The Tastemakers (40 page)

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.”

T
he 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.

A
fter 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:

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.”