Yes, bacon really is killing us

Bee Wilson Thu 1 Mar 2018 06.00 GMT

There was a little cafe I used to go to that did the best bacon sandwiches.
They came in a soft and pillowy white bap. The bacon, thick-cut from a local
butcher, was midway between crispy and chewy. Ketchup and HP sauce were
served in miniature jars with the sandwich, so you could dab on the exact
amount you liked. That was all there was to it: just bread and bacon and
sauce. Eating one of these sandwiches, as I did every few weeks, with a cup of
strong coffee, felt like an uncomplicated pleasure.

And then, all of a sudden, the bacon sandwich stopped being quite so
comforting. For a few weeks in October 2015, half the people I knew were
talking about the news that eating bacon was now a proven cause of cancer.
You couldn’t miss the story: it was splashed large in every newspaper and all
over the web. As one journalist wrote in Wired, “Perhaps no two words
together are more likely to set the internet aflame than BACON and
CANCER.” The BBC website announced, matter-of-factly, that “Processed
meats do cause cancer”, while the Sun went with “Banger out of Order” and
“Killer in the Kitchen”.

The source of the story was an announcement from the World Health
Organization that “processed meats” were now classified as a group 1
carcinogen, meaning scientists were certain that there was “sufficient”
evidence that they caused cancer, particularly colon cancer. The warning
applied not just to British bacon but to Italian salami, Spanish chorizo,
German bratwurst and myriad other foods.

Health scares are ten-a-penny, but this one was very hard to ignore. The
WHO announcement came on advice from 22 cancer experts from 10
countries, who reviewed more than 400 studies on processed meat covering
epidemiological data from hundreds of thousands of people. It was now
possible to say that “eat less processed meat”, much like “eat more
vegetables”, had become one of the very few absolutely incontrovertible
pieces of evidence-based diet advice – not simply another high-profile
nutrition fad. As every news report highlighted, processed meat was now in a
group of 120 proven carcinogens, alongside alcohol, asbestos and tobacco –
leading to a great many headlines blaring that bacon was as deadly as
smoking.

The WHO advised that consuming 50g of processed meat a day – equivalent
to just a couple of rashers of bacon or one hotdog – would raise the risk of
getting bowel cancer by 18% over a lifetime. (Eating larger amounts raises
your risk more.) Learning that your own risk of cancer has increased from
something like 5% to something like 6% may not be frightening enough to put
you off bacon sandwiches for ever. But learning that consumption of
processed meat causes an additional 34,000 worldwide cancer deaths a year
is much more chilling. According to Cancer Research UK, if no one ate
processed or red meat in Britain, there would be 8,800 fewer cases of cancer.
(That is four times the number of people killed annually on Britain’s roads.)

The news felt especially shocking because both ham and bacon are
quintessentially British foods. Nearly a quarter of the adult population in
Britain eats a ham sandwich for lunch on any given day, according to data
from 2012 gathered by researchers Luke Yates and Alan Warde. To many
consumers, bacon is not just a food; it is a repository of childhood memories,
a totem of home. Surveys indicate that the smell of frying bacon is one of our
favourite scents in the UK, along with cut grass and fresh bread. To be told
that bacon had given millions of people cancer was a bit like finding out your
granny had been secretly sprinkling arsenic on your morning toast.

Vegetarians might point out that the bacon sandwich should never have been
seen as comforting. It is certainly no comfort for the pigs, most of whom are
kept in squalid, cramped conditions. But for the rest of us, it was alarming to
be told that these beloved foods might be contributing to thousands of
needless human deaths. In the weeks following news of the WHO report,
sales of bacon and sausages fell dramatically. British supermarkets reported a
£3m drop in sales in just a fortnight. (“It was very detrimental,” said Kirsty
Adams, the product developer for meat at Marks and Spencer.)

But just when it looked as if this may be #Bacongeddon (one of many

agonised bacon-related hashtags trending in October 2015), a second wave of
stories flooded in. Their message was: panic over. For one thing, the analogy
between bacon and smoking was misleading. Smoking tobacco and eating
processed meat are both dangerous, but not on the same scale. To put it in
context, around 86% of lung cancers are linked to smoking, whereas it seems
that just 21% of bowel cancers can be attributed to eating processed or red
meat. A few weeks after publishing the report, the WHO issued a clarification
insisting it was not telling consumers to stop eating processed meat.

Meanwhile, the meat industry was busily insisting that there was nothing to
see here. The North American Meat Institute, an industry lobby group, called
the report “dramatic and alarmist overreach”. A whole tranche of articles
insisted in a commonsense tone that it would be premature and foolish to
ditch our meaty fry-ups just because of a little cancer scare.

Nearly three years on, it feels like business as usual for processed meats.
Many of us seem to have got over our initial sense of alarm. Sales of bacon in
the UK are buoyant, having risen 5% in the two years up to mid-2016. When I
interviewed a product developer for Sainsbury’s supermarket last year, she
said that one of the quickest ways to get British consumers to try a new
product now was to add chorizo to it.

And yet the evidence linking bacon to cancer is stronger than ever. In
January, a new large-scale study using data from 262,195 British women
suggested that consuming just 9g of bacon a day – less than a rasher – could
significantly raise the risk of developing breast cancer later in life. The study’s
lead author, Jill Pell from the Institute of Health and Wellbeing at Glasgow
University, told me that while it can be counterproductive to push for total
abstinence, the scientific evidence suggests “it would be misleading” for
health authorities to set any safe dose for processed meat “other than zero”.

The real scandal of bacon, however, is that it didn’t have to be anything like
so damaging to our health. The part of the story we haven’t been told –
including by the WHO – is that there were always other ways to manufacture
these products that would make them significantly less carcinogenic. The fact
that this is so little known is tribute to the power of the meat industry, which
has for the past 40 years been engaged in a campaign of cover-ups and
misdirection to rival the dirty tricks of Big Tobacco.

How do you choose a pack of bacon in a shop, assuming you are a meat eater?
First, you opt for either the crispy fat of streaky or the leanness of back. Then
you decide between smoked or unsmoked – each version has its passionate
defenders (I am of the unsmoked persuasion). Maybe you seek out a packet
made from free-range or organic meat, or maybe your budget is squeezed and
you search for any bacon on special offer. Either way, before you put the pack
in your basket, you have one last look, to check if the meat is pink enough.

Since we eat with our eyes, the main way we judge the quality of cured meats
is pinkness. Yet it is this very colour that we should be suspicious of, as the
French journalist Guillaume Coudray explains in a book published in France
last year called Cochonneries, a word that means both “piggeries” and
“rubbish” or “junk food”. The subtitle is “How Charcuterie Became a Poison”.
Cochonneries reads like a crime novel, in which the processed meat industry
is the perpetrator and ordinary consumers are the victims.

The pinkness of bacon – or cooked ham, or salami – is a sign that it has been
treated with chemicals, more specifically with nitrates and nitrites. It is the
use of these chemicals that is widely believed to be the reason why “processed
meat” is much more carcinogenic than unprocessed meat. Coudray argues
that we should speak not of “processed meat” but “nitro-meat”.
Prosciutto di Parma has been produced without nitrates since 1993. Photograph: Stefano Rellandini/Reuters

“Pure insane crazy madness” is how Coudray described the continuing use of
nitrates and nitrites in processed meats, in an email to me. The madness, in
his view, is that it is possible to make bacon and ham in ways that would be
less carcinogenic. The most basic way to cure any meat is to salt it – either
with a dry salt rub or a wet brine – and to wait for time to do the rest.
Coudray notes that ham and bacon manufacturers claim this old-fashioned
way of curing isn’t safe. But the real reason they reject it is cost: it takes much
longer for processed meats to develop their flavour this way, which cuts into
profits.

There is much confusion about what “processed meat” actually means, a

confusion encouraged by the bacon industry, which benefits from us thinking
there is no difference between a freshly minced lamb kofta and a pizza
smothered in nitrate-cured pepperoni. Technically, processed meat means
pork or beef that has been salted and cured, with or without smoking. A fresh
pound of beef mince isn’t processed. A hard stick of cured salami is.

The health risk of bacon is largely to do with two food additives: potassium
nitrate (also known as saltpetre) and sodium nitrite. It is these that give
salamis, bacons and cooked hams their alluring pink colour. Saltpetre –
sometimes called sal prunella – has been used in some recipes for salted
meats since ancient times. As Jane Grigson explains in Charcuterie and
French Pork Cookery, saltpetre was traditionally used when brining hams to
give them “an attractive rosy appearance when otherwise it would be a murky
greyish brown”.

In earlier centuries, bacon-makers who used saltpetre did not understand

that it converts to nitrite as the meat cures. It is this nitrite that allows the
bacteria responsible for cured flavour to emerge quicker, by inhibiting the
growth of other bacteria. But in the early 20th century, the meat industry
found that the production of cured meats could be streamlined by adding
sodium nitrite to the pork in pure form. In trade journals of the 1960s, the
firms who sold nitrite powders to ham-makers spoke quite openly about how
the main advantage was to increase profit margins by speeding up
production. One French brand of sodium nitrite from the 60s was called
Vitorose or “quick-pink”.

Nitro-chemicals have been less of a boon to consumers. In and of themselves,

these chemicals are not carcinogenic. After all, nitrate is naturally present in
many green vegetables, including celery and spinach, something that bacon
manufacturers often jubilantly point out. As one British bacon-maker told
me, “There’s nitrate in lettuce and no one is telling us not to eat that!”

But something different happens when nitrates are used in meat processing.
When nitrates interact with certain components in red meat (haem iron,
amines and amides), they form N-nitroso compounds, which cause cancer.
The best known of these compounds is nitrosamine. This, as Guillaume
Coudray explained to me in an email, is known to be “carcinogenic even at a
very low dose”. Any time someone eats bacon, ham or other processed meat,
their gut receives a dose of nitrosamines, which damage the cells in the lining
of the bowel, and can lead to cancer.

You would not know it from the way bacon is sold, but scientists have known
nitrosamines are carcinogenic for a very long time. More than 60 years ago,
in 1956, two British researchers called Peter Magee and John Barnes found
that when rats were fed dimethyl nitrosamine, they developed malignant liver
tumours. By the 1970s, animal studies showed that small, repeated doses of
nitrosamines and nitrosamides – exactly the kind of regular dose a person
might have when eating a daily breakfast of bacon – were found to cause
tumours in many organs including the liver, stomach, oesophagus, intestines,
bladder, brain, lungs and kidneys.

Just because something is a carcinogen in rats and other mammals does not
mean it will cause cancer in humans, but as far back as 1976, cancer scientist
William Lijinsky argued that “we must assume” that these N-nitroso
compounds found in meats such as bacon were also “carcinogens for man”. In
the years since, researchers have gathered a massive body of evidence to lend
weight to that assumption. In 1994, to take just one paper among hundreds
on nitrosamines and cancer, two American epidemiologists found that eating
hotdogs one or more times a week was associated with higher rates of
childhood brain cancer, particularly for children who also had few vitamins in
their diets.

In 1993, Parma ham producers in Italy made a collective decision to remove

nitrates from their products and revert to using only salt, as in the old days.
For the past 25 years, no nitrates or nitrites have been used in any Prosciutto
di Parma. Even without nitrate or nitrite, the Parma ham stays a deep rosy-
pink colour. We now know that the colour in Parma ham is totally harmless, a
result of the enzyme reactions during the ham’s 18-month ageing process.

Slow-cured, nitrate-free, artisan hams are one thing, but what about mass-
market meats? Eighteen months would be “a long time to wait on hotdogs”,
as the food science expert Harold McGee comments. But there have always
been recipes for nitrate-free bacon using nothing but salt and herbs. John
Gower of Quiet Waters Farm, a pork producer who advises many British
manufacturers of cured meats, confirms that nitrate is not a necessary
ingredient in bacon: “It’s generally accepted that solid muscle products, as
opposed to chopped meat products like salami, don’t require the addition of
nitrate for safety reasons.”

Bacon is proof, if it were needed, that we cling to old comforts long after they
have been proven harmful. The attachment of producers to nitrates in bacon
is mostly “cultural”, says Gower. Bacon cured by traditional methods without
nitrates and nitrites will lack what Gower calls that “hard-to-define tang, that
delicious almost metallic taste” that makes bacon taste of bacon to British
consumers. Bacon without nitrates, says Gower, is nothing but “salt pork”.

Given the harm of “nitro-meat” has been known for so long, the obvious
question is why more has not been done to protect us from it. Corinna
Hawkes, a professor of Food Policy at City University in London, has been
predicting for years that processed meats will be “the next sugar” – a food so
harmful that there will be demands for government agencies to step in and
protect us. Some day soon, Hawkes believes, consumers will finally wake up
to the clear links between cancer and processed meat and say “Why didn’t
someone tell me about this?”

The most amazing thing about the bacon panic of 2015 was that it took so
long for official public health advice to turn against processed meat. It could
have happened 40 years earlier. The only time that the processed meat
industry has looked seriously vulnerable was during the 1970s, a decade that
saw the so-called “war on nitrates” in the US. In an era of Ralph Nader-style
consumer activism, there was a gathering mood in favour of protecting
shoppers against bacon – which one prominent public health scientist called
“the most dangerous food in the supermarket”. In 1973, Leo Freedman, the
chief toxicologist of the US Food and Drug Administration, confirmed to the
New York Times that “nitrosamines are a carcinogen for humans” although
he also mentioned that he liked bacon “as well as anybody”.

The US meat industry realised it had to act fast to protect bacon against the
cancer charge. The first attempts to fight back were simply to ridicule the
scientists for over-reacting. In a 1975 article titled “Factual look at bacon
scare”, Farmers Weekly insisted that a medium-weight man would have to
consume more than 11 tonnes of bacon every single day to run the faintest
risk of cancer. This was an outrageous fabrication.

But soon the meat lobby came up with a cleverer form of diversion. The AMI
– the American Meat Institute – started to make the argument that the
nitrate was only there for the consumer’s own safety, to ward off botulism – a
potentially fatal toxin sometimes produced by poorly preserved foods. The
scientific director of the AMI argued that a single cup of botulism would be
enough to wipe out every human on the planet. So, far from harming lives,
bacon was actually saving them.
In 1977, the FDA and the US Department of Agriculture gave the meat
industry three months to prove that nitrate and nitrite in bacon caused no
harm. “Without a satisfactory response,” Coudray writes, “these additives
would have to be replaced 36 months later with non-carcinogenic methods.”
The meat industry could not prove that nitrosamines were not carcinogenic –
because it was already known that they were. Instead, the argument was
made that nitrates and nitrites were utterly essential for the making of bacon,
because without them bacon would cause thousands of deaths from botulism.
In 1978, in response to the FDA’s challenge, Richard Lyng, director of the
AMI, argued that nitrites are to processed meat “as yeast is to bread”.

The meat industry’s tactics in defending bacon have been “right out of the
tobacco industry’s playbook”, according to Marion Nestle, professor of
nutrition and food studies at New York University. The first move is: attack
the science. By the 1980s, the AMI was financing a group of scientists based
at the University of Wisconsin. These meat researchers published a stream of
articles casting doubt on the harmfulness of nitrates and exaggerating the risk
from botulism of non-nitrated hams.

Does making ham without nitrite lead to botulism? If so, it is a little strange
that in the 25 years that Parma ham has been made without nitrites, there has
not been a single case of botulism associated with it. Almost all the cases of
botulism from preserved food – which are extremely rare – have been the
result of imperfectly preserved vegetables, such as bottled green beans, peas
and mushrooms. The botulism argument was a smokescreen. The more that
consumers could be made to feel that the harmfulness of nitrate and nitrite in
bacon and ham was still a matter of debate, the more they could be
encouraged to calm down and keep buying bacon.

A bacon sandwich at a diner in Michigan. Photograph: Molly Riley/Reuters

The botulism pretext was very effective. The AMI managed to get the FDA to
keep delaying its three-month ultimatum on nitrites until a new FDA
commissioner was appointed in 1980 – one more sympathetic to hotdogs.
The nitrite ban was shelved. The only concession the industry had made was
to limit the percentage of nitrites added to processed meat and to agree to
add vitamin C, which would supposedly mitigate the formation of
nitrosamines, although it does nothing to prevent the formation of another
known carcinogen, nitrosyl-haem.

Over the years, the messages challenging the dangers of bacon have become
ever more outlandish. An explainer article by the Meat Science and Muscle
Biology lab at the University of Wisconsin argues that sodium nitrite is in fact
“critical for maintaining human health by controlling blood pressure,
preventing memory loss, and accelerating wound healing”. A French meat
industry website, info-nitrites.fr, argues that the use of the “right dose” of
nitrites in ham guarantees “healthy and safe” products, and insists that ham
is an excellent food for children.

The bacon lobby has also found surprising allies among the natural foods
brigade. Type “nitrate cancer bacon” into Google, and you will find a number
of healthy eating articles, some of them written by advocates of the “Paleo”
diet, arguing that bacon is actually a much-maligned health food. The writers
often mention that vegetables are the primary source of nitrates, and that
human saliva is high in nitrite. One widely shared article claims that giving up
bacon would be as absurd as attempting to stop swallowing. Out of the mass
of stuff on the internet defending the healthiness of bacon, it can be hard to
tell which writers have fallen under the sway of the meat lobby, and which are
simply clueless “nutrition experts” who don’t know any better.

Either way, this misinformation has the potential to make thousands of

people unwell. The mystifying part is why the rest of us have been so willing
to accept the cover-up.

Our deepening knowledge of its harm has done very little to damage the
comforting cultural associations of bacon. While I was researching this
article, I felt a rising disgust at the repeated dishonesty of the processed meat
industry. I thought about hospital wards and the horrible pain and indignity
of bowel cancer. But then I remembered being in the kitchen with my father
as a child on a Sunday morning, watching him fry bacon. When all the bacon
was cooked, he would take a few squares of bread and fry them in the meaty
fat until they had soaked up all its goodness.

In theory, our habit of eating salted and cured meats should have died out as
soon as home refrigerators became widespread in the mid-20th century. But
tastes in food are seldom rational, and millions of us are still hooked on the
salty, smoky, umami savour of sizzling bacon.

We are sentimental about bacon in a way we never were with cigarettes, and
this stops us from thinking straight. The widespread willingness to forgive
pink, nitrated bacon for causing cancer illustrates how torn we feel when
something beloved in our culture is proven to be detrimental to health. Our
brains can’t cope with the horrid feeling that bacon is not what we thought it
was, and so we turn our anger outwards to the health gurus warning us of its
hazards. The reaction of many consumers to the WHO report of 2015 was:
hands off my bacon!

In 2010, the EU considered banning the use of nitrates in organic meats.

Perhaps surprisingly, the British organic bacon industry vigorously opposed
the proposed nitrates ban. Richard Jacobs, the late chief executive of Organic
Farmers & Growers, an industry body, said that prohibiting nitrate and nitrite
would have meant the “collapse” of a growing market for organic bacon.

Organic bacon produced with nitrates sounds like a contradiction in terms,

given that most consumers of organic food buy it out of concerns for food
safety. Having gone to the trouble of rearing pigs using free-range methods
and giving them only organic feed, why would you then cure the meat in ways
that make it carcinogenic? In Denmark, all organic bacon is nitrate-free. But
the UK organic industry insisted that British shoppers would be unlikely to
accept bacon that was ‘“greyish”.
Then again, the slowness of consumers to lose our faith in pink bacon may
partly be a response to the confusing way that the health message has been
communicated to us. When it comes to processed meat, we have been misled
not just by wild exaggerations of the food industry but by the caution of
science.

On the WHO website, the harmfulness of nitrite-treated meats is explained so

opaquely you could miss it altogether. In the middle of a paragraph on “what
makes red meat and processed meat increase the risk of cancer”, it says: “For
instance, carcinogenic chemicals that form during meat processing include N-
nitroso compounds.” What this means, in plain English, is that nitrites make
bacon more carcinogenic. But instead of spelling this out, the WHO moves
swiftly on to the question of how both red and processed meats might cause
cancer, after adding that “it is not yet fully understood how cancer risk is
increased”.

The typical British sausage does not fall into the ‘processed meat’ category. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP

This caution has kept us as consumers unnecessarily in the dark. Consider

sausages. For years, I believed that the unhealthiest part in a cooked English
breakfast was the sausage, rather than the bacon. Before I started to research
this article, I’d have sworn that sausages fell squarely into the “processed
meat” category. They are wrongly listed as such on the NHS website.

But the average British sausage – as opposed to a hard sausage like a French
saucisson – is not cured, being made of nothing but fresh meat, breadcrumbs,
herbs, salt and E223, a preservative that is non-carcinogenic. After much
questioning, two expert spokespeople for the US National Cancer Institute
confirmed to me that “one might consider” fresh sausages to be “red meat”
and not processed meat, and thus only a “probable” carcinogen. (To me, the
fact that most sausages are not processed meat was deeply cheering, and set
me dancing around the kitchen with glee thinking about toad in the hole.)

In general, if you ask a cancer scientist to distinguish between the risks of

eating different types of meat, they become understandably cagey. The two
experts at the National Cancer Institute told me that meats containing nitrites
and nitrates have “consistently been associated with increased risk of colon
cancer” in human studies. But they added that “it is difficult to separate
nitrosamines from other possible carcinogens that may be present in
processed meats like bacon”. These other suspects include haem iron – a
substance that is abundant in all red meat, processed or not – and
heterocyclic amines: chemicals that form in meat during cooking. A piece of
crispy, overcooked bacon will contain multiple carcinogens, and not all are
due to the nitrates.

The problem with this reasoning, as I see it, is that it can’t account for why
processed meat is so much more closely linked to cancer than cooked red
meat. For that, there remains no plausible explanation except for nitrates and
nitrites. But looking for clear confirmation of this in the data is tricky, given
that humans do not eat in labs under clinical observation.

Most of what we know about processed meat and cancer in humans comes
from epidemiology – the study of disease across whole populations. But
epidemiologists do not ask the kind of detailed questions about food that the
people who eat that food may like answers to. The epidemiological data –
based on surveys of what people eat – is now devastatingly clear that diets
high in “processed meats” lead to a higher incidence of cancer. But it can’t tell
us how or why or which meats are the best or worst. As Corinna Hawkes of
City University comments, “The researchers don’t ask you if you are eating
artisanal charcuterie from the local Italian deli or the cheapest hotdogs on the
planet.”

I would love to see data comparing the cancer risk of eating nitrate-free
Parma ham with that of traditional bacon, but no epidemiologist has yet done
such a study. The closest anyone has come was a French study from 2015,
which found that consumption of nitrosylated haem iron – as found in
processed meats – had a more direct association with colon cancer than the
haem iron that is present in fresh red meat.

It may be possible that epidemiologists have not asked people more detailed
questions about what kind of processed meats they eat because they assume
there is no mass-market alternative to bacon made without nitrates or
nitrites. But this is about to change.

The technology now exists to make the pink meats we love in a less damaging
form, which raises the question of why the old kind is still so freely sold. Ever
since the “war on nitrates” of the 1970s, US consumers have been more savvy
about nitrates than those in Europe, and there is a lot of “nitrate-free bacon”
on the market. The trouble, as Jill Pell remarks, is that most of the bacon
labelled as nitrate-free in the US “isn’t nitrate-free”. It’s made with nitrates
taken from celery extract, which may be natural, but produces exactly the
same N-nitroso compounds in the meat. Under EU regulation, this bacon
would not be allowed to be labelled “nitrate-free”.

“It’s the worst con I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” says Denis Lynn, the chair
of Finnebrogue Artisan, a Northern Irish company that makes sausages for
many UK supermarkets, including Marks & Spencer. For years, Lynn had
been hoping to diversify into bacon and ham but, he says, “I wasn’t going to
do it until we found a way to do it without nitrates.”

When Lynn heard about a new process, developed in Spain, for making
perfectly pink, nitrate-free bacon, he assumed it was another blind alley. In
2009, Juan de Dios Hernandez Canovas, a food scientist and the head of the
food tech company Prosur, found that if he added certain fruit extracts to
fresh pork, it stayed pink for a surprisingly long time.

In January 2018, Finnebrogue used this technology to launch genuinely

nitrate-free bacon and ham in the UK. It is sold in Sainsbury’s and Waitrose
as “Naked Bacon” and “Naked Ham”, and in M&S as “made without nitrites”.
Kirsty Adams, who oversaw its launch at M&S, explains that “it’s not really
cured”. It’s more like a fresh salted pork injected with a fruit and vegetable
extract, and is more perishable than an old-fashioned flitch of bacon – but
that doesn’t matter, given that it is kept in a fridge. Because it is quick to
produce, this is much more “economically viable” to make than some of the
other nitrate-free options, such as slow-cured Parma ham. The bacon
currently sells in Waitrose for £3 a pack, which is not the cheapest, but not
prohibitive either.

I tried some of the Finnebrogue bacon from M&S. The back bacon tasted
pleasant and mild, with a slight fruitiness. It didn’t have the toothsome
texture or smoky depth of a rasher of butcher’s dry-cured bacon, but I’d
happily buy it again as an alternative to “nitro-meat”. None of my family
noticed the difference in a spaghetti amatriciana.

Nitrite-free bacon still sounds a bit fancy and niche, but there shouldn’t be
anything niche about the desire to eat food that doesn’t raise your risk of
cancer. Lynn says that when he first approached Prosur about the fruit
extract, he asked how much they had sold to the other big bacon
manufacturers during the two years they had been offering it in the UK. The
answer was none. “None of the big guys wanted to take it,” claims Lynn.
“They said: ‘It will make our other processed meats look dodgy’”.

But it also remains to be seen how much consumer demand there will be for
nitrite- or nitrate-free bacon. For all the noise about bacon and cancer, it isn’t
easy to disentangle at a personal level just what kind of risk we are at when
we eat a bacon sandwich. OK, so 34,000 people may die each year because of
processed meat in their diet, but the odds are that it won’t be you. I asked a
series of cancer scientists whether they personally ate processed meat, and
they all gave slightly different answers. Jill Pell said she was mostly
vegetarian and ate processed meats very rarely. But when I asked Fabrice
Pierre, a French expert on colon cancer and meat, if he eats ham, he replied:
“Yes, of course. But with vegetables at the same meal.” (Pierre’s research at
the Toxalim lab has shown him that some of the carcinogenic effects of ham
can be offset by eating vegetables.)

Our endless doubt and confusion about what we should be eating have been a
gift to the bacon industry. The cover-up about the harm of meat cured with
nitrates and nitrites has been helped along by the scepticism many of us feel
about all diet advice. At the height of the great bacon scare of 2015, lots of
intelligent voices were saying that it was safe to ignore the new classification
of processed meats as carcinogenic, because you can’t trust anything these
nutritionists say. Meanwhile, millions of consumers of ham and bacon, many
of them children, are left unprotected. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing
about this controversy is how little public outrage it has generated. Despite
everything, most of us still treat bacon as a dear old friend.

In an ideal world, we would all be eating diets lower in meat, processed or

otherwise, for the sake of sustainability and animal welfare as much as health.
But in the world we actually live in, processed meats are still a normal, staple
protein for millions of people who can’t afford to swap a value pack of frying
bacon for a few slivers of Prosciutto di Parma. Around half of all meat eaten
in developed countries is now processed, according to researcher John
Kearney, making it a far more universal habit than smoking.

The real victims in all this are not people like me who enjoy the occasional
bacon-on-sourdough in a hipster cafe. The people who will be worst affected
are those – many on low incomes – for whom the cancer risk from bacon is
compounded by other risk factors such as eating low-fibre diets with few
vegetables or wholegrains. In his book, Coudray points out that in coming
years, millions more poor consumers will be affected by preventable colon
cancer, as westernised processed meats conquer the developing world.

Last month, Michele Rivasi, a French MEP, launched a campaign – in

collaboration with Coudray – demanding a ban of nitrites from all meat
products across Europe. Given how vigorously the bacon industry has fought
its corner thus far, a total ban on nitrites looks unlikely.
But there are other things that could be done about the risk of nitrites and
nitrates in bacon, short of an absolute veto. Better information would be a
start. As Corinna Hawkes points out, it is “surprising” that there hasn’t been
more of an effort from government to inform people about the risks of eating
ham and bacon, perhaps through warning labels on processed meats. But
where is the British politician brave enough to cast doubt on bacon?

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