Are We Really 'in the Midst of a Bacon Bubble'?

Bacon is booming, and here at The Atlantic we too are guilty of promoting the pig part of the moment, chronicling everything from the now-ubiquitous bacon bourbon and the bacon-with-chocolate trend to how a small American town greased a giant omelet pan by strapping bacon to a young woman's feet and having her skate across it in 1931.

But all is not peachy in Baconland, at least according to The Wall Street Journal. The paper makes a case that chefs' insatiable hunger for pork has led to a bacon backlash, and that the bacon boom itself is nothing more than a "bacon bubble"—a bubble that is about to burst:

We are in the midst of a bacon bubble—and a growing number of chefs (some of whom quietly admit they helped inflate the bubble to begin with) say it's about to pop. Bacon had a good run, but now it has gone flabby—used too much and too often, it's lost its novelty and coated fine dining with a ubiquitous veneer of porky grease.

Chef John Currence, owner of four restaurants in Oxford, Miss., adores bacon and proudly wears a pig tattoo on his arm. But even he says that the bacon craze has gone a bit far. Strike that: The man recently received a gift of bacon-flavored lip balm. It's gone way too far.

"It's like cussing," Mr. Currence says of today's over-use of bacon in restaurants. "It's easy, it's effective, it always gets a cocked eyebrow, but it just doesn't belong in church."

Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal.