Best Food Writing 2014 (7 page)

The sprawling twenty-two-thousand–square foot floor of the Forum's event hall was abuzz with activity. Six long tables, each stretching the length of the room, had been taken over by eighty-two local restaurants and bars, beer and liquor companies, and other vendors. Another eighty waiters and bartenders, working for the catering company Sodexo, wandered like lost children in black shirts
while chefs, cooks, bakers, and owners scrambled to get ready. Pallets of beer kegs were being pushed around to all corners of the room, as James Brown played over the sound system. Along the back wall a giant screen was flashing the Baconfest logo: Chicago's sky blue–and-white flag with red stars, rendered to look like a strip of bacon. Everywhere I looked people were carrying in trays, casseroles, Tupperware containers, and pulling huge hand carts piled with mountains of cooked bacon. Michael Griggs, one of the founders and organizers of Baconfest, now in its fifth year, was busy running around with a walkie-talkie, trying to corral the activity into some semblance of order.

“Hey,” said one of the chefs from the restaurant Belly-Q, who literally stepped in front of Griggs's path to get his attention, “we have a fryer going. Can we leave the hot oil in or take it with us?”

“Take it with you,” said Griggs over his shoulder as he blew past the chef and kept moving on to the next issue.

One by one the restaurants turned on their portable griddles and ovens, reheating their bacon creations, which ranged from simple candied strips of bacon to concoctions like bacon-spiked bloody Marys, bacon peanut butter macarons, bacon cupcakes, bacon pineapple donuts, bacon pizzas, bacon biscotti, chicken-fried bacon, bacon meatballs, and bacon cotton candy, to name just a few. Puffs of bacon vapor were visibly rising into the air, settling down a few minutes later as a fine mist of aerosolized bacon grease that clung to every possible surface. In the corner of the hall a chef from one of the restaurants walked up to a table run by Jones Dairy Farm, one of the few dedicated bacon producers attending Baconfest. They had hung a whole slab of bacon, several feet long, from a rack next to their table, while a glistening warm pork belly rested on a carving board, lit up by a heat lamp like a Broadway diva. “Look at how beautiful this is,” said the chef, who was tapping his fingertips together rhythmically like Mr. Burns plotting something diabolical. “I'm like a moth to a flame. Or a fat guy to a slab of bacon.”

At 11:30 the doors opened to 150 advance guests. These VIPs had paid $200 each for tickets that allowed them to enter an hour earlier than the rest of the 1,500 Baconfest attendees (whose general admission tickets still cost $100 each). All of the event's three thousand–odd tickets, for both the lunch session and the dinner
session (identical format, but with different restaurants) had sold out months before, in just forty-one minutes, and others had paid even more for scalpers' tickets. The VIPs quickly fanned out with their Baconfest program guides in hand, heading to the tables that most interested them. There were families in newly purchased Baconfest T-shirts (including one portraying the Blues Brothers as flying pigs), wealthy well-dressed couples, hardcore foodies with expensive DSLR cameras, and a lot of burly men in Chicago Blackhawks jerseys. I walked outside and looked at the general admission line, which now stretched all the way around the corner and down two full blocks. Inside Griggs gave the signal over his radio to unlock the doors, and when they were flung open a cheer went up from the line. One man shouted “BACON!” at the top of his lungs like a general leading the cavalry charge.

“Oh my god,” a woman said as she came into the hall and saw its sheer scope.

“Where's the bacon?” asked another man in a panic, making a beeline to the nearest restaurant's table, where he encountered the Signature Room's smoked bacon bread pudding, with pork tenderloin stuffed with chorizo and wrapped in bacon and topped in bacon-braised red cabbage and a bacon ancho sauce. He ate it in a single bite, then packed away another.

Some people entered the room and bolted to a particular booth, while others just froze for a minute, drunk with excitement at the overwhelming sight of so much bacon. Two men stood at the entrance and slow clapped. Nearby a police officer turned to his partner and said, “If this crowd gets out of hand, we may have to use bacon spray instead of pepper spray.”

Walking around the festival during the lunch session I got a firsthand taste of how the cultural momentum of the bacon trend translated into economic opportunity.

At the Jones Dairy Farm table I spoke with Doug McDonald, the sales manager in charge of the company's foodservice accounts. “Bacon is our fastest-growing category. The past five years we've seen double-digit growth in food service sales. What you see now is bacon going from retail and pancake houses to mainstream bar and grills serving bacon during happy hour,” he said. “There's a restaurant in
Arizona called Fifty/Fifty that we sell to. They take our thick-cut bacon, cook it, and put it on the bar in brandy glasses like peanuts.”

At the other end of the hall Bob Nueske, the second-generation owner of Wisconsin's Nueske's, one of the largest independent bacon smokehouses in the country, looked out at the wild, ravenous crowd with wonder. “I always have a fear that trends are like hula hoops,” Nueske, who is broad and tall, with a mobster's wall of coiffed hair, told me as strips of the company's applewood smoked bacon slowly sizzled on an electric griddle. “This bacon thing is beyond a trend. Thirty years ago I couldn't imagine kids making bacon like they are now.”

Dave Miller, the owner of Bang Bang! Pie Shop, a Chicago bakery, was handing out bacon cherry rugelach, a traditional Jewish cookie rendered as unkosher as possible. “I see bacon as outdated,” admitted Miller, “but it's a money maker and we do it because the economics demand it. It creates a cult following.” The bakery sold strips of candied bacon at a dollar a piece, and these acted as a sort of honey trap for bacon lovers, who came to Bang Bang! for the bacon but invariably bought a loaf of bread or some other item.

Bacon's economic power was a shock even to those who built businesses around it. Sven Lindén was the founder of Black Rock Spirits, which made Bakon Vodka, a bacon-infused vodka that debuted in 2007 as a joke. It now does over $1 million in wholesale sales each year. “We knew there was a novelty component,” Lindén told me as we stood by his booth, where they were handing out bacon bloody Marys, “but even in states where we've been around for five years they'll have a small bar do seven thousand bacon Bloody Marys a year.” One of the few vendors not selling food but doing brisk business was Rebecca Wood, who owned the gift boutique Enjoy: An Urban Novelty Store, which had an entire bacon section filled with over a hundred novelty products. When she opened the store in 2005 her top-selling item quickly became bacon strip bandages, and today it remained in the top spot, followed by bacon socks, and I Love You More Than Bacon signs, which sold like gangbusters online.

Surrounded by bacon maniacs downing shots of bacon black bean stew, bacon cotton candy, and bacon root beer floats, it was impossible not to get caught up in the infectious exuberance of Baconfest. There were people like Jeaneed Kalakr and her grandson Parker, who
wore matching, homemade T-shirts printed with a poem written for the occasion: “From one porker to the next / Don't give me no fat / I squeal for bacon / One good snort deserves another / I am a bacon lover . . . undercover.” The miraculously petite sisters Christina and Danielle Wade were dressed in matching bacon earrings, socks, and T-shirts made for their 2011 Bacon Takedown Tour. “It's not a trend for me,” the enthusiastic Danielle said. “It's a way of life.” There were dudes wearing muscle shirts that said, “Bacon Gives Me a Lardon” and “Drink First. Pork Later”; babies in little pig outfits; a man wearing a homemade matching hat and shirt that displayed a peace sign made up of strips of bacon he'd ironed on; and my favorite, a T-shirt of a cat surfing a strip of bacon in outer space. “That's the coolest T-shirt here!” I told the owner and then immediately regretted it, as I saw someone with a T-shirt that had two bacon-surfing space cats. Yes, the bacon trend was about food, but it was also a money-making meme, like a live version of an online joke that just gets spun round and round and round until you wonder where it will end.

“Before the bacon bubble came into being it was very niche,” said Aaron Samuels, who had bought VIP tickets with his wife, Charlotte, as an anniversary gift. The two of them were decked out for battle, with pink headbands, backpacks, and a studied knowledge of what was on offer. Samuels, who had a giant beard and was decidedly zaftig, wore a T-shirt that proclaimed “Man Boobs Are Sexy,” while Charlotte's shirt featured an angel pig with wings and a halo floating above a plate of bacon, with the caption “It's what I would have wanted.” “If the bacon bubble bursts, we'll still be fans of bacon,” Samuels said. “Most people at Baconfest are the O.G.s of bacon”—meaning its original gangsters, bacon's most hard-core fans.

Nearby I overheard a man ask a group of strangers in full-on bacon regalia whether they were baconheads. “No,” said one of them, hoisting a bacon bourbon cocktail, “we're Chicagoans. Other cities do marathons. We do Baconfest.”

D
r. Pepper or her gall bladder, one of them had to go. Her doctor explained the option of eliminating soda and other acidic, fatty, greasy foods and adopting a diet of cucumbers and broccoli—foods that strengthen the stomach's lining and the digestive tract. “Your gall bladder is currently operating at about 20%,” he said, and then went on to stress that a reversal of biliary dyskinesia and complete relief of epigrastric pain could not be guaranteed without surgery. My sister, Dezy, faced a decision that compromised her identity at its core, both physiologically and metaphysically. She had been taught, by our CPA father, that life is about costs and fluctuating supplies based on demand. Now, Dezy had to decide whether she would pay the new cost of enjoying her favorite beverage. Having a favorite, mind you, is a big deal in my family. Dezy saw it as her right as an American, echoing our father's famous saying, “He who has a surplus has the benefit of favorites.”

The panic that settled in Dezy's already unstable mind came not from the pain she had been feeling the past couple months but from the prospect of giving up the sweet, syrupy goodness, the pungent aromas of peppermint pouring out of a single can of Dr. Pepper.
As a child, the substance was as verboten as dope, classified by our parents as a Schedule 1 drug with no medicinal benefits. Dezy didn't understand why her parents would criminalize something that lined supermarket aisles, sparkled on TV commercials, and tasted like the gods' ambrosia. Why should she be denied what is publicly available? Therefore, she made a pact with her soul that when she had her own house her refrigerator would be stocked from drawer to shelf with shiny, sweating burgundy cans of the liquid she wouldn't live without.

She learned to trust the marketplace over her family, for only in the marketplace can any desire be fulfilled, at a price.

And so she considered the price, as explained by her doctor. “Remove the gall bladder, undergo a brief period of recovery in which you will have to remain on a strict diet, and then reintroduce more volatile foods, such as soda. I can guarantee, in this scenario, that the functionality of your gall bladder will not be a factor, since, of course, you will no longer have a gall bladder.” The doctor laughed, but then swallowed his smile at Dezy's failure to appreciate his joke.

“So the problem,” Dezy asked, her legs going numb from the firm chair, “is the gall bladder itself?”

The sterile paper covering the chair crinkled under her shifting weight. Dezy, though bone skinny, felt heavy with the weight of a bowling ball pressing against her intestines.

“Indeed,” her doctor answered.

“Then remove it,” she said. And in that instant she felt a sudden release. Not from the pain twisting her stomach, but from the burden of having a very essential freedom taken away from her. She could survive an operation; in fact, she had already resolved herself to doing so. Hell, she had had her wisdom teeth pulled when she was fourteen. One operation is like any other. She could survive without auxiliary parts of her body. What she couldn't do: renounce her sovereignty and not eat and drink what she damned well wanted to.