Feeding some of the hungry

There’s trouble brewing in the United States. Trouble of the most crispy kind.

A form of agricultural speculation has left the States with the single largest stockpile of bacon it’s had on hand in the last 28 years.

Right now, according to U.S. government data, there’s more than 40 million pounds of pork bellies being held in refrigerated warehouses in U.S.

How much bacon is 40 million pounds? According to Quora.com, “Regular-sliced bacon is .062 inches thick (1/16 inch) with 16-20 slices per pound.”

So, it totals somewhere close to as many as 800 million 10-inch long strips of bacon, looking for a home. That’s enough raw bacon strips, if laid out end to end, to circle the Earth five times at the equator. (But only three times around the Earth if we were to cook it crispy first, because cooked bacon apparently ends up averaging somewhere around six inches long.)

It is a staggering amount of supply — a supply that U.S. farmers have produced by ramping up their pig production on short notice, in hopes that American pork could fill the gap left by the deaths of millions of Chinese pigs due to an outbreak of African swine fever.

That bet seems to have been a reasonable one, given that Chinese purchases of U.S. hogs is on the rise.

Meanwhile, in mid-september, the Chinese government, concerned about the cost of pork, auctioned off 10,000 tonnes of pork from its estimated 3 million to 5 million metric tonne pork stockpile to push down prices.

Big numbers. Big, big numbers.

But it leads to a much more serious question, and not really about how many strips of bacon there are here or there or anywhere else, either: if the United States can ramp up hog production to 77.7 million animals during September — the largest number of the snuffling beasties in production in the States since 1943 — as simply as by rolling the dice on the expected emergence of disease-driven foreign demand, why is there so much hunger in the world?

It’s not just pork; after a string of three highly successful years for soybean farmers in the United States, the stockpile of that agricultural commodity grew to 1.05 billion bushels, more than 60 billion pounds of stored soybeans.

Corn? After a record year for corn farmers in 2016, the corn stockpile grew to more than 2 billion bushels — or 112 billion pounds of corn. (Both the corn and soybean stockpiles are expected to shrink somewhat in the coming year, due to 2019’s poor growing conditions.)

And still, we haven’t found a co-ordinated way to ensure that we can maintain a healthy, famine-free human population worldwide.

Maybe you don’t see the correlation between hunger and 800 million strips of bacon.

Maybe you’re just thinking about all that bacon now. Maybe that’s part of the problem.