How Bacon for Breakfast Became an American Staple

Breakfast is often branded as the most important meal of the day. Depending on where you live in the U.S., a standard breakfast might look like anything from bagels and breakfast sandwiches to cereal, smoothies or oatmeal. And of course, there’s the dish now considered an American breakfast staple: bacon and eggs.

Bacon and eggs seem quintessentially American — but it hasn’t always been that way. In the 1920s, a dish as heavy as bacon and eggs for breakfast was uncommon; breakfast foods were usually light. The demand for bacon was just not there. That is, not until one man by the name of Edward Bernays devised a groundbreaking PR strategy that used doctors to market bacon as healthy — and the bacon business started to boom. One man had not only the power to change the breakfast industry, but inadvertently gave the meat industry a model for later falsely marketing meat as healthy and sustainable.

The Birth of Meat Industry PR

Edward Bernays is known as the “father of public relations,” and essentially rebranded the concept of propaganda as PR. In his 1928 book, Propaganda, Bernays lays out how social science and psychological manipulation can be used in PR.

Coincidentally, Bernays’ uncle was the founder of psychoanalysis himself, Sigmund Freud, and his book is influenced by some of Freud’s teachings. One of Freud’s theories was that human behavior was driven by irrational forces — and Bernays leveraged this concept. Bernays hypothesized that if you understand the public’s mind, you can manipulate people without their realizing.

In Propaganda, Bernays writes that previous advertising for bacon had argued that the food was cheap, good and gives you “reserve energy.” He wrote that the new salesman for bacon should ask: who influences the eating habits of the public, and what is the force driving people’s eating behaviors? The answer, he rightly believed, was that people would trust their physicians. “[L]arge numbers of persons will follow the advice of their doctors, because he understands the psychological relation of dependence of men upon their physicians,” Bernay wrote.

The PR Push for Bacon

Bernays was hired to boost sales of bacon for the Beech-Nut Packing Company. Their product line sold peanut butter, candy drops, soups and bacon. But bacon was not selling well, which is where Bernays came in.

Bernays went to chat with the company’s physician, and learned that a more calorie-dense breakfast could be better than a light breakfast. He then asked the doctor if he was willing to contact 5,000 other doctors in order to confirm that a heavy breakfast is better — and got 4,500 physicians to do so. Bernays then got this “finding” published in newspapers with the headline “4500 physicians urge heavy breakfast in order to improve health of the American people.”

These headlines and stories would say that bacon and eggs should be included in a standard American breakfast. From there, sales for the Beech-Nut Packing Company went up.

As simple, or complicated, as that.

Though eggs were popular and historically eaten around the world, in the U.S, they became more ubiquitous through their new association with the increasingly popular breakfast meat, bacon.

Bacon Consumption Today

The typical American consumes 224.6 pounds of meat annually, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As for bacon, Bernays was so successful in his marketing campaign that this processed food product has since transcended the breakfast category.

Though overall demand for pork is down nine percent from 20 years ago, production is still up, and bacon sales remain strong. In 2018, bacon was found on 68.1 percent of fast food menus. You can find bacon in burgers, as part of a BLT, on doughnuts or even as their own snack. Meanwhile, even though breakfast itself has become less popular, with most Americans having ditched a traditional breakfast, bacon is still present in more than half of households in the United States, to the detriment of the environment, animal welfare and consumer health.

Since many dietitians will tell you there’s no such thing as “bad foods” — it’s possible for some amount of bacon to be part of an overall healthy diet. But it’s also an unavoidable truth that bacon is high in sodium and saturated fats. Saturated fats can raise your cholesterol, which can in turn increase your risk of heart disease. Processed meats like bacon have also been categorized as carcinogenic since 2015, meaning eating too much processed meat has been linked to an increased risk of cancer.

The environmental and animal welfare costs are also considerable. The U.S pork industry keeps pigs in crowded and inhumane conditions, with mother pigs often confined in crates and immobile. The United States slaughters about 130 million pigs each year to make products like pork chops and bacon.

Environmentally speaking, bacon production alone is responsible for around 14 percent of all food sector emissions and a massive amount of manure — some 331 billion pounds of manure each year, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. The sheer amount of pig poop, combined with the way it’s stored — in massive lagoons — helps fuel methane emissions in the U.S., nine percent of which comes from livestock manure, mostly industrial dairy and also pork factory farms. Nitrates from the manure also end up polluting waterways and air quality for communities that live nearby these farms. Yet despite all of the problems, pork production has increased over the years, and the industry is heavily invested in marketing to make sure this continues.

Public Relations in the Meat Industry Today

In 1992, seemingly following Bernays’ playbook, the beef industry wanted to plant beef in the mind of every American by answering the question: “What’s for dinner?” Similarly, in 1987, the pork industry had their own campaign to convince people that pork was a versatile meat. The “Other White Meat” campaign saw pork sales go up by 20 percent.

The infamous 1992 beef campaign was replicated in 2020 on Instacart, and beef saw a 26-36 percent increase in sales after consumers viewed the campaign.

In 2021, JBS, a leading beef producer, targeted consumers through their “Net Zero by 2040” campaign. The campaign sought to target consumer concerns over the environmental impact of beef, and promised net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. It ran advertisements along those lines, despite not being on track to meet those goals. The net-zero campaign uses PR to market meat as sustainable — when it is quite the opposite.

Earlier this year, the industry also began a partnership with five universities to create PhD programs that will build “trust between pork producers and pork consumers.” The pork industry has also taken advantage of social media, attempting to entice consumers with TikToks by the National Pork Board, suggesting pork can keep you focused and “fired up.”

It’s been almost 100 years since Bernays’ bacon campaign, and his legacy is still shaping food preferences today. Despite environmental and health concerns, bacon is still on the American breakfast plate, and PR strategists continue to work hard to ensure it stays there.