Parks & Recreation’s Ron Swanson (played by Nick Offerman) has only cried twice. But a problem is looming that could again inspire tears in the small-town parks department director: a bacon shortage. The European Union reports that pig herds around the world are “declining at a significant rate.” And this could lead to a serious pork (and most crucially, bacon!) shortage — a problem that Britain’s National Pig Association chairman, Richard Longthorp, now warns is “unavoidable.”…. Oddly, this shortage isn’t coming on the heels of restaurant chains across the world adding copious amounts of bacon to nearly every dish on their menus. Rather, the issue is economic: the ever-rising prices of pig feed are making the business of pig farming a tougher one to manage.
I may be a vegan, but, truth be told, I find myself kinda missing bacon sometimes- so I understand how the words “global bacon shortage” can strike fear into the hearts of men. If you believe that bacons makes everything better, then a worldwide shortage of meat candy can only result in the creation of unhappiness and misery.
In an era of austerity, recession, war, and political unrest, bacon is something we’ve always been able to count on- comfort food when the need for salt, nitrates, and generalized unhealthiness reaches its peak. Bacon is infinitely adaptable, it’s use and value limited only by the bounds of human imagination. There’s bacon ice cream, a bacon bra, Maoist propaganda wrapped in bacon, bacon-flavored beer, and even bacon-flavored syrup for your latte. That’s just scratching the surface…and don’t get me started on bacon-flavored mayonnaise….
Bacon’s value as a comfort food has become so pervasive that convicted killers are choosing it to be included in their last meal….and after that killer has been dispatched to Hell, he can be buried in a bacon coffin.
My God, don’tcha just LOVE America?? And who would have thought that the lowly pig would be elevated to the source of a foodstuff fit for the gods? It’s a good thing I became a vegan for health and not moral reasons, eh?
Now it seems all of that may be threatened as a worldwide shortage of pig feed is causing farmers to thin their herds (Gaggle? Cluster? Congress? What do you call a collection of pigs, anyway??) Never mind that most Americans would gladly pay any amount of money to get their meat candy fix.
And most real American patriots know one thing to be true: It’s Barack Obama’s fault.
The NPA has launched a “Save Our Bacon” campaign to convince consumers to purchase local bacon, a show of solidarity to persuade supermarket chains to stock the homegrown meat and pay farmers a higher price.
Sow herds have been shrinking across Europe for the last 12 months. Numbers show that Italian herds are down 13 percent, Sweden 7 percent and Ireland 6 percent. The NPA says that declining herds dropping slaughtering rates by even just 2 percent cause prices to increase 10 percent on store shelves the next year. The association anticipates a 10 percent drop in slaughter rates, potentially doubling the cost for pork across Europe.
The issue isn’t reserved to just Europe. In the U.S., the government has created a pork-buying program to ensure pig farmers don’t go under. Even China has added more pork to its cold storage, an insurance against a potential shortage or spiking prices.
The message? Politicians recognize that while war and economic distress are certainly forces not to be trifled with, the one thing that will tear Western civilization asunder is the inability to find bacon. If you want to see disorder and rioting in the streets, just wait and see what happens when the bacon cooler in supermarket meat departments is empty.
Red? Blue? Who cares? Any political observer with their finger on the pulse of the American electorate knows that the winner in November will be the candidate who guarantees a steady supply of quality, affordable bacon. How else will they be able to win the all-important White Male vote? Free NASCAR tickets? Yeah, right; that only works in the deep South….
