Bacon Shortage: A Meat Lover's Nightmare

This week there was a crisis when it was suggested that there maybe bacon shortage.   However, it turns out there will not necessarily be a shortage, but there will likely be high prices as was cleverly addressed by Jarrett Bellini in his blog entitled: 
Apparently this Matters: Bacon Shortage.   

Americans love bacon.    By the time the meat has been processed, well it just doesn’t look like bacon was actually a part of a pig.  With its great smoky flavor, either served sizzling hot with eggs or crumbled up cold on a salad, bacon does not look like the former pig belly from which it came. Bacon is like candy or a good piece of pastry with a great smoky taste that you cannot get enough of.

Bacon’s taste is so wonderful that just its drizzled fat is added to many recipes.  And for those who love bacon but can’t eat it because it will plug up their arteries, bacon's flavorful essence has been captured in the much leaner turkey bacon or bacon bits made from soybeans.    Someday, cooking bacon fragrances, if not already, will become room fresheners. 

A pork chop, a T-bone steak, a Butterball turkey, a Kentucky Fried chicken breast, or a lobster tail, all has some semblance of the former living animal. For some people just staring at the cooked bones or animal carcasses, have driven them heaven forbid to the lifestyle of a vegetarian or a vegan!

With frying, sautéing, baking, or broiling, meats and fish take on wonderful tastes that are described in great cookbooks or featured on television cooking shows.

Bacon, chicken or fish nuggets, sausages, hot dogs, bologna, spiral sliced Honey Baked ham, beef jerky, hamburger patties, and  fish sticks, no longer resemble the animal that they originated from. With the addition of ingredients  (spices, salt and lots of it, sugar), steaming, boiling, coloring, cutting and grinding the tissues and bones have been transferred into tasty human snacks.

With the image of a pig or cow removed far from our minds, bacon and beef jerky sticks can be quickly consumed almost like a bag of potato chips or box of candy at a movie theater.


For many of us, we are purists and don't organ meats.  Yet the organs at one time nestled very closely to the white turkey breast or cured ham we eat for holidays. So rather than waste those parts, food processors have cleverly added those parts into our ballpark hot dogs or ground hamburger. 

Yup, Americans love their bacon and all bacon like products---in fact Americans love anything that has mooed, oinked, or clucked.  And just implying that there maybe a shortage of bacon is a meat lover’s nightmare.  

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For those of you who are as obssessed about bacon as I am, you will enjoy the following blog:  Greg Voakes 17 Mouthwatering Facts About Bacon