global bacon shortage

**deputyfestus** · 09-26-12, 05:23 PM

Originally Posted by SmokenScion

You make the brew? Extract or All grain?

No an English friend of mine makes it. It's an all malt brown ale.

**AetheLove** · 09-26-12, 06:45 PM

Originally Posted by deputyfestus

Damn this is making me hungry for a bacon samich to go with this dark home brew.

Damn, this is making me hungry to get invited over to Festus'.

Æ

**deputyfestus** · 09-26-12, 07:13 PM

Originally Posted by AetheLove

Damn, this is making me hungry to get invited over to Festus'.

Æ

I settled for fajitas.

**Guyver** · 09-26-12, 07:59 PM

Originally Posted by Gumby

Nooooooooooo!!!!

More like:

**Ranger10** · 09-27-12, 03:46 AM

Bacon tastes good. Pork chops taste good.

**Nuckle** · 09-27-12, 06:47 AM

I love pork!

**SmokenScion** · 09-27-12, 12:20 PM

I need a pig farm.

**SmokenScion** · 09-27-12, 12:52 PM

FALSE ALARM!!
Unavoidable bacon shortage: U.K.’s National Pig Association has everyone worried about the price of pork. - Slate Magazine

For starters, all bacon isn’t equal. The thing British people call “bacon” isn’t the same as what Americans call “bacon.” Their bacon is from the back cut of the pig and corresponds to what we call “Canadian bacon.” Our beloved bacon, made from pork belly, is known in the United Kingdom as “streaky bacon.” In Canada, interestingly, “bacon” means the exact same thing as in the United States, and they use the term “back bacon” to refer to what we call “Canadian bacon” and English people just call “bacon.” Which is simply a long-winded way of saying that the pork supply issue has nothing in particular to do with bacon.

**AetheLove** · 09-27-12, 03:56 PM

Originally Posted by SmokenScion

FALSE ALARM!!
Unavoidable bacon shortage: U.K.’s National Pig Association has everyone worried about the price of pork. - Slate Magazine

I don't see how this is (a) surprising or (b) a problem.

There was bad weather in many corn-growing regions. There's less corn that we might want. Corn will be more expensive. That's good news for farmers who grew corn in a place that wasn't affected by the drought and had a good crop. This will be a huge year for them. For farmers who were affected by the drought, but spent extra money on irrigation, it's unclear to me what the net outcome will be. It's bad news for farmers who had a bad crop.

Corn is a foundation product, it goes into lots of things we want; it's food for us, it's food for other things which become food for us, it's food for other things which become non-food products for us, it's a raw material in many (dude, way many) other non-food products. It's also a raw material in ethanol production (and heavily subsidized for that use, I might add).

So all those things are going to be more expensive to produce, and may get produced in smaller quantities. There's a futures market for corn, so it's not obvious to me who will wind up bearing the cost (though consumers will see at least some of it).

There may be less pork, but I don't know if we can call that a shortage. Is what we had last year (and from what I can tell, at least the last 10 years) a surplus? What's normal?

Since the supply shock is in a foundation product, there will be hundreds (thousands?) of markets affected. Remember, corn is also central to mass-produced beef and chicken.

Maybe we should make predictions.

Bacon-wise, I predict that in the US a minor effect will be that people who serve bacon in their homes once a week will see price increases of less than 25% and will not adjust their consumption very much. I think the effects will show up more in the commercial markets. So, for example, you'll see fewer restaurants serving crumbled bacon and bacon-vinaigrette on salads.

As pork production increased this past decade, we've seen pretty much every fast-food chain add bacon to their core products - bacon on burgers, bacon on chicken, bacon in wraps, etc. - and that's a huge volume. I predict that you'll see prices for those go up (like, "add bacon for 29-cents" will become "add bacon for 49-cents"), or even that they'll be removed from menus.

It occurs to me that one effect is that many of us will reduce our weekly intake of saturated animal fat, salt, and nitrates. Maybe God really did cause the drought - and was doing us a favour.

Cheers,

AetheLove