I didn’t realise quite how much I loved bacon, pancetta, chorizo and ham until the World Health Organization added processed meats to its list of carcinogens in 2015. Those salty, chewy pancetta chunks that send a mushroom risotto stratospheric – if I can resist scoffing the lot before the rice is cooked. The crumbly grain of Christmas ham carved off the bone. Translucent chorizo slices on holiday with a sip of red wine, or fried with potatoes, coating them with red umami oil. I am that disgusting person who dips her fingers in the pan after cooking bacon, to savour the salty melted fat.
Perhaps the health risks aren’t as scary as they sound as long as you’re not eating the stuff every day. But plenty are. Britain is a nation of bacon bap breakfasters, with ham sandwiches a lunchbox staple. We serve these foods in our hospitals and our schools, and once I’d read the cancer news I couldn’t unknow it. I went from thinking of charcuterie as traditional and natural – the stuff of bustling Saturday farmers’ markets – to shunning it as toxic. Once I started checking the ingredients, I saw that even the farmers’ market stuff contained nitrates and/or nitrites. When meat with these additives is cooked and eaten, carcinogenic N-nitroso compounds (NOCs) such as nitrosamine are formed.
