A closer look
Commodities traders at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange spent decades literally screaming at each other in trading pits to buy and sell pork belly futures, essentially betting millions of dollars on the future price of bacon. Introduced in 1961, these financial contracts allowed meat packers to lock in prices and hedge against the volatility of pig populations, turning breakfast meats into a high-stakes, hyper-capitalist casino game. The trading of frozen pork bellies became legendary in popular culture as the ultimate symbol of absurd financial abstraction, perfectly capturing how Wall Street can financialize absolutely anything. The exchange finally delisted the futures in 2011 because modern refrigeration and constant demand stabilized the market, but for fifty glorious years, grown men in brightly colored jackets built vast generational wealth purely by guessing how much Americans would want to clog their arteries the following summer
