If you’re even the most casual observer of food writing on the internet, bacon seems to be an inescapable and overexposed topic; the only piece of charcuterie that approaches a fetish. In 2006, when satirical website The Onion reported that meat had become America’s number two condiment, it could not have possibly foreseen that within a few years, Baconnaise would be on the market.

Google’s insights tool, which aggregates the world’s searches into beautiful graphs, identifies a seasonal pattern in online bacon interest (once we filter out the estimable Kevin and Francis Bacon, in whom interest knows no season). While there are peaks around Christmas, the world’s year-to-year interest in this particular piece of pork stayed relatively even until the end of 2007, when the number of bacon searches began an exponential climb. This is all the more apparent when we start to filter for deeper interest in bacon: “bacon recipes” or “calories in bacon” - a steady interest until 2007 followed by growth. The search for bacon represents an interest that remains unaffected by the global financial crisis. It's one of the only internet trends that has managed to stretch itself over years.

What caused the bacon tipping point in 2007? The web was hardly bacon-free up until that point. My personal theory is that the growth of social media (especially Digg and Facebook) formed a feedback loop that endlessly reposts text or images with bacon in it.

Every year since 2006 there has been at least one article published presaging a bacon backlash caused by sheer online overexposure, as Jane Black in this week’s Washington Post writes:

About once a year, some food writer tries to right this culinary wrong. In 2007, as bacon mania stretched into uncharted territory, Food and Wine's Nick Fauchald bemoaned his drawer full of Band-Aids made to look like bacon strips, bacon-streaked wrapping paper and bacon breath mints. "What I really need," he wrote, "is a bacon garbage can." In 2009, in anticipation of the two-day Baconfest held in Chicago, TimeOut's David Tamarkin declared defiantly that everything really is not better with bacon. And just a few months ago, Salon's Francis Lam tried a new, equally unsuccessful tack: Love bacon if you must, he said. But the new bacon is country ham.

Last year, I expected that sausage would make a comeback; people would forsake bacon for the best of the wurst. Like country ham (which is virtually unknown outside the USA), it didn't even come close to happening and the bacon onslaught continued unabated. Can anything knock bacon off its perch?