Pork belly is particularly popular in American, British, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Hispanic, Filipino, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Thai cuisine.

In Dominican, Colombian, Venezuelan, and Puerto Rican cuisine, pork belly strips are fried and served as part of bandeja paisa surtido (chicharrón).

The word o (오; 五) in ogyeop-sal means 'five', referring to the five-layered pork belly meat with the skin.

The South Korean government planned to import 70,000 tons of pork belly with no tariff in the second half year of 2011.

Samgyeop-sal-gui (삼겹살구이) or ogyeop-sal-gui (오겹살구이) refers to the gui (grilled dish) of pork belly.

The tradition is to cook it slowly in the oven with the skin on and serve it accompanied by potatoes, medisterkake (pork meatballs similar to frikadeller), sausages, and lingonberry jam, as well as stewed cabbage (surkål), comparable to sauerkraut.

In Filipino cuisine, pork belly (Tagalog: liyempo; Philippine Spanish: liempo) is marinated in a mixture of crushed garlic, vinegar, salt, and pepper before being grilled.

For slow roast pork belly, the meat is baked at a moderate temperature for up to three hours to tenderize it, coupled with periods of approximately twenty minutes at a high temperature at the beginning or end of the cooking period to harden off the rind or "crackling".

It is frequently used as a pars pro toto synecdoche for commodities in general and appears in several depictions of the arena in popular entertainment, such as the 1983 film Trading Places.

[15] Inaugurated on August 18, 1961, on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), frozen pork belly futures were developed as a risk management device to meet the needs of meat packers who processed pork and had to contend with volatile hog prices, as well as price risks on processed products held in inventory.

Spot prices varied depending on the amount of inventory in cold storage, the seasonal demand for bacon, and the origin of the pork.

[citation needed] In more recent years, pork belly futures' prominence declined; eventually, they were among the least-traded contracts on the CME and were delisted for trading on July 18, 2011.