Humanity facing GLOBAL BACON SHORTAGE Doomwatchers are painting an apocalyptic picture of a world where weeping humanity is reduced to scraping meagre nourishment from mash without bangers, hole without toad, scratchings without pork and, chillingly, sarnies without bacon. According to the BBC, a drought-hit US maize harvest has forced up cereal prices worldwide, …
NO!! The competition must go on.
In fact if pork is in short supply, then only the most dedicated baconologists will be tempted to enter.
The freaks and oddballs who despoil the 'holy sandwich of loviness' with such abonimations such as Mayonnaise, cheese or vegetables, will probaby look at turkey rashers to complete their evil butties of the beast
Vegetables as an abomination yes
Mayo as an abomination hell yes the vile stuff should be banned from everything
But cheese? I mean, american processed cheese sure, anyone using that should be shot in the foot, but a nice mature cheddar, or a deliciously creamy mozzarella can help bring out the true bacony goodness of a bacon sarnie, y'know so long as you don't overload with cheese.
Would you like them in a tree (due to rising sea levels)?
They are so good, so good you see?
You should have them here or there,
You should have them anywhere.
*Bacon sarnies need only six ingredients..
Plain white sliced bread
Butter
Bacon
Small amount of grated mature chedder (grated smoked applewood if it takes your fancy)
HP Sauce (just a drizzle)
One or two sun dried tomatoes, making sure you don't get too much oil on the bread.
Anyway.. if we are currently importing bacon, and we have farmers wondering what to do with their land, then can we not step up and make this once great Kingdom an exporting powerhouse of bacon again (and keep enough back (bacon) for ourselves)?
If the import price is high, then the home grown price should be getting close to equilibrium.. maybe enough to make it worth while for local pig farmers to do what they do best, and export the best of British pork?
Where's the bacon icon?
" think you're getting all the downvotes because of the sundried tomatoes."
He lost me at "sliced white bread". I could live with that if it was Texas Toast, otherwise bread sawn by hand into doorstep-thick wedges is the only acceptable method.
To be properly British, the flour for the bread should have been clog-milled in Lancashire by burly loom-tenders to the rhythm of traditional concertina music, but that is, alas, impractical today owing to the scarcity of concertinas.
Me I like it toasted too, but can allow that that is optional.
Back bacon, and lots of it, cooked properly but not overcooked.
Cheese is entirely unnecessary, smoked cheese doubly so (one suspects this "cheddar" as never having been within ten miles of the county or indeed of having been made in the UK at all), and the sun-dried tomatoes have no place in a larder of any sort. All they are good for is adding half a quid to the price of an otherwise palatable sandwich and rendering it barely edible. I'm only surprised this so-called recipe didn't involve guacamole, snails or raw fish.
As for the HP, I reserve the right to slather. My sandwich, my rules.
Once again we see that no culinary delight is so good it cannot be rendered entirely naff by someone with pretensions of chef-ness.
Sun dried tomatoes. Applewood smoked cheddar. Azathoth on a Bike.
Forgive me - if everyone has to abide by the new rules, why do prices have to increase? Because all your competitors have to do the same anyway, and the only loss will be the cost of the new procedures/equipment spread over your ENTIRE sales for the year. Are we seriously talking more than a percent or two?
And, surely, if we import most of our bacon now we're not really doing it the most cost-effective way anyway. Won't this be a boost for UK farms wanting to farm pigs again?
We have had very good animal welfare rules for many years, and you will find British pork at the 'premium' end of the supermarket range as good welfare is more expensive than the truly disgusting conditions animals are kept in abroad. Denmark has been a foreign source for many decades#centuries# and is reasonable on the welfare side, but bringing them up to a similar standard to us is going to increase their costs. Southern Asia will only grow as a source for the 'value' end of the market as a result of this and their animal welfare will stay truly terrible for a long as I can forsee.
UK farming is very efficient, but in general we produce everything the most humane way, and that is how we can be undercut on cost. I always buy British and yes, you can taste the difference!
Rocket scientist logo, as you don't have to be to buy the best and buy British
because farmers will only be able to cram half as many piggies into the giant concrete and steel hangars, and will have to buy slightly less rancid and contaminated food to feed the pigs.
And if most pork is imported, that's a pretty good indicator that foreign pork is cheaper than domestic pork - otherwise it wouldn't be cost-effective to do it.
So if I understand correctly - the foreign pork will become more expensive as they have to upgrade their farming conditions to match what British farmers already have to do.
So British pork (and especially bacon) should not rise in price (except as dictated by feed prices).
If so, then goody - I always buy British pork and bacon.
Why a shortage? Obviously if there's a pig-food shortage, then to save the pigs starving we should be eating them at record-breaking pace.
There should be a glut of bacon, we shouldn't be able to move for bacon.
Your reporters should sit and think a minute before they write - they're obviously rasher than they should be.
Slightly off-topic. When I read this I thought "will this make a difference to the price of expensive, dry-cure bacon, or only to the rubbish?"
Then it occurred to me that in the 50% of the bacon sarnie thread that I had the stamina** to read, there was no mention of the horrible white slime emitted by much bacon when it's fried. Will the new bacon rules lead to a reduction in this abomination?
**Need more bacon sandwiches.
@Elmer Phud
Indeed the bacon Sandwich is a cure for vegetarianism. My wife, when she met me, was a vegetarian. All it took was one bacon sarni on a sunday morning to cure her.
In fact her mum used to cook bacon on sunday mornings and waft to smell through the kitchen door and upstairs to entice her away from the dark side.
Needless to say I get on very well with the mother-in-law.
"Instead of feeding cereals to pigs which then get slaughtered and eaten, why don't we just eat the food we grow directly? Would make sense in a world of 7 billion people and rising."
Okay. By that reasoning wouldn't it make sense to stop using expensive electricity to heat your house and simply burn the excess population?
And who the fist-lightningbolt-skull-musroomcloud wants to eat a cereal sandwich? Get on message!
"Instead of feeding cereals to pigs which then get slaughtered and eaten, why don't we just eat the food we grow directly?"
I guess you are in favour of the wholesale slaughter (and extinction) of all domestic livestock then?
"Would make sense in a world of 7 billion people and rising."
However you paint it, a world population of 7 billion and rising doesn't make sense. It isn't sustainable. For starters, there isn't enough fresh water.
Two reasons I can think of, off the top of my head:
1: Gluten intolerance. The human digestive system is not adapted to eat cereals. Some are lucky, others not so lucky.
2: Taurase deficiency. This is a rare* genetic condition; which leaves sufferers unable to produce an enzyme required to manufacture taurine from other protein fragments, and therefore unable to survive on a vegetarian diet. Sufferers first go blind; then their internal organs fail slowly, one by one, over a period of many years.
* Rare in humans, anyway.
If British regulations mean that we get less low-quality pork from badly treated animals, surely this will only mean that we see a fall in the availability of the cheapest sausages, lowest quality bacon and crappiest reformed ham. This will push people to buy superior quality products, which should lead to an increase in demand, making breeding pigs in the UK more profitable, and ultimately a fall in the price of this higher-quality British meat as the economies of scale cut in.
"Stephen Howarth, of the pig tentacle of the UK's Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board ... "
What hellish architeuthidae-suidae hybris is this? Is some kind of submarine porker the proposed solution to the shortage? I guess it'll make bacon production easier since they'll already have been marinaded in salt
I get my bacon (and pork and beef and lamb and buffalo) from a wee (okay, not so wee) farm about 20 miles from my house, where all the animals get to frolic and gambol as god intented, till they're slaughtered, and chopped up and eviscerated and sliced and grilled and stuffed between two slices of bread...
It actually costs very little more than most supermarkets...other than the bike ride (or other transport of your choice) to get it.
Support your local farmers...it's surprisingly economical.
This is it, the producers will go on and on about standards increasing costs and so on - but really everyone just wants a bit more money in their pocket.
I recently complained to Seabrook's crisps about the shrinking size from 31.8g bags to 25g in their multipacks, with no price drop. They said the generic rubbish you'd expect, such as the prices haven't been rising in the shop - my arse - prices often trend upwards - I'd rather pay a few pennies more and get the correct portion than be potentially misled by shrinking portions!
It's not the producers, it's the retailers..
I produce a product, that is placed into 200 outlets acroos my area of operations..
My price to the retailers has not increased in 4 years (it will shortly, mark my words).
My product is VAT free, yet every time there is a VAT increase, the retailers increase the price of my product, to the public, citing VAT, despite the fact that I haven't increased my price to them.
When I tell them I'm increasing my price, to cover a 60% rise in fuel costs, 50% in materials cost, they tell me they will drop me as a supplier...
DON'T blame the pruduction.. blame the gready fuknuts on the retail end..
Is this based on the same "science" that says that it takes 7 liters of water to produce 1 kg of beef because the assumption is made that all cows always eat maize and other similar foods and doesn't take into account at all that cows generally are put out to pasture? Pigs eat just about anything, not just maize. So it's unlikely that the price of bacon will change the slightest iota, even if it is wrapped up in a global warming scare type story.
As a northern Briton living abroad i can't get the ingredients easily to enter the competition.
Nevertheless, when i get home, the first thing i do is grill some best quality back bacon, butter some fresh "plain loaf", preferably the heel, sometimes lightly toasted, and then lightly spread some English mustard on it.
Heaven!!
the BBC didn't mention the main reason for high corn prices:
"While the drought may have triggered the price spike in corn, an underlying cause is the federal policy mandating ever-increasing amounts corn for fuel. Because of this policy, ethanol production now consumes approximately 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop, and the cost of corn for use in food production has increased by 193 percent since 2005 [the year before the RFS took effect]. Put simply, ethanol policies have created significantly higher corn prices, tighter supplies, and increased volatility."
source: http://www.globalwarming.org/2012/09/10/ethanol-mandate-waiver-decks-stacked-against-petitioners/
so no bacon for you and me, and no supper at all if you're one of the world's real poor folk :-(
I am actually looking forward to victim less, lab-meat. In-vitro bio-tech is fast approaching the stage when commercial production can begin to be considered. Imagine ordering your own customized prime cut of Saddleback and Old Spot bacon. Charolais rump at possibly as little as half of today's market price mmmm ..... and no animals died in the process (yeah!). I'm drooling at the very thought. It's the future you know and I can't stay silent (or do I mean soylent?), about it any longer.
Flames cos it's frying right now and I'm anticipating some down votes, just saying.
This is clearly nothing more than scaremongering by an organised lobby seeking to destroy our economies. Everyone knows that bacon availability has fluctuated throughout human history and in fact bacon today is almost certainly less crispy than when the Vikings settled in Greenland. Making projections like this on little more than computer models doesn't take account of Thames frost fairs or the Maunder Minimum and just because the majority of bacon experts are adamant we are heading into a crisis doesn't mean we should continue to change our behaviour. We will always be able to find more bacon so long as we ignore the Green lobby and start fracking for shale bacon.
... for quality pork goodness.
The difference in quality between my local butchers bacon and a certain large supermarket chain that starts with T is more than a little noticable.
Even their 'finest' range is no comparison.
Yup, you pay a premium for it already - and why not?
Once you've tried proper, high welfare, free to roam and snuffle up truffles pork based products you'll wonder why you ever settled for less.
The cheap stuff - notice how when you fry it, you get water with horrible specs of white fat - ending up with half the product you purchased = bad economic sense.
Pork eaters of Britain, show solidarity!
Buy the good stuff regardless of how pricey it gets - just eat less of it, or make every scrap count!
Your waistline will thank you.
The conspiracy that diverted the world's food corn to ethanol is not only environmentally useless - and worse, as the ethanol binge is poisoning the Great Plains soils, the Mississippi River, and the Gulf of Mexico - it is not only pricing food out of the reach of poorer folks world-wide, but now: NO BACON!
...meat free bacon.
Quorn bacon.
Mines the one with the puke in the pocket (I didn't mess up the floor in here)
So, anyway, why is a shortage of corn/maize in the USA going to affect UK pigs, or even Danish pigs for that matter? Surely the UK and Europe don't import feed all the way across the Atlantic just for pigs. Don't they still have the pigswill bucket in the school canteens any more?
Where are British Oil and Cake Mills during this crisis?
And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig".
...Spke to a mate today who supplies me my pork products- and threre's no difference in the herd size this year than last year and he doesn't see any difference next year. I told him about the corn shortage and he said yeah, that will affect the large producers but not the small. So my bacon is saved.
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