longer, fattier bellies and integrating belly-heavy breeds like the Berkshire and Landrace pigs into their livestock. “Twenty years ago, if you looked at the animal then and now, the animal now is much longer today than it was then,” said pork trader Steve Nichol. “Now you have a longer belly. Before you would get seventeen slices, but now I can get twenty-two to twenty-three slices out of a belly.” Others have talked about meat packers cutting bellies in half and charging even more for their product.
The scale of the economic impact of the bacon trend was most visible in the pork belly futures market at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, not too far from where Baconfest was held. With a constant stream of bellies now going from the kill floor directly to the smokehouse, the need for warehouses banking millions of frozen bellies faded away. Where the belly market once provided a cacophony of financial speculation, of great fortunes made and lost by men shouting frantic trades, it had since become a ghost town. As the bacon trend took hold, pork belly became a year-round ingredient, and no one needed to speculate on it anymore. In July 2011 half a century after the trade in pork belly futures began, the contract was delisted from the market, and the pork belly’s life as a financial instrument ended. Only three months before, the National Pork Board finally dropped “The Other White Meat” as a slogan, opting instead for the more bacon-friendly “Pork: Be Inspired.” When it came to pork, the twenty-first century belonged to bacon.
After two and a half hours of Baconfest the salt, booze, and the sheer decadence of the day began taking its toll on the crowd. Those who ran between vendors at first now shuffled, and those who ate everything in their sight were now cherry picking, taking one bite and tossing the rest away. After eating my fifth bacon-flavored macaron, I honestly never wanted to eat anything made from bacon again in my life. (That feeling has since passed.) A sea of bodies slumped against the walls of the hallway outside the main event, and there were bacon fans passed out in each other’s arms like they’d fallen valiantly in battle against their salty foe. Everything reeked of bacon smoke. Michael Griggs and the other organizers took to the microphone and called for everyone’s attention. “Hello bacon nation!” Griggs yelled to a cheer and random cries of “Bacon!” They announced the winner of the bacon poetry contest, which was “Winter vs. Bacon” by Steve Nordin, a selection of which appears below:
Bacon on a cold night
Bacon on a chilled morning.
Bacon on bread, in the middle of the day.
I bite down and my mouth fills with the warm
Smokey flavor, like boots crunching down
Through crisp fall leaves.
Suddenly the hollowed out surrounding winter
Is alive.
The Baconfest organizers then presented an oversized $50,000 check to the Chicago Food Depository. Griggs thanked everyone in attendance and told them to go home because the venue had to be cleaned and reset with a whole new slate of restaurants for the dinner shift. People slowly filed out, some drunkenly helped along by security guards, and I followed Griggs to the back of the venue, where several hundred bags of garbage were piled to the ceilings and spread along corridors. A dozen volunteers were sifting through some of the bags, separating compostable forks and bowls from food waste and plastic in a vain effort to recycle. The scope of Baconfest’s business became apparent in that moment. Three thousand people had paid more than half a million dollars to eat several tons of bacon. The restaurants and food companies had served up hundreds of thousands of dollars in products that had been bought from suppliers, and many of these restaurants and food companies would see increased business from Baconfest fans in the weeks and months to come. The event paid tens of thousands of dollars to the day’s hired staff and generated sales at Chicago-area bars, restaurants, and hotels—and, likely, cardiologist offices—in the hours after the event. As Griggs tried to get the staff to stop sorting and focus on clearing the hallway, he turned and asked me what exactly I was writing about anyway.
“It’s about the economics of the bacon trend,” I told him.
“Right,” he said, sweeping out his hand at the mountains of trash that represented every paying customer that had passed through the doors of Baconfest so far. “Like all this business that wouldn’t be done if the trend didn’t exist.”
I had come to Tampa at the end of my journey around North America’s food trend landscape for a single reason. It was not the city’s famous Cubano sandwiches, a food that actually originated with Cuban immigrants here, or the all-American grills that dominated the landscape (including Hulk Hogan’s Beach Club, conveniently located in my hotel). Over the past year I had observed items, people, and phenomena whose trends were at various stages of their evolution: the cupcake trend cresting, a chef whose influence was starting to spread, an apple that was just budding, food trucks on the cusp of great power. All of these trends were relatively recent, some were a few years old, others had begun just over a decade back, but none of them were what I would consider past their prime. I wanted to know what became of a food trend once it had passed to the other side.
All trends have a life cycle. The old ones must inevitably decline to clear space for the new ones. We had to stop worrying about fat so we could start worrying about carbs, had to fall out of love with whole wheat bread to truly embrace multigrain flaxseed chia-infused pasta. Bacon will always be a part of the American diet, but the future of bacon-flavored sexual lubricant is no more assured than the relationships born of its smoky aphrodisiac. In this way food is no different from other trends, like fashion. I had come to Tampa to see the last stop for one of the most iconic food trends of the past century. This trend had started out with an elite audience of tastemakers, had spread through a media frenzy, grown into a phenomenon that defined that era’s culture, and then dropped from fashion. It had enjoyed a brief resurgence, then flamed out once again, and it was now as far from being a current food trend as mutton, Jell-O molds, or hardtack biscuits. I had tracked this trend’s history through archived articles, old cookbooks, and interviews with its few surviving, elderly tastemakers. Now I found myself before a half-empty strip mall in the Tampa suburbs, like an anthropologist standing at the foot of a temple in the jungle, ready to encounter the last tribe of American fondue enthusiasts and what they were doing with a food trend that has long since passed.
Ahh fondue. If there exists a food trend that elicits stronger images and associations, I have yet to encounter it. Fondue—with its whiff of simplicity and exotic continentalism, overtures of romance and sex, and memories of rib-sticking comfort. Fondue brings to mind melted cheese and a basket of cubed bread, cauldrons of molten chocolate waiting for strawberries, the sizzle of hot oil frying a hunk of filet. Fondue is a conjurer of the past, a food trend that exists primarily in memory, often decades removed from the last time you ate it. You hear its name and picture ski lodges, a fog of stinky cheese, crackling fireplaces, shag carpets, and Burt Reynolds lying there, shirtless and with a long-stemmed fork in his hand. It is not only a cultural anachronism, but a symbol of all cultural anachronisms, of the fate of forgotten food trends, now no more relevant than tie-dyed T-shirts or lava lamps. Fondue is a punch line. Fondue is a pet rock.
I was born just as the last blue Sterno flame flickered out on the fondue trend. By the time I first encountered it on ski trips with my parents, it was already cocooned in nostalgia. Once a winter we would be vacationing in a resort like Aspen or Whistler and find ourselves in a restaurant with other families, sitting around a large round table as a giant pot of cheese that smelled like a musty basement bubbled in the center. The parents would eagerly dip their bread cubes in the cheese, laughing about the fondue set wedding gifts languishing in their garages, of first dates at fondue parties and scrubbing hardened cheese from velour sofa cushions. The kids around the table would try one bite of the pungent fondue, wrinkle their noses, and eat plain bread cubes until our parents relented with an order of chicken fingers. Our reaction to chocolate fondue was another story, however. We would dunk anything we could in there—bananas, strawberries, marshmallows, napkins, sugar packets, spoons—to get at that sweet nectar. When I got a bit older we started a tradition at our weekend house of hosting a Christmas Eve cocktail party for all the other Jewish families we were friends with. We served shrimp cocktails, frozen Swedish meatballs, deli sandwiches, and chocolate fondue. One of my father’s clients always sent a huge slab of chocolate as a Christmas gift, and this went into the fondue pot along with a few triangles of the oversized holiday Toblerone bars we bought at the supermarket. We had a small fondue set with a little enamel pot set over a tea light, accompanied by long-handled thin forks. One year my mother bought microwave-ready chocolate fondue, and it was so bad (an oily, runny, god-awful mess) that our Christmas fondue tradition died then and there. We went back to Chinese food after that.
Cheese fondue originated in Switzerland during the late nineteenth century as a simple peasant dish of melted hard cheeses, like emmenthal and gruyere, eaten with hunks of stale bread. Its ingredients were cheap, filling, and could be packed easily into a rucksack. The preparation couldn’t have been simpler: all you needed was a pot, a fire, and possibly a dash of wine or brandy to improve the taste. Fondue became a staple of yodeling Swiss cow herders during winter months, though it soon came down from the mountain pastures to inns and taverns. The epicenter of fondue culture is Neuchâtel, a picturesque lakeside town i
n the hills of the Jura region, bordering France. Here is where the classic recipe of fondue Neuchâteloise emerged, with a mix of shredded emmenthal and gruyere cheeses, garlic, pepper and nutmeg, cornstarch (to keep the texture consistent), dry white wine, and a dash of kirsch, a clear cherry brandy. During my last year of high school I had several friends who went to Neuchâtel on exchange for a semester. When they returned they all looked like puffed up Butterball versions of themselves. I asked my friend Mike why they had gained so much weight, and he answered with one word: fondue. They had been lured by the delicious siren of Neuchâtel, which cast its pungent spell from every bar, restaurant, and pub. That summer, back in Canada, Mike would go on covert fondue missions to Swiss restaurants around the city. I can still picture him sitting alone in the corner of one of these places, swirling bread around a fondue pot as oompah music played, happy as anything.
In Switzerland fondue eating developed its own subculture, which only increased the food’s popularity. “It was mostly a dish served in the wintertime with young people,” recalled Erwin Herger, who grew up in Lucerne, Switzerland, in the 1930s and 1940s. “If you lost your bread in the pot, a girl had to kiss the boy to her left, and if a boy lost his, he had to buy the next bottle of wine. It was timeless. Everyone knew about fondue Neuchâteloise.” I was having lunch with Herger and his wife, Gerda, at a loud dockside fish restaurant in Melbourne, Florida, a seaside community on the Atlantic coast, where they had retired some years back. Herger, now eighty-four years old and somewhat hard of hearing, was one of the instrumental figures of the American fondue trend, thanks to the twenty years he spent at the helm of the Chalet Suisse’s kitchen, the New York City restaurant that made fondue trendy. The Chalet Suisse had opened in the 1920s during prohibition on West 52nd Street in a narrow, low-ceilinged room with painted murals of the Alps on the back wall. The restaurant served traditional Swiss food, including cheese fondue, schnitzel, and other specialties. Recipes for fondue had appeared occasionally in American newspapers or cookbooks, often from well-traveled individuals who had been skiing in Switzerland, like Helen Evans Brown, who wrote in her 1950 Chafing Dish Book (a WASP cookery classic) that “recipes for cheese fondue … are numerous and varied, but none can excel the classic one of Switzerland.”