Besides being pretty bad for you, factory farming of pigs is extremely brutal to the pigs themselves [1]. It's best to avoid all pork products, including bacon. Also, considering all the recent talk about being humane to octopuses considering their intelligence, the same should go for pigs [2].
Also they are shitty and the quality of their meat is shitty. Gqve it a real try and was very disappointed from onboarding to delivery to actual product.
Yes, I have recently stopped eating pigs for similar reasons. I live in the UK and was horrified to find they are killed by CO2 gas. I am lucky enough to experience breathing in my own CO2, and I can tell you that it feels like you're suffocating. Your main respiratory drive is driven by CO2 levels and it induces panic and heavy breathing.
Aside from how they die, pigs are pretty intelligent animals, and I think an adult pig is similar in mental capacity to a 6 yr old or higher.
If they lived better fulfilling lives and died peacefully I might feel like I could eat pork. But not at the moment.
Actually it becomes a rabbit-hole. I then discovered how baby male chicks are killed...
At the moment I feel like eating meat requires a mental disconnect from the suffering if the animal and what we think is ok, and the act of eating food.
Farm beside me when I was growing up would kill them with a sledgehammer. So, err, yeah. I'm less concerned about the death (as long as it's over as quickly as possible) than the living conditions.
Either way, I'm basically vegetarian these days. I'll pay for something someone promises me is really organic acorn fed pork or some kind of super happy cow, but I'm not even really sure how much I believe that anymore.
Venison, however, I think is basically guilt free. It's never farmed (at least, where I am from) and it tastes better than beef..
> Venison, however, I think is basically guilt free.
Yes, but only for sociopaths who can not feel guilt.
I live in a rural area, farmland and timber. Hunters come for deer in season, whenever that was. Coming home at a certain time in the evening, I always seemed to interrupt some does and fawns crossing the road in the same place, so I know to be cautious and drive slow. But lately it had seemed to me that I never see any deer, which is unusual. Two weeks ago, I'm out early at sunup, I turn a corner, and I see about 40 fawns in a field, they all look up at me at the same time, then dart across the field. There isn't one there that's more than a year old. No deer, just a large amount of fawns. So this last season the hunters apparently killed every deer in the area. All that are left are the fawns, dozens and dozens of them, motherless. Seeing all those fawns was the saddest thing I have witnessed in recent memory.
Hunting is not good, and those that hunt, suck, for the needless killing for sport, but also for their extreme, unbounded entitlement. If someone can't enjoy themselves without killing something, there is something terribly wrong with them. But with any luck, they'll all die of rectal cancer.
Saying pigs are smart as a human six years old sounded pretty crazy so I looked it up. Mostly I see claims that they are comparable to a human three year old. A six year old can hold basic conversations, they are starting to learn how to read and write, starting basic arithmetic. No way pigs are even close to six year old.
You will be happy to know at least one company started sexing chickens before they even hatch by pricking with a needle and taking a very small sample of the egg prior to it really developing. That way they don’t have to birth male chicks and avoid culling them.
I'm not arguing against your main point, but I believe all the recent talk about being humane to octopi is just giving them the same treatment as pigs. Which can be pretty piss poor as you note, but now you can't boil it alive.
What possible reason is there to boil an octopus alive?
I come from a shellfish village, and we would do our lobsters this way all my life -- we would put them in headfirst which I guess maybe slightly reduces the time they suffer (although -- personally -- when I am doing it, I kill them with a knife to the brain before they go into the water these days)..
I'm no expert on cooking octopus, I'm saying that the recent hubbub about being humane to octopi gave them the same treatment we currently give pigs, things like a humane slaughter. Your statement seemed to imply we should give pigs the same treatment as octopi.
Pigs have always received better treatment, even though they often receive terrible treatment. Octopi are served live in some places still.
On a practical note, I'm struggling more and more to find dishes that I would even put pork in. At this point, the only pork dish I eat is pulled pork and that's not exactly something you can make a staple in your diet without some serious work at home.
Pulled pork in a slow cooker is quite easy to make. Brown it in a pan, put in the slow cooker with seasoning, four hours later, pull it. (It’s not a staple for us, but it’s in the regular rotation and I’d put it as slightly less total effort than most of our family meals.)
These trade associations lobby the government to codify these deceptive rules, or like our nonsense serving sizes they all do it in unison so when the food companies are busy deceiving everyone with their package labeling they can say “Hey we’re just following the law!” or “We’re just following industry standards!”
Trade associations do this, too [EDIT: directly, that is, not just via lobbying]. I once saw someone on this very site (weakly, to be fair to the poster) defend Google's poor labeling of their ads on the search screen with something along the lines of "they're just following the guidelines set forth by [trade association]".
Which is exactly the reaction they try to get by laundering their preferences through trade associations. That's the point. An illusion of some kind of authority keeping companies in check, while actually it's those very companies setting the rules, to deflect criticism and stave off actual regulation.
Serving sizes are set to a standardized size so you can compare equal portions between products. So if you want to know which type of potato chip has lower salt, they both list “8 oz” as the serving size, even if one bag has 10 oz and the other has 12 oz. Then you can easily tell which one you want.
You don’t seem to be getting the point. The idea is so you can compare the nutritional value using a standard measurement size, no matter how big the bottle is. Knowing how much sodium is in something is not very useful when shopping if you can’t compare it to other products on the shelf.
The main issue is really the term “serving size”, as it implies that what’s in the package is a single “serving”. (And this confusion only applies to smaller, convenience size packages. Nobody would think a party size bag of chips is a single “serving”).
If they called it something else, like “sample size”, it might not be so bad. However it’s also difficult to come up with a succinct word to describe it.
I was going to comment to say something like this. Intuitively this seems like a simple problem that has been deliberately complicated to provide some wiggle room for the producers.
And the government happily agrees because a) more scope creep, more budget, more better and b) easy political brownie points from the portion of the population that think the government should be involved in everything. When was the last time you heard a government agency say "no we don't want to be responsible for managing the definition of some already somewhat nebulously defined industry product, doing that is not an effective use of resources in light of our mandate"?
> the government happily agrees because a) more scope creep, more budget, more better
The people deciding on the budget and bloviating about the budget are not the ones paid by that budget. And the people paid are not generally highly regarded or zealously consulted by the bloviators (well, different bloviators have different favorite budgets), so their agreement is immaterial to the decision.
Use it or lose it budgeting creates a massive incentive to burn money on all sorts of things, including scope creep.
The people actually making the decisions on whether or not to accept the scope creep don't need to be told by the political appointees at the top whether they should because if they weren't capable of reading the political winds they wouldn't have ascended to decision making positions in a government bureaucracy.
Sodium nitrites are a sinus headache trigger for me. I tried the uncured stuff and got a headache. After a little research I learned about celery powder naturally having it. Really disingenuous way to market it. I still eat pork belly (actually uncured bacon) regularly.
Eating almost exclusively at home and an food allergy dedicated restaurant. After still getting headaches I asked the owner and he pointed out the pepperoni. Tested independently with deli meat and bacon.
Best advice is to do an elimination diet. It improved for me then it was years of trial and error. I basically just eat meat, rice, milk, butter, and broccoli now but not wanting to take a drill to my forehead is great.
Nitrates are in everything. That's part of the point of this article: you can cure bacon with celery extract. Anyways, this subthread begs the question. What we're debating is the health risk of nitrates. The parent comment asks, essentially, "do nitrates matter? bacon is already unhealthy".
Pork isn't especially unhealthy, it's just that everything you learned about nutrition in the 90s was a lie. You don't actually have to follow the food pyramid and eat an entire loaf of bread a day.
Bacon may be unhealthy since it's generally burnt to a crisp and has more oxidants.
Bacon is ~40% fat. The sodium is probably carcinogenic in addition to any compounds developed in cooking.
A lot of nutrition science has changed recently, but eating a bunch of saturated fat is still generally believed cause cardiovascular disease.
I think there's evidence that keto and even carnivore can work for some people. Ted Naiman seems more sustainable/evidence-based to me if you want to eat animal protein.
> A lot of nutrition science has changed recently, but eating a bunch of saturated fat is still generally believed cause cardiovascular disease.
The specifically interesting part of nutrition science changes is that we've discovered how individualized this is. Same with salt intake.
Some people can pack away 10g of sodium per day with no deleterious effects on their blood pressure. Others respond very poorly to it.
Some people can raw slonk a dozen egg yolks or 1/4lb of lard and see no appreciable rise in serum total cholesterol or LDL levels. Others cannot.
The main thing we've learned is that dietary advice based on broad population studies will tell you precisely nothing about how good or bad a given food is for your specific metabolism, epigenetic expression, and physiology. We should all go for differential blood panels in our teens or early twenties to determine this up front. A thousand dollars to save a hundred times that later down the road.
Raw dough/batter is a one-off risk. If that one batch wasn't contaminated, you're safe. Insofar as nitrates are a risk, they're more of a cumulative chronic exposure sort of risk.
Is the cumulative risk on the order of 0.01% to 0.1%? Or is it like 1% to 10%? If it's the former, then it's not worth thinking about. If it's the latter, I may change my behavior. Or it could be expressed via expected life years lost. If 1 year, eh. If it's 10 years, that's another story. Also how much would need to be consumed. Are we talking about bacon every day? Or once a week? Or month?
I have no idea whether it even is a risk. My point was that it’s very hard to compare the two examples because they’re very different risk profiles, irrespective of the magnitude of their effects
The article speaks specifically about colorectal cancer:
>found that every 50 grams of processed meat per day upped the risk by 18 percent
18% sounds like a big increase, and it is a big increase from a relative standpoint. But the absolute risk goes from 5% lifetime risk to 6% lifetime risk in the linked study.
So is alcohol, salted fish, and potatoes, and so are a bunch of toxic chemicals that aren't an expected component of foods that we nevertheless ingest in trace amounts; the dose makes the poison.
Its true that the dose makes the poison and in the case of processed meats, the dose that people normally eat is enough to increase their risk of bowel and stomach cancer. Its telling that you are comparing it to alcohol, another substance that many people drink cancer-causing amounts of.
I believe the acrylamide that forms in roasted or fried potatoes is only a probable carcinogen and only causes cancer in studies with doses much higher than people eat.
I don't get while actual uncured bacon i.e. fresh pork belly is not more popular. Just add salt and fry and in my opinion it tastes even better than cured bacon.
There are large numbers of dishes in Europe and Asia that are negatively impacted from the smoky taste in bacon when used as a replacement for pork belly. Pork belly isn't only just good for a side at breakfast or a topping on a sandwich.
Of course not. My question was about how equivalent pork belly is to bacon. It appears that they are only vaguely equivalent. If I wanted some fatty pork, pork belly would be a good choice. If I wanted bacon, pork belly is not a substitute. thank you for the suggestion.
We do that. While it's good, it's not as good as cured meats, where spices have had the time to soak in, the surface saltiness only stay for a few bites. I'd try marinating it, but I'm unsure about possible health risk in leaving opened raw pork in unprotected air for any amount of time.
The solution is to braise it (e.g. red braised pork belly) until it becomes tender enough to melt in your mouth. Usually you add some soy sauce and spices to the braising liquid to give it the saltiness and flavor.
Bacon is the one meat most people seem to like burnt. Personally, if there's no fat to chew on, I don't want that bacon. Which means I almost never order it at a restaurant (unless actual pork belly is on the menu, which is easily among my favorite foods).
I've tried many times to like pork belly - particularly in Chinese food - but I find the thick layer of fat often left on it to be thoroughly unappetizing. I don't mind fat left on most meats but I can't deal with that stuff.
Important to the cooking process, not important to the final dish if the texture is off-putting. If you make it at home, just remove before incorporating.
This is not even the first time this deceptive practice has been employed in the US food industry, lets call it the joy of regulatory capture.
Back in the 80s, when "fat-free" became a potent marketing lever, the food manufacturing lobby got the FDA to rule that if the fat content per serving was less than 1 gram, it was close enough to zero to call it fat free.
The problem was they were careful not to define or regulate "portion size" such that they were selling conventional Oleo as "Fat-Free Margarine" where the portion size was dialed down enough to contain no more than .99 grams of fat, when it was as burdened with lipids and unhealthy as any other margarine.
Interesting. While the nitrate/nitrite issue may actually be worse, I prefer the taste of "uncured" salami, particularly the applegate brand (mentioned in TFA) but also others. Good to know it may actually be worse from the nitrite perspective.
I guess I don't eat enough bacon to have formed an opinion on that.
It doesn’t have pink salt in it. Or sodium erythorbate. Pink salt gives me headaches. I don’t add sodium erythorbate to anything I cook, and I don’t expect it to be in anything I eat.
Bacon without headaches is healthier bacon (for me). End of story.
Pink salt contains sodium nitrate. Curing in pink salt uses a measured, known amount of sodium nitrate. Curing bacon without pink salt requires another source of sodium nitrate. By far the most common is celery powder, although celery seed is also used sometimes. Unfortunately, the amount of nitrates in celery varies quite a bit, so to make sure that your "uncured" bacon cures properly you need to use enough celery so that, in the worst case, there's enough nitrate -- which means that in the normal case, the nitrate levels end up much higher.
If sodium nitrate is the content of pink salt that causes your headaches, one would expect a similar or greater amount of sodium nitrate in celery powder to cause similar symptoms.
Why would anyone trust uncured bacon? If it isn't cured, it is going to develop bad pathogens. That's my joke anyway. This stuff is terrible: it's not even cured!
They do not compare the health consequences of a naturally derived ingredient (nitrates from celery) vs an industrial-scale produced one (sodium nitrate-- basically, salt-peter -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_nitrate).
I'll take celery over salt peter any day.
This article is not the least bit persuasive, and I wonder if the author has any industry-tilted biases, because the article seems bias, as summarized with: "hey don't worry about salt-peter! celery-nitrates are just as bad!"
One could also see this article as pointing out that these uncured meats are actually cured, but simply using an unapproved curing agent, and thus must by law be misleadingly labeled as uncured, and must be misleadingly labeled as no nitrates added (despite nitrates indisputably being added).
The food still has nitrates and nitrites. Your focus is on the "no safer" part of the headline, which does seem overstated.
From basic chemistry, nitrates and nitrites are all salts that dissolve in water. So the only differences between different nitrates are what which cation is present, since the body is designed to deal with sodium ions. I suppose celery based curing agents could potentially have different cations. It is also possible that the amounts introduces are meaningfully different. (And of course, the nitrite side of things differs in a similar manner.)
But other than cations, and amount of nitrate and nitrite salts remaining in the food, the only other plausible difference is any trace impurities in the curing agent which may be related to how the curing agent is sourced.
So my wife has a chemistry degree and we have talked at length about how there are many molecules used in food that are identical regardless of how they are derived (“natural” vs synthetic), noting specifically that the naturally derived versions are often less pure / more likely to contain unwanted byproducts because (obviously) they are not the sole molecule in the food from which they are derived.
The fetishistic obsession with naturally derived flavors and additives is mostly blindly dogmatic and ignores the science.
Yes, but….. industrial chemicals also have contaminants that are different, potential chirality issues, and quality control problems that are different than ‘natural’ products (scare quotes because most are still industrially processed).
As any chemist will tell you, no process has 100% yield with zero dangerous side products, let alone 100% of the time.
Real processes have mistakes that make it past QA, let alone scams and other issues.
Is the concern generally overblown? Yes. But it isn’t completely unrealistic either.
Also dying from plagues, getting crazy parasites, etc.
I'm not saying it's an informed decision, I'm saying it's a conservative one, with relatively well known problems and risks (minus the relatively modern industrial contamination and pesticide problems, which make it mostly moot IMO).
and for some reason, these nearby molecules often counteract negative effects associated with the desired molecule- naturally occurring sugar is nary found far from fiber, and ascorbic acid has even been suggested to reduce the toxicity of sodium nitrite, though there's probably not much vitamin C left in the powdered celery..
It’s literally the same chemical, but the celery extracted one is of uncontrolled concentration possibly resulting in higher levels in the resulting meat products.
There’s no protective magic that sourcing the same arrangement of atoms from a plant adds.
You're linking the wrong thing. The actual additive is sodium nitrite, not sodium nitrate. The article makes this clear.
The industrial process for producing nitrites commonly derive them from sodium nitrate, yes. But deriving food-grade compounds from substances that would be toxic on their own is a common chemical practice, and is not, on its own, remarkable.
Both sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate are used to cure food; sodium nitrate (the active ingredient in "Prague Powder #2") is used for long cures (the nitrate breaks down over time, which is what you want) and nitrite is used for quick cures.
[1] https://ffacoalition.org/articles/pig-farming/
[2] https://www.humanesociety.org/animals/pigs