I realize it's a privileged position, but I'd gladly pay more for a salami/bacon that doesn't last as long to get rid of the carcinogen.
As a Waitrose shopping rich person you could be sold some 'Duchy Farms organic, free-range, humanely murdered meat' and buy in to the concept much like you might buy some other deluxe product on their shelves. However, if down the pub and ordering off the menu, would you care at all about what is in the pies, sausages and bacon? It would not be the place to go full-vegan-socially-awkward, particularly if you were hungry and someone else was paying the bill.
Most meat products are quite alien to our taste - ask a small child - but, along with alcoholic drinks, coffee, tobacco and much else that is quite abhorrent at first, we learn to go along with the rest of the human tribe and go along with it. There is a social aspect to eating meat, that allegedly amazing smell of bacon isn't just about satisfying one's cravings for such food, it is also about that social experience, even if eating on one's own.
Anyone who already eats sausages/bacon/burgers in canteen style environments or after a few beers from some roadside van is already saying don't care about lots of things, so some added nitrate scare counts for nothing. We would still be eating cow-brain on toast had it not been for how tragic BSE turned out.
That doesn't mean preservatives must be inherently bad or carcinogenic though - e.g canned foods, dehydrated fruit, while things are lost in the process it doesn't necessarily have to make the food toxic. But when you see a 20p cake you can bet it's going to be bad for you, not just because it's sugary, but because it's 20p and therefor must have a long shelf life, and cake isn't inherently long lived.
Products that claim to be "nitrate-free" are lying. They're exploiting the native nitrite/nitrate content of (extracts of) green vegetables rather than adding nitrates directly. Your body does not care about this difference, but your psychology does.
* Botulism is incredibly rare.
* Don't eat seal blubber.
* Be careful with your pruno; one jailhouse batch took accounted for the majority of cases in 2012.
To be fair I think many people have been unconsciously fed misinformation - for instance I somehow picked up the "processed food == mixed up non-specific animal parts" thing without ever looking into it or thinking much.
I'm interested.. can you remember where you picked up the botulism thing? did you live through that anti-nitrates era or do you think you might have picked it up from more modern forms echoed around the web?
You can look it up online --- in fact, you can use it as a HACCP plan for your own cured meat enterprise if you want, which is amazing --- and see where and why it requires nitrites.
I absolutely trust these people more than I trust a random British food writer who says hot dogs give people brain cancer.
http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/blog/why-our-bacon-better
http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/blog/whole-story/i-love-baco...
> All of the bacon we sell is made without synthetic nitrates or nitrites.
Is that the dodge mentioned in the article where they actually do use nitrates from celery instead, which are just as bad even though they're natural?