Ohhhhhh bacon. On average we eat more than 18 pounds of it a year, and not just alongside eggs and pancakes.

There's bacon lasagna, bacon cocktails, even -- in a bridge too far -- bacon toothpaste.

But the reason why bacon broke out from the breakfast table isn't just because of its taste, but some deft marketing by the National Pork Producers Council and the story of pork bellies -- the commodity it's made from.

"Pork bellies, like other agricultural products, had seasonal price fluctuations," says David Sax, author of, "The Tastemakers: Why We're Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up with Fondue."

The price was intricately tied to tomato season because, simply put, people wanted to put slabs of bacon on BLTs.

But when the food trend of the 1980s hit -- low-fat foods -- the price of pork bellies bellied up.

Pig farmers turned to the National Pork Producers Council in desperation, hoping to find a way to get people to eat bacon again.

The council turned to fast-food restaurants who were struggling to sell the lean hamburgers, suggesting it was a cheap way of adding a lot of fat and flavor.

"They said, 'Listen, can you put bacon on your sandwiches?'" says Sax. "They said, 'Look, we'd love to. We're trying to sell these ultra-lean sandwiches because that's what people want but nobody actually wants to buy them.'"

Hardee's had the first hit with the Frisco burger, and other chains followed suit. With franchises all over the country into bacon, the market for pork bellies bloomed.

The trend branched out when smaller, visionary restaurants caught on. Innovative chefs then made bacon jam, bacon cupcakes and bacon-wrapped anything.

That's how the wave caught on, so much so that there are bacon conventions across the country. 

"I saw one person who had a t-shirt [at a convention] and it was a cat surfing a piece of bacon in outer space," says Sax. "It's this interesting, Portlandia-esque collision of ironic hipster bacon love and just big old American bacon lovers, too."