The Tastemakers (39 page)

The more bacon these restaurants served, the more people wanted it. Offshoots of the bacon trend began emerging: some chefs dedicated their efforts to homemade charcuterie and other cured meats, and others wholeheartedly embraced the uncured pork belly, braising it Chinese style and then searing it so the fat acquired a caramelized crust that was irresistible. The consumer research firm Technomic reported that the number of bacon items on American menus rose steadily from 2006 through 2012, an increase of nearly 25 percent over that period. In 2013 it also noted that 87 percent of American diners were willing to pay at least 50 cents to add bacon to a burger or sandwich. Bacon was suddenly everywhere. As these chefs cooked more bacon, they demanded better-quality bacon, and they educated their customers about the differences between wet and dry cures, hickory and applewood smoke. Coveted boutique bacon brands such as Nueske's and Benton's not only saw an uptick in restaurant sales but they also became food world stars in their own right. Pig farmers and smokers from the backwoods of Virginia and Alabama were suddenly being profiled in
Bon Appétit
and
Gourmet
and invited to the best restaurants in the country, where they were lavished with praise.

As interest in eating bacon grew, bacon evolved from a food item to a cultural touchstone. A growing chorus of bacon evangelists, bacon obsessives, and baconheads began forming a community across the country. “I Love Bacon” was a bumper sticker-turned-rallying cry, as the bacon faithful came together online and in the greasy flesh to spread the gospel. One of the most prominent was Heather Lauer, a marketer who started the Bacon Unlimited blog in 2004. “I would never describe myself as being obsessed with it,” said Lauer, who lives in Arizona. “When you're growing up you don't eat bacon with every meal … bacon's this special thing you only eat at holidays or on weekends. It is an affordable treat to look forward to.” When she began Bacon Unlimited Lauer was one of half a dozen bloggers talking about bacon online. A year later their numbers were increasing significantly, and Lauer saw that it was actually becoming a movement of its own. She wrote the book
Bacon: A Love Story
in 2009 to chronicle this, in which she noted that the interest in bacon culture followed the rise in American bacon consumption, which grew 20 percent between 2000 and 2005.

There had always been bacon lovers. My younger brother Daniel became hooked on bacon during those summer camp canoe trips, and he used to fry up a few strips as an after-school snack. He put bacon on his pizza, on pancakes, and on burgers whenever he had a chance and would frequently utter Homer Simpson's drooling mantra “
mmmmm
 … bacon” at its very mention. Now blogs like Lauer's and social media sites allowed a world of bacon fans to share their obsession. The Internet didn't make the bacon trend, but its effect was the equivalent of tossing a pan of bacon grease onto a fire. In 2008, when Kansas City barbecue aficionados Jason Day and Aaron Chronister, who ran the BBQ Addicts blog, posted photos of a new dish they had made called the Bacon Explosion—a football-sized orb of spiced sausage and crumbled bacon, wrapped in a lattice of bacon strips, entombed in foil, and then smoked—they unleashed the type of all-American culinary sensation that other nations point to in shock and jealous disbelief. The original Bacon Explosion recipe has since been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. One newspaper called it “the most popular recipe
on the web.” This gave rise to Bacon Explosion T-shirts, countless instructional YouTube videos, and a cookbook written by Day and Chronister featuring the Bacon Explosion on its cover. If you go to their website,
bbqaddicts.com
, you can purchase your own Bacon Explosion in three flavors (original, jalapeño, and cheese), and it will be shipped to your house in dry ice, ready to heat and eat.

Others indulged in flagrant, frat-boyish bacon porn. The YouTube show Epic Meal Time, filmed by a crew of Jack Daniels–chugging carnivore Jewish punks in Montreal, made outlandish bacon-heavy culinary creations in a constant display of caloric one upsmanship. One episode featured a lasagna stuffed with bacon: fifteen Big Macs, fifteen A&W Teen Burgers, and fifteen Wendy's Baconators, plus a special Jack Daniel's meat sauce, onion rings, and one liter of Big Mac sauce, totaling 71,488 calories with 5,463 grams of fat. Nevertheless, Epic Meal Time's videos have been viewed tens of millions of times, and there is now an Epic Meal Time video game, a spinoff television series, a cookbook, and a large selection of merchandise you can buy on their website. If you prefer more restrained bacon entertainment, you can tune in to the Discovery Channel's,
United States of Bacon
, which is a bacon obsessive's road trip, very much in the style of the Food Network's bacon-centric ratings leader
Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives
.

The bacon trend also inspired a cottage industry of bacon-themed products that didn't actually include bacon but
look
like bacon and sell on its appeal. Seattle novelty company Archie McPhee makes bacon bandages, bacon tinfoil, bacon stockings, bacon-scented spray, bacon Christmas tree ornaments, bacon tuxedos, bacon shirts, bacon socks, bacon-flavored toothpaste, and bacon dishes and cups. Some of these products, like the toothpaste and the spray, don't just look like bacon but smell or even taste like it without containing any actual pork. Then there was the rapid, astonishing rise of J&D's Foods, whose motto “Everything Should Taste Like Bacon” has been taken to its extreme. Its founders Justin Esch and Dave Lefkow worked together at a technology company in Miami. Esch, who was from Telluride, Colorado, had always loved bacon and was particularly in love with a shot of bourbon a local
bar served with a bacon garnish. “It was a discussion about these shots that was the impetus to the idea that led to the creation of bacon salt in 2007,” said Esch, who cemented his business partnership with Lefkow at 3 a.m., drunk, on the beach in Miami as they bought the domain name
baconsalt.com
on a phone. The two worked at nights in Lefkow's garage to develop a salt that would deliver the smoky flavor of bacon without actually being made of bacon—the product is actually kosher. They financed the venture by borrowing from the $5,000
America's Funniest Home Videos
prize that had been awarded to Lefkow's three-year-old son (who has since been repaid).

J&D's Bacon Salt was launched in July 2007, with sales coming exclusively from online orders, which Esch and Lefkow packed and shipped themselves. “We sold three thousand jars of bacon salt in seventy-six hours, in twenty-two states and twelve countries,” said Esch. “J&D's was profitable in hour forty-two of being in business. The thing that blew us away was that we were looking at orders, and we didn't know the first twenty customers. Bacon salt became such a hot trending topic that it made MSN top search its second day, and then on Google. It just blew up. The bacon fanatics and bacon world just came out.”

What the two lacked for in money, they made up for with a PT Barnum approach to marketing. They pressed the case of J&D's Bacon Salt to bloggers, the media, and potential buyers with relentless phone calls, samples, and campaigns on social media, where they rapidly acquired fans. “We produced a massive amount of bacon-related content,” Esch said. “We reached out to the blogs I Heart Bacon and Mr. Baconpants and Royal Bacon Society … we just realized this fire was burning, and people were in love with bacon, and we asked, ‘How do we throw bacon grease on this?' We put funny, easily shareable things online to feed this.” In October 2008 they staged a wrestling match in the basement of a Seattle nightclub (where they had relocated), featuring two combatants, a strip of bacon and a jar of mayonnaise, fighting in a pit filled with six thousand pounds of mayonnaise to promote their newest product, Baconnaise, a bacon-flavored mayonnaise. “If you pour six
thousand pounds of mayo on the floor of a nightclub in a basement, you'd better have a plan to get it out,” said Esch.

Baconnaise propelled J&D's and the bacon trend to the next level. When Jon Stewart sampled the product on
The Daily Show
, he spat it into the trash and then told the camera, “I think my tongue just shat in my mouth.” Esch thought the joke would kill the company, but Stewart's on-air revulsion only drove up demand further. Next thing they knew J&D's products were on
Oprah
, newspapers were running feature stories on their business, and retailers like Walmart and Costco were placing huge orders for Baconnaise and other products. These include the marquee lines of Bacon Salt (now in nine flavors) and Baconnaise (in regular and light) as well as bacon-flavored popcorn, ranch dressing, croutons, gravy, and spice rubs. The company also expanded into a line of novelty products, including bacon-flavored lip balm, shaving cream, stickers, and envelopes, bacon-scented candy roses, and a coffin that looks like it's made from bacon. It costs $3,000, and they have actually sold three of them. Did I mention the lube? J&D's makes a bacon-flavored sexual lubricant. It was conceived as a gag gift, available four times a year, but Esch estimates they have sold over a hundred thousand tubes of bacon lube, which means that somewhere in the world tonight, there is a very real chance that a child is being conceived in bacon-flavored passion.

C
hicago's Baconfest is not the largest bacon festival in the country. That honor goes to the Blue Ribbon Baconfest in Des Moines, Iowa, which began in 2008 as a charitable event in a local bar featuring local bacon producers and some bacon foods, like bacon cheeseburgers, ice cream, and cupcakes. Two hundred people showed up and raised $1,000 for charity. By contrast, the 2013 Blue Ribbon Baconfest sold out all nine thousand tickets in under four minutes to people who came from thirty-nine different states and seven countries. It featured a bacon queen beauty pageant in a dress made from bacon strips, former professional wrestler Hacksaw Jim
Duggan, as well as an estimated half a pound of bacon being eaten by each person attending the show. Brooks Reynolds, one of the event organizers, estimated that Blue Ribbon Baconfest generated over $1.5 million for Des Moines, split between ticket sales, out-of-town visitors, and related economic activity that day. There is also Camp Bacon, an annual retreat put on by the Michigan deli and food emporium Zingerman's, which is the World Economic Forum of bacon gatherings, attended by big movers in elite bacon and focused on high quality and sustainability. Though Chicago's Baconfest is smaller in total attendance than its Iowa counterpart, in many ways it is more ambitious. It is a mix between the high culinary ambitions of the Fancy Food Show and the religious geekdom of a Star Trek convention. Its organizers (Michael Griggs, Andre Vonbaconvitch, and Seth Zurer) have made Baconfest a profitable business and have been expanding the brand with similar events in San Francisco and Washington, DC, in recent years. Walking around the festival during the lunch session I got a firsthand taste of how the cultural momentum of the bacon trend translated into economic opportunity.

At the Jones Dairy Farm table I spoke with Doug McDonald, the sales manager in charge of the company's foodservice accounts. “Bacon is our fastest growing category. The past five years we've seen double-digit growth in foodservice sales. What you see now is bacon going from retail and pancake houses to mainstream bar and grills serving bacon during happy hour,” he said. “There's a restaurant in Arizona called Fifty/Fifty that we sell to. They take our thick-cut bacon, cook it, and put it on the bar in brandy glasses like peanuts.” At the other end of the hall Bob Nueske, the second-generation owner of Wisconsin's Nueske's, one of the largest independent bacon smokehouses in the country, looked out at the wild, ravenous crowd with wonder. “I always have a fear that trends are like hula hoops,” Nueske, who is broad and tall, with a mobster's wall of coiffed hair, told me as strips of the company's applewood smoked bacon slowly sizzled on an electric griddle. “This bacon thing is beyond a trend. Thirty years ago I couldn't imagine kids making bacon like they are now.”

Dave Miller, the owner of Bang Bang! Pie Shop, a Chicago bakery, was handing out bacon cherry rugelach, a traditional Jewish cookie rendered as unkosher as possible. “I see bacon as outdated,” admitted Miller, “but it's a money maker and we do it because the economics demand it. It creates a cult following.” The bakery sold strips of candied bacon at a dollar a piece, and these acted as a sort of honey trap for bacon lovers, who came to Bang Bang! for the bacon but invariably bought a loaf of bread or some other item. Bacon's economic power was a shock even to those who built businesses around it. Sven Lindén was the founder of Black Rock Spirits, which made Bakon Vodka, a bacon-infused vodka that debuted in 2007 as a joke. It now does over $1 million in wholesale sales each year. “We knew there was a novelty component,” Lindén told me as we stood by his booth, where they were handing out bacon bloody Marys, “but even in states where we've been around for five years they'll have a small bar do seven thousand bacon Bloody Marys a year.” One of the few vendors not selling food but doing brisk business was Rebecca Wood, who owned the gift boutique Enjoy: An Urban Novelty Store, which had an entire bacon section filled with over a hundred novelty products. When she opened the store in 2005 her top-selling item quickly became bacon strip bandages, and today it remained in the top spot, followed by bacon socks, and
I Love You More Than Bacon
signs, which sold like gangbusters online.