Like so many Britons, I love a bacon butty or a plate of ham and eggs. But most of these pork products are made with nitrates – and rated as carcinogenic by the World Health Organization. So I’ve been investigating the alternatives …
Most big stores do now offer an own-brand nitrate-free bacon.The WHO lists processed meat as a “known human carcinogen” along with smoking, alcohol and asbestos, but clearly these substances don’t all carry the same risk. Smoking is the biggest cause of lung cancer, which leads to 35,000 UK deaths per year. Alcohol is linked to seven kinds of cancer, and comes with other health risks such as heart and liver disease, along with serious accidents.
. Based in Northern Ireland, the company started out making sausages for M&S, but the WHO’s 2015 report on processed meat gave them an idea. “We thought: we’ve got all this volume of pork; why don’t we step in and try and do this the ‘proper’ way?” says Jago Pearson, chief strategy officer at Finnebrogue. In 2018, the company launched its Naked Bacon brand and began producing M&S’s own label nitrate-free bacon. Now it’s supplying Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose, Asda and Morrisons.
Before bacon was made industrially, he says, “it would have been done either through salting or salt plus drying”. Parma and Serrano ham are made similarly: “The more traditional producers only use salt and drying.” Fermented products like salami, for which microbes are essential, can easily be made without nitrates, too, he says. “Nitrates have been introduced over time to help speed up that process and to create something that looks pink and fresh,” says Ferguson.
In the US, there has been a clampdown on bacon marketed as “uncured”, which has been spiked with celery or other vegetable extracts instead of the E numbers. It may sound healthy, but it’s not. Like many vegetables, celery is a source of nitrate, and a concentrated extract can indeed stand in nicely for the usual additives. But the end product still contains harmful levels of nitrates, and can now no longer be labelled as “uncured”, or “no nitrate or nitrite added”.
In the meantime, Lindars says, in conventionally cured meats, “there has been a big push over the past 18 months or so to reduce the level of nitrates from 150 parts per million, which is the maximum. Two retailers that I know of have reduced their standard product to 60 parts per million: Co-op and Waitrose.”
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