Make It with Bacon

A serious (journalese for noticeable) shortage of pork bellies is being reported this weekend, as seen in the story below. 

The reporter lists exports, Wendy’s hamburgers, Swine Flu and simple supply-and-demand as reasons, but fails to mention one major culprit – the Food Network. 

It seems like the cooking gurus on Food Network cannot prepare  anything without using bacon or pancetta – the non-smoked Italian version of the same belly meat. 

From an article by Dan Piller of the DES MOINES REGISTER—

Americans have stuck loads of bacon on their sandwiches and salads this summer as the U.S. supply of hogs has fallen, creating a
shortage in that most joked-about commodity, pork bellies.
Investors in bellies are having the last laugh.
The price of pork bellies, from which bacon is made, has shot up from 94 cents a pound as recently as June to $1.40 a pound in August.
On the store shelves, average retail prices have risen more than $1 per pound since last year, to more than $4, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports.
"The prices will go up even more in coming weeks because the bacon that's on the shelves now was purchased earlier in the futures market," says Joe Muelhaupt, executive vice president of Des Moines Cold Storage.
Market analysts say the reason for the suddenly high prices is simple shortage: A year ago, 76.3 million pounds of pork bellies
were in commercial freezers around the country. In early August of this year that figure had dropped to 35.4 million pounds.
The problem could be seen starkly last week in Des Moines Cold Storage's minus-26 degree freezer, where racks stood empty that normally would be filled with slats of pork bellies.
"Normally we have 10 to 20 million pounds in storage here in our facilities," Muelhaupt says. "This week we were down to 330,000 pounds. That's no more than eight loads."
The relative shortage of pork bellies is an exaggerated version of the tighter supplies this year. U.S. farmers have reduced the
number of hogs 3% in reaction to three years of low prices. Then add stronger demand, a 27% increase in exports and an end
to the fears that arose last year over H1N1 virus, popularly known as swine flu.

The story continued, but the reporter didn’t really have anything else to say, just another column-inch or so to fill.

If you have to read the whole thing, you can find it here.