Pork bellies, a source of bacon, wealth and chuckles, lose their place on the Chicago Merc

The first livestock-futures contract on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, frozen pork bellies, is gone today for the first time since 1961, due to changes in the meat business and consumer habits. (Chicago Tribune photo: Pigs at the Merc in 1967, as their bellies were becoming big items)

A Tribune headline calls the belly market "iconic," perhaps because the term "pork bellies" has a certain je ne sais quoi that gave it currency that reached from hog farms to trading houses to comedians and scriptwriters, who used it as a catchphrase for arcane pieces of the financial world. "Nobody knew it was bacon. It made people laugh," long-time Chicago trader Bob Short told Reuters.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, bellies were the most popular agriculture contract and "the glamour market," the exchange's Harvey Paffenroth told Reuters. "There was a mystique about it; maybe it was the name. But it was also one of the first hedge funds, enabling producers -- and then traders -- "to hedge against price fluctuations," Amber Gibson of Meating Place reports.

Pork production usually peaks in the fall. Meatpackers would store frozen pork bellies during the winter, then thaw them for summer, when demand increases as "tomatoes ripen and people make bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches," Reuters reports. "Today," Gibson writes, "with an increase in year-round consumption, consolidation of the industry, and the use of fresh, not frozen bellies, the pork belly future has become obsolete," so the exchange de-listed it. (Read more)