Secret Financial Life of Food by Newman Kara;

Author:Newman, Kara;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

Opening day of the live hog contract at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (February 28, 1966). (Image used with the permission of CME Group Inc. © 2011. All rights reserved.)

CHAPTER EIGHT

This Little Piggy Made a Market

The Rise and Fall of Pork Bellies

Have you ever seen this cartoon? It’s a household scene at dinner, and the wife says, “Pork bellies are not proper dinner conversation.”

LEO MELAMED, FORMER CHAIRMAN OF THE CHICAGO MERCANTILE EXCHANGE

Bacon: we know it, love it, lust after it, obsess over it (and, in a recent TV commercial, marry it). However, we forget that it is essentially pork belly—cured, smoked, and fried into a delectably crisp, salty breakfast side, guaranteed to wake an entire household with its seductive, savory aroma. But traders know. And for fifty years, they counted on our collective bacon obsession, to profitable effect.

As a financial instrument, pork bellies were iconic. For many, the image of greedy traders as pigs at the trough was equally iconic. Until pork belly became a headliner on restaurant menus recently, few knew exactly what a pork belly was. Pork bellies created a viable market at a precarious time for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and they lasted for a half-century, until the market closed in July 2011.

Defining the Pork Belly

So what exactly is a pork belly? It is the meat carved from the underside of the abdomen and the chest of the pig, which consists of alternating layers of fat and lean muscle. Pork belly is widely used in making sausage, paté, and terrines. It is increasingly cooked as a luscious, fatty dish in its own right. Cured and cut into strips, pork belly becomes bacon.

To traders, a hog technically has two “bellies,” which are cut off in slabs and then frozen in storage until sliced for bacon. And from each mature hog ready for slaughter, a measly 12 to 15 percent of that is belly—which explains why it is considered relatively precious. A little useless trivia: one hog yields approximately 250 bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, depending on the size of the animal (and the heft of your BLT). Compared with harder “back fat” (the cut of the pig that yields Canadian bacon), belly fat is the softest and most succulent found on the animal—another reason it has been valued so highly throughout history.

Americans aren’t the only ones who have had a love affair with pork. Although it is hard to know for certain, historians say the Chinese were likely the first to taste roast pork (and pork belly continues to be featured on Chinese menus). In ancient Greece, pork was a mainstay of banquet feasts. Romans of all classes were fond of pork, and Roman historian Pliny the Elder noted that a talented cook could derive more than fifty different flavors from pork.

When European settlers came to the New World, they found that pork was the favorite and most widely consumed meat, and this continued to be the case well into the twentieth century. Farmers liked pigs: the animals required

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