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thousand–odd tickets, for both the lunch session and the dinnersession (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.
    â€œOh my god,” a woman said as she came into the hall and saw its sheer scope.
    â€œWhere’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 inArizona 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