From an excellent #longread at Bloomberg Businessweek, including a retelling of bacon’s resurgence in the 1990s from health nuts’ bête noire to everyone’s best friend through clever marketing and market research, here are some interesting facts:

In the past decade, bacon has grown into an industry generating more than $4 billion in annual sales. It has moved from a breakfast meat to a food trend touching an incredible array of consumer goods, both edible and not, from bacon-heavy fast-food burgers and bacon-infused desserts at fine dining restaurants to bottles of bacon-distilled vodka and even a sexual lubricant formulated to smell (and taste) like bacon. More than cupcakes, ramen, or kale, bacon has become the defining food trend of a society obsessed with food trends.

Food trucks, barely in existence prior to 2008, now employ tens of thousands and generate more than $2 billion in revenues. The rise of specialty coffee and the Starbuckification of most coffee drinkers has shifted the production of the entire coffee-growing business to Arabica beans. Greek yogurt has shot up from an ethnic outlier to the default yogurt, remaking the dairy case, while trendy craft beers have triggered a bull market in hops, doubling prices over the past 10 years.

In terms of economic impact, nothing beats bacon. While most food trends tend to trickle down from the gourmet market into the mouths of mass consumers, that wasn’t the case with bacon. Bacon mania was sparked not in the kitchens of fancy restaurants in New York or Chicago, but in the pork industry’s humble marketing offices in Iowa, where people like Joe Leathers engineered a turnaround for an underappreciated cut of pig.

What follows from that point is a history of bacon as a staple of the American diet. I suggest reading the whole thing. And now I’m hungry.