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So, the World Health Organization came out earlier this week saying that eating bacon, sausage and a number of other nitrate-heavy deli meats is the equivalent of smoking cigarettes.
If you heard the news, you probably just shrugged your shoulders and said “Ah well, what can you do? There are so few pleasures in life already.”
At least that is what 99.9 percent of the people have said to me when I have mentioned to them that eating a pound of bacon with their Saturday morning eggs and bucket of hash browns probably wasn’t the best health decision they could be making.
We’ve known for at least 30 years that nitrate-filled meats are carcinogenic. Bacon has always been on the Cancer Society’s top 10 list of foods you should seriously limit in your diet.
That bacon, sausages and deli meats cause cancer was one of the first big impetuses behind the first mainstream vegetarian movement of the 1980s. But if you are old enough to have been there, you know that by the mid-90s most of us had gone full circle back to our meats—as our addiction overcame our rational knowledge that we were killing ourselves.
We quietly admitted our helplessness in the face of a morning plate of crispy bacon—nice and hot—oh, the smell of frying bacon, it’s Pavlovian wonder!
What’s better than Saturday morning bacon in bed, while your lover smokes her post-coitus cigarette? That’s right—nothing!
I’ve seen people weep with joy over my morning scrambled eggs and bacon. Weep!
How do I turn the stove off in the face of such joy?
Of course we could go nitrate-free by raising our own pigs, slit their throats ourselves and butcher our own preservative-free bacon. But the thought of a neighborhood full of screaming pigs and blood-drenched backyards would just turn many of us into born-again vegetarians.
Best if that messiness is kept hidden behind the high bricked walls of the abattoir slaughter-house.
No, best to file ‘bacon=smoking’ away in the same part of the brain where we have already filed ‘barbecue=smoking,’ ‘eating fast food=smoking’ and ‘processed foods=smoking.’
It’s best not to think about the fact that 60 perent of all the food crops grown in the world are grown simply to feed our livestock.
It’s best not to think that it takes 40 gallons of water to produce one hamburger.
Or that a rainforest landscape the size of Greece is destroyed every five years so we can produce cheap cans of beef stew and a $1.50 hamburgers on every street corner across the land.
It’s best also not to think about the fact that after our consumption of oil, corporate agro-business is the next largest contributor to climate change on the planet.
What we eat, and how we grow it, is literally killing the world, and us as well.
But hey, it’s Saturday morning, and you’ve just finished another week of too much work in too little time, and you just want to sit down with your coffee (don’t ask where this came from either), your eggs (chicken factory hell eggs) and your [scream-free] bacon…maybe a little music and the Saturday paper.
“Screw it! Throw on a couple of extra slices. And make mine extra crispy.”
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This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4, 2015.
Maybe its as simple as it tastes good?
Bacon IS sexy. Tripe, on the other hand, remains as gag-inducing as it sounds.
You know, it is a lot easier to point the fingers at consumers and working people, as this author is doing, rather than attack the bigger issue here. Can a regular person be blamed that they want bacon, eggs and coffee on Saturday after working all week? Is that unreasonable? How is it their fault that the food oligarchs use highly questionable practices? How is it their fault that agribusiness is horrendous? It’s like criticizing poor people for shopping at Wal Mart. To me, this lifestyle activism reeks of a very middle class approach – voting with your dollars sort of thing. I call bullshit. Attack the big boys, not the little people who are just trying to make it. You want to fix food production practices? Aim your arguments at the corporations, not the guy who wants bacon after working all week.
“What we eat, and how we grow it, is literally killing the world, and us as well. ” Hope you’re including the pesticide laden GMO fruit and veg that the supermarkets sell in that. Face it, there’s no perfect way to feed millions of people. No, I’ll continue my once a week indulgence of bacon and savour every bit of it. Vegetables, no matter how you prepare them, are not satisfying. They’re eaten because they have to be for health. Nobody eats them for enjoyment. There’s nothing wrong with eating meat in moderation. WHO even came out after this recent news and said that they don’t expect people stop eating meat. Just need to cut back to more reasonable portions. You seem to be on a high horse; maybe you should work on your delivery if you’re hoping to convert meat eaters to your side. Good luck.
Hmmm, yes, I will totally take seriously anything this smug man who submitted a photo of himself holding his hand up to his bemused face laughing at our lack of understanding says, absolutely. He is 100% not a douchebag.
http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/…
If you are part of western society you are part of the problem, period. If I leave, someone will just take my place so… Weeeeeeeeee!
This lost me in the first paragraph – the is only a very limited sense in which that study said that processed and red meat “is the equivalent of smoking cigarettes.” As in – it is not equivalent in its effects on human health.
And if we were going back to a sustainable way of living, we might well be slitting our own pigs throats, but we’d also be making them into ham and bacon so they don’t rot and become disgusting and kill us.