Alex has got a good deal of media attention for his excellent new Chatham House report on future of food crises but the Daily Telegraph got the real scoop – by making up a scare story about the death of the Sunday Roast:
Researchers at Chatham House, a think-tank, found that a recent fall in the price of butter, milk and bread was likely to be only a “temporary reprieve”.
The price hikes would hit the price of beef, pork and lamb harder because they are reared on proportionately more grain than “white meat” like chicken.
Alex Evans, the report’s author, said the likely effect would be to make Britons less reliant on beef as a core part of the nation’s diet.
“It will become more expensive,” said Mr Evans. “We are not saying people won’t be able to have a Sunday roast but we will be eating less red meat in future.”
Now, there are some kill-joys who might point out that Alex’s report doesn’t actually mention the Sunday Roast once, but Global Dashboard has an established track-record of commentary in defense of fine British food: check out Evans and Gowan on Bubble, Squeak and eels last July. But the fact that pork prices are set to sky-rocket may explain an American internet phenomenon noted by the NYT today: a BBQ recipe going viral.
This recipe is the Bacon Explosion, modestly called by its inventors “the BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes.” The instructions for constructing this massive torpedo-shaped amalgamation of two pounds of bacon woven through and around two pounds of sausage and slathered in barbecue sauce first appeared last month on the Web site of a team of Kansas City competition barbecuers. They say a diverse collection of well over 16,000 Web sites have linked to the recipe, celebrating, or sometimes scolding, its excessiveness. A fresh audience could be ready to discover it on Super Bowl Sunday.
Where once homegrown recipes were disseminated in Ann Landers columns or Junior League cookbooks, new media have changed — and greatly accelerated — the path to popularity. Few recipes have cruised down this path as fast or as far as the Bacon Explosion, and this turns out to be no accident. One of its inventors works as an Internet marketer, and had a sophisticated understanding of how the latest tools of promotion could be applied to a four-pound roll of pork.
Leaving aside the new media aspect of all this, I’d argue that Americans are wisely stuffing down bacon and sausage before the prices head back up. If you want to make your own Bacon Explosion, the recipe’s here. My own urge to start layering the bacon wrapping was reduced by the discovery that the outcome looks like, well, you know…
For those more interested in making a quick buck than a Bacon Copralite (google it yourself), switch over to Porkworld, Latin America’s leading swine-trade website, which naturally features quotations from one Alex Evans…
