Why you eat bacon for breakfast (it was a PR stunt)
Bacon.
A staple of the hearty American breakfast.
It’s the breakfast of champions since the dawn of time, right?
Actually, no.
Eating a big hearty breakfast (with bacon of course) is a result of a marketing campaign by Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew.
Before the 1920s, nobody was eating bacon. It was scrap food for peasants.
The Beech-Nut Bacon company wanted to change that, because they were selling so little bacon.
So they went to Edward Bernays and asked him very nicely to help them increase bacon sales.
And Bernays, being a very nice man, agreed to do it -- for a hefty fee of course.
He was thinking:
“Well…..people are eating bacon for dinner, sometimes for lunch. There’s a whole other meal we can take advantage of.”
Back in the 1920s people were eating a very light breakfast.
Some coffee, maybe a roll, oatmeal or something like that. Even orange juice, after Albert Lasker’s brilliant campaign that basically invented orange juice.
But not bacon, eggs, chicken, salads, fish, even steak we eat now.
Not an easy task to convince people to change their daily routine, right?
Sure.
But we’re talking about Edward Bernays, often called the godfather of propaganda. Let’s just say the guy knew what he was doing.
He knew people don’t like being sold to. That people much prefer to think it was their idea to do (or buy) something.
So what does he do?
He goes to Beech-Nut’s in-house doctor and asks him something like:
“Hey doc, would you agree that a hearty breakfast containing bacon is the best way to start your day?”
Of course, the doctor agrees. What’s he gonna do, say no?
Next, he asks if some other of his doctor friends would agree.
So he has the doctor send a note to 5000 doctors around the nation, saying something like:
“I think eating a hearty breakfast containing bacon is healthier and people should do it more often. Do you agree?”
4500 of them wrote back and said they agreed.
That’s 90% btw.
Then instead of creating a marketing campaign around that and saying you should bacon and Beech-Nut bacon is the best, Bernays did something else.
He sent these findings to major newspapers nationwide.
And they printed headlines like:
“4,500 physicians urge Americans to eat heavy breakfasts to improve their health”.
And many of these headlines mentioned bacon and eggs as staples of this new, healthy routine.
So that’s how people started eating bacon for breakfast. Because, well, 4500 physicians can’t be wrong! Right?
And today, roughly 70% (!!!) of bacon is consumed for breakfast.
However much they were paying Bernays, it wasn’t enough.