This is the very reason, curly wagging tail and all, that my girls gave up all pig products in August 2011. Pete and I, on the other hand, looked at this little guy and said, "Mmmmm... Bacon..."
Remember that predicted worldwide peanut butter shortage last year that had the peanut butter fans in Jenworld in extreme hoarding mode last fall*? It appears that this year we’re facing another epic crisis.
Bacon, y’all. Bacon is going to be in short supply next year.
Here’s how it’s going to shake out:
The U.K. National Pig Association is warning that Europe will face a pork shortage in the next year, due to “shrinking sow herds.” This is a trend that is being seen all over the world.
The shortage is due to worldwide crop failures that have led to a sharp increase in the cost of pig feed. Clearly I must be ignorant because I thought that pigs ate just about everything … or at least that’s what my multiple readings of Charlotte’s Web have taught me over the decades. By my reckoning, couldn’t farmers be feeding their herds table scraps? And, for bigger farms, couldn’t they get scraps from, say, restaurants?
Anyway, expensive feed leads to farmers selling off herds rather than pay to feed them, which leads to less bacon in stores, which leads to less bacon on my plate or in my chocolate. It’s a whole domino effect, which should be a good reminder about just how small our planet is and how everything is interconnected.
We don’t eat a lot of the pink meat here, as two members of Team Jenworld eschew pork for moral reasons and one of us likes her arteries unclogged and her ass a little smaller thankyouverymuch. That said, I do consider bacon to be an essential part of any diet, even if only in small amounts. Vegetarians and vegans and fans of kewt widdle animals, feel free to disagree all you want, but I firmly believe that bacon makes nearly everything better.
Mac ‘n’ cheese? Good.
Mac ‘n’ cheese with bacon? Better.
Baked potatoes? Good.
Baked potatoes with bacon, plus mushrooms sauteed in bacon grease? Much better.
Dark chocolate? Good.
Dark chocolate stuffed with bacon? Better.
Buttered bread? Good.
Bacon butties? Excellent.
Caramelized bacon? DA BOMB.
Unfortunately, unlike peanut butter or toilet paper, stockpiling bacon presents a bit of a challenge, in that my capacious pantry and closets aren’t worth a damn for fresh bacon. Only a fridge or freezer will do and for hoarding purposes, which eliminates our fridge entirely, as I only buy local bacon that’s not laced with nitrates and nitrites, so it has a much shorter fridge life.
Still, while we don’t have a chest freezer for extra storage, we do have the freezer in our large American side-by-side fridge, which is enough for me to buy, say, five or even ten pounds of bacon and store it for the coming Hard Times. Rumor has it that we’re going to have another tough winter and I’m not going to face it without an ample supply of bacon for snowy morning breakfasts.
What about you? Do you love the pig? Will you hoard bacon?
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I like me some bacon!
My neighbor owns a teacup pig as a pet. He’s a lot bigger than he was supposed to get, and he can’t be allowed in the house any longer, but they still consider him a pet. Even so, my neighbor says the other day the pig was nosing around the herb garden, and the rosemary plants, and my neighbor says he couldn’t help but imagine…….!
Baked potatoes with bacon, plus mushrooms sauteed in bacon grease? Be still my heart!! (literally, I suppose…)
Perhaps investing in a large freezer is in your future? I am totally envious of your winter weather predictions. We are supposed to be leaning in the other direction and it makes me rather sad. I ♥ snow… LOTS of snow.
Aunt Snow, you made me laugh… and think of how good bacon might be with fresh rosemary…
Oh Dear, this is quite serious. Not only do we love bacon but pork belly, pork chops, pork shoulder, pork scratchings…you get the picture. I believe hoarding will be in order.
I am, apparently, the only person in the world who could easily live the rest of her life without bacon. I enjoy a single slice of bacon with pancakes every now and again, but in general I think the flavor of bacon is overwhelming and everything that has bacon added to it just tastes like bacon.
I know…I’m weird.
Violet, I am with you. I can eat one slice once a year or so, but regularly? Shudder.
I hate the way bacon smells too. especially when I’m the one cooking it because it stinks up my whole house and makes my nose want to die.
Now the serious shortage, Jen, is not the bacon the the purple balloons. Did you know there’s CURRENTLY a worldwide shortage of purple balloons and purple crepe paper? Because there is. And that is a travesty my friends. These poor little girls who have to have pink balloons because there are no more purple ones…. oh, it makes me weep.
The biggest question I have: WHO IS STEALING ALL THE BACON AND ALL THE BALLOONS?! And for what nefarious purpose?!
Not to mention the depletion of the world’s helium supply. No kidding:
http://www.newsday.com/business/helium-shortage-hits-party-balloon-season-1.3806818
This was BIG news here in Lincoln, Nebraska, where there is a time-honored tradition of letting loose thousands of red helium balloons after the first Husker touchdown of each football game.
It sorta seems like a little thing but this is one of those things that tells me we humans are doing something (a lot?) wrong to our big blue marble.
Another reason to buy the local heritage breeds. Since they’re farmed small they don’t suffer these bumps quite as badly. For what it’s worth – beef is going to be just as bad if not worse. Major droughts are not good for livestock, and a lot of the major ranching areas are suffering serious droughts. Heck, my local guy I get my beef from called in orders back in August. For meat that will not arrive at my door until at least January. He’s selling off anything that isn’t, in essence, pre-paid. Can’t afford to feed ‘em. (Grass fed, not grain, so it’s even harder when there is no rain to grow the grass.)
Yes, you can feed hogs all sorts of scraps…but it will affect the taste of the meat. Something we Americans have forgotten how to handle. We think all pork/beef/chicken should taste and look exactly the same. Just try feeding a tried and true supermarket beef person some grassfed stuff. They’ll think it’s anything but beef. Or that it tastes “wrong” or “weird”.
I still have about 5 packages of bacon in my freezer. Guess I’m going to have to make that last!
I like bacon, but we hardly ever have it at home. For some reason, neither of us (even my husband, who is an excellent amateur chef) can cook bacon worth a damn. We’ve tried the skillet, the oven, the microwave, about 400 different ways to cook bacon and have yet to be satisfied with how it comes out. I’d say we buy bacon at home maybe once or twice a year. Part of the problem may be that I’m especially picky about my bacon – I like my bacon crispy, which seems to difficult without burning it. Most restaurants even serve chewy bacon, which I do not care for at all. If anyone wants to come teach us how to cook bacon properly, maybe we’d have it more often at home…
Actually pigs will eat almost anything and if you’ve ever eaten pork from pigs that finished off on foraging you will never go back. It is OMG awesome bacon. There is just no comparison. If you have any little farms around there you might want to consider buying a pig. Kind of like cowpooling. You know that the pig was raised in a humane fashion and no undue drugs were used.
The problem with most pork that you buy is that it is factory raised and fed a grain diet. Since the drought this year the prices are going to skyrocket on most foods but some of the sharpest increases will be in beef and pork. Farmers started killing off their herds a few months ago because they saw this coming. Easy to sell off the crop now and take a decrease in price than pay for the increase in feed. I have a friend who’s a farmer that told me to stock up on beef and pork a few months back. We took a drive in the country a few weeks ago and there were some cows trying to eat off the trees because there wasn’t any pasture worth eating. Pretty sad.
My name is Becky and I am a bacon hoarder.
Bacon, Bread & Butter are exactly why one needs a back up freezer. Because you never ever want to run out of that stuff. Ever.
My Dad raised pigs one year…i remember we were eating dinner when we looked out the window to see they’d escaped. My Dad and brother chased them all around the yard before my Mom went out with the slop bucket…they followed her right back to their pen. Pigs deserve to be bacon…mmmm…piggies…lol.
@ Jen A—baking bacon. I highly recommend this method of cooking bacon. I had never heard of it even a short year ago…when my husband said his mother made her bacon this way, and now we shall too. So-oooo. Off to the kitchen store for a rack (the kind you use to cool cookies on a baking sheet) and a new baking sheet. You put the bacon on the wire rack, inside the baking sheet, inside your oven set at 375, and bake your bacon for 20 minutes…I do not flip it, but husband does (gotta be like his mommy makes it lol). It comes out greaseless, crispy, and fully cooked.
I am not a big bacon eater but it is the only pork I will eat. The family is big on it so I will stock up and I do have an outside freezer for such things. I suspect now that the word is out there won’t be any more sales, though. I usually buy extra when it is on sale.
I do like bacon, though I have not had it in all the iterations you have. I do eat a carnitas burrito bowl fairly regularly–yum.
The best way I have found to cook bacon is on the George Foreman grill. And then all the fat drips off to the pan underneath. Enjoy!!!
I’d stash bacon.
Wait a minute…pigs don’t eat table scraps? Now I’m SO confused. My childhood education about country life appears to be a sham!