How bacon sizzled and people got sweet on cupcakes

Bacon. It's everywhere. Wendy's features it in the "Baconator" and Paula Deen crumbles it into quiche. Ditto for those deluxe cupcakes top-heavy with frosting. Is there a bakery or supermarket that doesn't sell them?

Bacon and cupcakes — like sliders, bubble tea, popsicles, food trucks and chipotle — have caught on from coast to coast.

But how?

Food fads don't always spread exactly the same way as other types of pop culture, such as fashion and music. Chefs don't walk the runway at food shows holding up this spring's hot pad thai dish. There are no authoritative top-ten charts for food that show red velvet cake is No.1 with a bullet.

But favored foods items can go viral in the time it takes to upload a picture of salted caramel ice cream. The arbiters of trendy tastes include big-name chefs, bloggers, urban hipsters, eater tweeters and journalists. Usually, they work in some hard-to-quantify combination.

"It's kind of like trying to grab a jellyfish, in terms of trying to understand it," said Ted Allen, host of the Food Network's "Chopped."

Food fads are older than the fondue pot in the back of your parents' pantry. But the lines of dissemination were easier to track before the existence of the Food Network and the Web. The high-brow authority was Gourmet magazine. Home cooks took cues from cookbooks and friends. There were just a few famous culinary authorities, like Martha Stewart or Paul Prudhomme, who helped popularize Louisiana cuisine.

Top-down authorities live on in the food world, even if they now share the stage with the cyber-masses. Serious eaters still are influenced by the magazines like Food & Wine and Bon Appetit. But the rise of food TV has dramatically multiplied the number of celebrity cooks who can popularize a food item. Think of what Rachael Ray did for extra-virgin olive oil, or what Bobby Flay did for .grilling.

Television is widely believed to have kick started the long-running cupcake craze, though celebrity chefs had nothing to do with it. Credit here goes to Carrie Bradshaw and her pals on "Sex in the City," who treated themselves to the luxurious cupcakes at Manhattan's Magnolia Bakery. Mainstream and social media took it from there.

The obvious difference now is how food blogs and food-centric websites offer more possible trends at a faster rate, whether it's Epicurious listing "16 Restaurants that count" or a contributor posting a picture of tuna tartare on Foodspotting.