The Tastemakers (38 page)

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 fast 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.

Adding bacon atop burgers had always been a dream for the fast food chains, but it was logistically difficult. Bacon was a tricky meat to cook. There was a fine line between undercooked chewy bacon and overcooked dry bacon, and walking that line required patience and skill. Bacon generated strong odors and smoke, demanding lots of ventilation, and the grease it produced as a by-product presented its own problems. Restaurants that cooked bacon required larger grease traps, services to remove that grease, more thorough kitchen cleaning, and greater safety training and insurance to deal with grease burns and fires. Bacon was wasteful: you could buy a pound of raw bacon, but by the time you cooked away that fat, you might end up with half that weight or even a third. In short, bacon was a bitch.

The solution that made the bacon trend possible was precooked bacon. By the turn of the twenty-first century, innovations in precooked bacon allowed restaurants to reheat consistently precooked slices of perfect bacon in the round shape of a burger or sandwich with almost no smoke, grease, or associated headache. The companies that made the precooked bacon, which included Miller Food Services, a division of ConAgra, and the pork giant Hormel, could sell the precooked product at a premium because the customer knew exactly how much they were getting—and how much they could charge diners—in terms of its final weight. A pound of precooked bacon, once reheated, was pretty close to a pound.

“All of a sudden you could use bacon on everything, and you didn't have to worry about cook time, yield loss, and grease traps, which is a huge deal,” said Andrew Doria, a meat commodity trader at Midwest Premier Foods in Iowa. “Precooking bacon all of a sudden became something every pork producer had to do. Then there had to be thirty to forty percent of your bacon in precooked format or you'd be missing out.”

“The increase in demand was initially driven by this idea that you could get bacon on any sandwich you wanted,” said Doria's colleague, Steve Nichol. “Pretty soon, from a foodservice perspective, you were going out and saying, ‘We've got bacon on all of our sandwiches,' and if you've got it and the next guy got it, it becomes a factor of quality.” Or, in the words of another pork industry veteran: “Bacon suddenly became a condiment.”

This coincided with a shift in diet trends that was more favorable to bacon. In 1992 Dr. Robert Atkins published the sequel to his 1972 diet book, called
Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution
. The core idea was a diet high in vegetables and protein and low in carbohydrates, but the key message that people took from it was that you could now have bacon and eggs for breakfast every day if you wanted. The Atkins Diet, and the residual high-protein trend it slowly spawned, finally killed the fear of fat that had held bacon back for so long. Suddenly bacon was transformed from the devil's meat into a blessed protein. A new generation of bacon burgers and sandwiches emerged from chains like Burger King, who went whole hog into the trend with a bacon cheeseburger, bacon sourdough burger—with four strips of bacon—and even a bacon sundae for dessert, among others. Denny's unveiled a whole seasonal menu packed with bacon items called the Baconalia, which remains one of their best-selling specials. Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find a fast food or casual restaurant chain that doesn't have a bacon burger or bacon sandwich on their menu.

Meanwhile, bacon was branching out into all sorts of new dishes at independent restaurants. A new generation of chefs were breaking the mold of the traditional fine dining hierarchy, with its focus on French technique, ornate dining rooms, and large kitchens. These chefs were young and adventurous, they gravitated toward
full-fat comfort foods, and they absolutely worshipped the pig. Suddenly chefs everywhere were curing and smoking their own bacon, putting bacon into all sorts of crazy dishes, and even getting pork butchery guides tattooed onto their forearms, which sort of became the culinary world's equivalent of a tramp stamp. The restaurants these chefs cooked in were packed each night, and whether they were in New York, Denver, or Halifax, you found them filled with diners beating down the doors to try various bacon dishes. They roasted brussels sprouts with bacon, wrapped turkeys in bacon, infused bacon into cocktails, and candied bacon that they baked into brownies. Many just fried up thick-cut slabs of bacon like steaks. “Bacon, unlike a duck confit or charcuterie, doesn't require any skill to get it,” said food writer and salty meat expert Josh Ozersky. “Any idiot can get a pound of bacon, cut it up into pieces, and toss it into a pan with chicken fricassee or smear bacon jam onto a pork chop. Because bacon has more flavor per square inch than any food you can make, it instantly made their food more tasty.”