Bacon Emoji

🥓 is crispy strips of bacon, usually shown as two wavy rashers with visible fat streaks. The emoji means breakfast, brunch, cured pork appreciation, and, for anyone who was online between 2009 and 2015, a direct line to the internet's bacon mania era.

It also means "bringing home the bacon" in a looser financial sense, since that idiom predates the emoji by about a century and stayed in heavy English-language usage. The modern version of the phrase traces to a 1906 telegram sent to lightweight boxing champion Joe Gans, though the bacon-as-livelihood association is much older in English folklore via the Dunmow Flitch tradition.

🥓 arrived in Unicode 9.0 on 21 June 2016 (proposal L2/15-054) alongside 🥞 pancakes, 🥚 egg, 🥛 milk, and 🥐 croissant as an explicit breakfast-table cohort. By the time it shipped, peak bacon mania had already cooled. What remained is a $15.2 billion US industry, 51.6 pounds of per-capita consumption per year, and the cultural memory of a decade when bacon was treated as a personality trait.

🥓 is food-first. On Instagram it anchors brunch posts, diner photos, and full-breakfast content next to 🍳🥞☕. On Twitter/X it shows up in morning-routine posts, BLT threads, bacon-on-pizza flame wars, and the occasional Kevin Bacon reference.

On TikTok, bacon content lives in three lanes: cooking tutorials (the "baked bacon" and "bacon weave" techniques cycle every year), taste tests comparing American, British, and Canadian cuts, and 2010s-nostalgia posts ironically reviving "Epic Bacon" energy. The emoji is also the canonical shorthand for anyone making Full English breakfast content in the UK.

In relationship texting, 🥓 is almost entirely literal: "making bacon," "bacon and eggs?" or "want brunch." It's not a flirt emoji, not a shade emoji, and rarely sarcastic. One minor exception: sending 🥓 to a vegan friend on purpose is a known low-key joke.

Bacon is one of the oldest cured meats in the Western diet, with evidence of salt-cured pork dating back to Roman-era Europe. The modern word "bacon" comes from Old French and originally meant a side of pork. The English-language association of bacon with livelihood has medieval roots through the Dunmow Flitch tradition: a flitch (side) of bacon was awarded to married couples in Essex who could swear they hadn't regretted their marriage for a year and a day. Chaucer references it in The Canterbury Tales.

"Bringing home the bacon" as a modern phrase is American, first documented around 1906 in a telegram to boxing champion Joe Gans before his title fight. The idiom took off in early-20th-century American sports reporting and stayed.

The internet's relationship with bacon went nuclear in the late 2000s. Reddit, 9GAG, and food blogs turned bacon into a whole identity. Epic Meal Time launched in October 2010 with YouTube videos of Harley Morenstein and his friends building 10,000-calorie dishes wrapped in bacon. The channel crossed a million subscribers in seven months, the fastest growth on YouTube at the time. "Bacon Strips!" became a catchphrase.

On Reddit, "the narwhal bacons at midnight" became a real identification phrase. Posted by user Saydrah on 7 August 2009, it became the way Redditors could recognize each other in real life. The correct response was "midnight," with the randomness being the point.

The 🥓 emoji was approved under proposal L2/15-054 for Unicode 9.0, reaching phones in 2016 just as bacon mania was receding. It's now a quieter, more practical emoji, a breakfast tag rather than a cultural flag.

1. 2009'The narwhal bacons at midnight' first posted on Reddit, becoming the Reddit identification phrase.↗
2. 2010Epic Meal Time debuts on YouTube in October. Crosses 1M subscribers in seven months, the fastest at the time.↗
3. 2015Proposal L2/15-054 submitted to Unicode for a dedicated bacon emoji in the breakfast-table cohort.
4. 2016🥓 approved and shipped as part of Unicode 9.0 on 21 June, alongside 🥞 🥚 🥛 🥐.↗
5. 2018Google redesign switches from two strips to a single strip. Twitter/X and Facebook follow.
6. 2023[Salon publishes](https://www.salon.com/2023/01/31/heres-how-we-fell-in-and-out-of-love-with-bacon/) 'How we fell in and out of love with bacon,' effectively declaring the mania era closed.

• •The US bacon market is worth $15.2 billion. Americans eat about 51.6 pounds per capita per year.
• •Epic Meal Time once made a 1-million-calorie lasagna with 120 packs of bacon. The show won a 2011 Shorty Award and got Harley Morenstein onto the Tonight Show.
• •The 'bringing home the bacon' idiom in its modern form comes from a 1906 boxing telegram to lightweight champion Joe Gans, not medieval English tradition (though the bacon-as-livelihood imagery is older).
• •The medieval Dunmow Flitch tradition awarded a side of bacon to couples in Essex who could prove a year of harmonious marriage. Chaucer references it in The Canterbury Tales around 1390.
• •The average Bacon Number, film connections to Kevin Bacon, for all actors in the world is 2.98. The Oracle of Bacon site calculates anyone's number.
• •The 🥓 emoji was approved under proposal L2/15-054 for Unicode 9.0, part of the breakfast-table cohort with 🥞 🥚 🥛 🥐.
• •Google, Twitter/X, and Facebook all show a single strip of bacon while Apple, Samsung, and most others show two. The difference rarely registers, but bacon purists notice.
• •Pork bacon is haram in Islam and not kosher in Judaism. Turkey bacon, beef bacon, lamb bacon, and halal bacon alternatives serve the same role.
• •Italian carbonara is traditionally made with guanciale, cured pork jowl, not bacon. English-language recipes swapping in American bacon are an ongoing source of mild diplomatic tension between cooks.

• •Epic Meal Time (2010-present). The Canadian YouTube show hosted by Harley Morenstein. Their Fast Food Lasagna crossed 34M views. The chant 'Bacon Strips! Bacon Strips!' became a recurring meme.
• •Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (1994-present). The parlor game connecting any actor to Kevin Bacon in six film links. Bacon initially hated the game, then founded SixDegrees.org around it.
• •The Epic Bacon meme (2009-2013). Peak early Reddit/9GAG culture. 'Bacon' as a superlative for anything cool.
• •'The narwhal bacons at midnight' (2009-2013). Reddit identification phrase, posted by user Saydrah in August 2009.
• •Ron Swanson (Parks and Recreation). His standing bacon-and-eggs order, 'I'll take all the bacon and eggs you have,' is one of the most-quoted meat-appreciation lines in sitcom history.
• •The Kevin's Famous Chili scene (The Office). Bacon isn't central, but the breakfast-food reverence of mid-2010s workplace comedy orbits the same energy that 🥓 carries.