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If you make your own sausages and deli meats, you can just skip the nitrites; they are not really needed for the taste, just for the red color. So your sausage

If you make your own sausages and deli meats, you can just skip the nitrites; they are not really needed for the taste, just for the red color. So your sausages will come out grey/brown, but will taste just as good. Nitrites are a bit of an economic factor, due to accelerating the curing process, and also help in mitigating risks around food safety. So they're primarily relevant to entities doing this sort of thing at industrial scale, who are subject to government standards on food safety. Home cooking to the rescue! ...on a related note, I don't really understand why small-scale organic/regional producers of aren't already doing this. At least where I am, in a rural part of Germany, we have farmers markets and other sales outlets that pride themselves on doing pretty much everything in the organic/regional playbook that could possibly set them apart from the mass-market, and who charge very high prices. Surely, they could do me the favour and just skip the nitrites? But, for some reason, they don't.

bsder 3y ago
> If you make your own sausages and deli meats, you can just skip the nitrites; they are not really needed for the taste, just for the red color. That's not completely correct if you don't cook the meat quickly afterward. Apparently the safety issue is mostly botulism. Certain meats (especially sausages) create anaerobic conditions while curing that allows botulism to grow. Nitrites prevent that. It is possible to cure meats without nitrates (see: Prosciutto di Parma), but it's not a straightforward, blanket thing.
- stakhanov 3y ago
  Botulism is extremely rare, though. According to Wikipedia, it's 145 cases anually in the U.S., and 15% of those are foodborne. Compare that to millions of cases each year, in the U.S., of foodborne illness, in general. That's why I'm saying: It's a risk calculation, and government standards on food safety definitely prefer to err on the side of mandating too much processing of food over allowing too much foodborne illness. Maybe, some of those risk calculations need to be revisited, and there needs to be a societal-level debate about how many cases of tummy-ache we are willing to trade off for how many basis points of cancer risk. Incidentally, it stands to reason that the same kinds of things we do to kill off pathogens also kill off a lot of the microorganisms that may be useful to the body. To the extent that we're talking about additives, if we ingest them, then it seems likely that they might also kill off (or inhibit the growth of) useful parts of the microbiome already in the body. Of course, all of this I say in a mode of "cocktail party speculation" rather than peer-reviewed science, but there are just tons of unknown unknowns there, when it comes to the microbiome, and it actually offers one possible action mechanism (surely there are more than one), about how exactly it is that relying mostly on highly processed foods would be unhealthy for you.
  - bsder 3y ago
    > Botulism is extremely rare, though. Precisely because we have engineered our foods and processes for safety. None of this is new: "When Every Ketchup But One Went Extinct" https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-heinz-ketchup https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-heinz-ketch... "Their earlier ketchups “were medium bodied with average acidity,” Smith writes. In 1906, they replaced this ketchup with a shelf-stable, preservative-free ketchup that had twice as much salt, sugar, and vinegar as other commercial ketchups" Is a ketchup with extensively boiled tomatoes (which kills quite a bit of their nutritive value), double the salt and double the sugar better than one with small amounts of benzoate?

bsder 3y ago

> If you make your own sausages and deli meats, you can just skip the nitrites; they are not really needed for the taste, just for the red color. That's not completely correct if you don't cook the meat quickly afterward. Apparently the safety issue is mostly botulism. Certain meats (especially sausages) create anaerobic conditions while curing that allows botulism to grow. Nitrites prevent that. It is possible to cure meats without nitrates (see: Prosciutto di Parma), but it's not a straightforward, blanket thing.

stakhanov 3y ago
Botulism is extremely rare, though. According to Wikipedia, it's 145 cases anually in the U.S., and 15% of those are foodborne. Compare that to millions of cases each year, in the U.S., of foodborne illness, in general. That's why I'm saying: It's a risk calculation, and government standards on food safety definitely prefer to err on the side of mandating too much processing of food over allowing too much foodborne illness. Maybe, some of those risk calculations need to be revisited, and there needs to be a societal-level debate about how many cases of tummy-ache we are willing to trade off for how many basis points of cancer risk. Incidentally, it stands to reason that the same kinds of things we do to kill off pathogens also kill off a lot of the microorganisms that may be useful to the body. To the extent that we're talking about additives, if we ingest them, then it seems likely that they might also kill off (or inhibit the growth of) useful parts of the microbiome already in the body. Of course, all of this I say in a mode of "cocktail party speculation" rather than peer-reviewed science, but there are just tons of unknown unknowns there, when it comes to the microbiome, and it actually offers one possible action mechanism (surely there are more than one), about how exactly it is that relying mostly on highly processed foods would be unhealthy for you.
- bsder 3y ago
  > Botulism is extremely rare, though. Precisely because we have engineered our foods and processes for safety. None of this is new: "When Every Ketchup But One Went Extinct" https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-heinz-ketchup https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-heinz-ketch... "Their earlier ketchups “were medium bodied with average acidity,” Smith writes. In 1906, they replaced this ketchup with a shelf-stable, preservative-free ketchup that had twice as much salt, sugar, and vinegar as other commercial ketchups" Is a ketchup with extensively boiled tomatoes (which kills quite a bit of their nutritive value), double the salt and double the sugar better than one with small amounts of benzoate?