Relax, Bacon Fans; Reports America Running Out Of Bacon A Hoax

Americans, resume your love affair with bacon. There’s no shortage, despite dire news reports to the contrary that America’s favorite breakfast meat would soon be in short supply. We repeat: Eat up. Have seconds.

Announcement of the shortage caused a near panic. But it was, to borrow a phrase, “fake news.” It all started when the U.S. Department of Agriculture put out a routine report that showed the nation’s reserve of frozen pork belly — the fatty part of the pig where bacon comes from — was at the lowest level in half a century.

Then the Ohio Pork Council picked up the gauntlet.

“Today’s pig farmers are setting historic records by producing more pigs than ever,” Rich Deaton, the organization’s president, said in a statement. “Yet our reserves are still depleting.”

The group, which represents pig producers and promotes their products, put up a website, baconshortage.com, as a marketing strategy, Deaton told The New York Times.

Now that the purported shortage has been debunked, the website is a blank page. But before the content was scrubbed, some of the nation’s best-known news organizations — USA Today, NBC, CBS, Men’s Health and Business Insider — picked up what turned out to be non-news.

Now, the Ohio Pork Council has scrambled eggs all over its face.

Deaton told The Times the goal of the website wasn’t to create a panic, but to “quell the fears that we’re going to run out.”

The USDA report said the 2016 year-end inventory of frozen pork belly was down more than 35 million pounds from the year prior, but Deaton said pig farmers in Ohio and across the country are farrowing more pigs to feed Americans’ appetite for bacon.

Chris Young, the executive director of the American Association of Meat Processors, said that within six months of a pig’s birth, it’s bacon, so the frozen pork belly inventory will soon be replenished.

“We are aware of reserve levels, however, we are not concerned,” Young said in a statement to TIME. “We don't see America's love of bacon going away anytime soon. The industry will not run out and farmers will respond in time to take advantage.”

Photo by cyclonebill via Flickr Commons