We’re bringing home the bacon

Spring break diets may come and go, but when it comes to satisfying that urge to splurge on calories, bacon is forever.

Quirky, kitschy and downright goofy-looking, bacon is America’s gastronomic sweetheart, but what’s with all the hoopla that surrounds pig belly meat anyway?

We support the answer given to us by senior bacon enthusiast Chip Summers, who says it’s because “Bacon makes anything it’s paired with just that much more awesome.” Don’t care about that baked potato? Add a dusting of bacon bits. Oops, now you care. Just ask most any vegetarian what meat they miss most from their omnivorous pasts — our money’s on bacon.

In North Carolina, the pig is king, and bacon is one of his most appreciated offerings. With a hog population of more than 10 million, our state ranks second in national hog production. Ten million hogs means more pigs in North Carolina than people.

Accompanying all those pigs is a plethora of problems. One of the most locally important comes with a smell. Just one pig excretes four times the waste of an average human, and the North Carolina pig industry’s solution isn’t pretty.

In just three years in the ’90s, 115 farms were caught dumping hog waste into waterways, some of them even intentionally. Huge mismanagement issues caused one North Carolina lagoon to bust and spill 25 million gallons of liquid manure into our local rivers, farms and highways.

That, my friends, is a lot of crap.

So, are we trying to convince you to stop eating bacon? Not exactly, but Tar Heel bacon lovers do face a dilemma.

We suggest that meat-a-tarians buy from local, transparent pork producers such as Alamance county’s Cane Creek Farms, who say their “farming practices differ from those of large scale counterparts in almost every way.”

Aside from being free range, hogs at Cane Creek are allowed to live, for the most part, just like they would in the wild. That leads to happier, healthier pigs, but also really good bacon. After all, waste isn’t as much of a problem when pigs have enough space to lead a real pig life, as opposed to life in concentrated pens.

Wanting to take our local bacon experiences to new heights of culinary exploration, we dug up several inventive recipes that probably shouldn’t have contained bacon, but somehow did.

A quick rundown: bacon caramel brownies, bacon chocolate chip cookies, candied bacon ice cream and perhaps the most notorious bacon creation of all time, known simply as the bacon explosion.
This heart-stopper is brilliant — essentially a single sausage log encased in bacon, stuffed with even more bacon. Eat at your own risk.

So if you’re going to have your bacon and eat it too, be conscious what your food dollars are purchasing.

An irresponsible pork industry is a product of bacon consumer apathy, and we Tar Heels have no excuse. Many local pork producers like Cane Creek Farms have products for sale at the Carrboro and Chapel Hill Farmers Markets and many restaurants on Franklin Street.

Eat up.

Blair Mikels is a Senior southern studies from Raleigh. Contact her at mikels@email.unc.edu. Alex Walters is a Junior biology major from Hayesville. Contact him at awalt@email.unc.edu.