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How did something as transparently dirty as cured meat enter the temple of clean? The American “meat stick” industry – mainly cured beef sticks that are awesomely calorific – hit $3bn last year. In the UK, processed meat snacking products have grown in sales by 38% since 2020, and are projected to pick up another 49% percent by 2027. The puzzle is not “are they tasty?” or “are they convenient?” We know they are, but so is a Snickers. Rather, how did a category that we’ve known for years is actively bad for your health come to be the snacking choice of gymgoers and lifestyle gurus alike?
Scientifically questionable meat-heavy diets come and go (remember the Atkins diet?) but in 2018, conservative guru Jordan Peterson went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to talk about his book 12 Rules for Life, and – complimented by Rogan on his physique – said in passing he now ate only beef, salt and water. And he never cheated. The “animal products only” Carnivore Diet, by orthopaedic surgeon Shawn Baker, was published at the same time.
A year later, the Annals of Internal Medicine in the US published an astonishing study which recommended “that adults continue current processed meat consumption”. It was astonishing because, in the maelstrom of conflicting dietary advice – red wine prevents cancer, it gives you cancer, tomatoes are good for you, they also give you cancer, etc – science had long been pretty settled on processed meats. There were still question marks over nitrates and nitrites, which are so prevalent in meat processing, and whether or not they could be isolated as the root of the problem. But until that study, most people agreed that processed meat was bad for you. Federica Amati, head nutritionist at the Zoe app, and nutrition topic lead at Imperial College London School of Medicine, gives a whistlestop tour of the health risks of processed meats: “Dextrose is a high-glycemic ingredient that increases blood sugar levels and can lead to dehydration in high amounts. N-nitroso compounds are cancer-causing substances believed to be responsible for some of the adverse effects. They are formed from nitrite (sodium nitrite) that is added to processed meat products. They’re high in saturated fat, which is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, and they’re a class one carcinogen, known to increase the risk of colorectal cancer.”
“The mechanism is less interesting than the certainty,” says Chris Van Tulleken, author of Ultra-Processed People. “The evidence is very clear that processed meats elevate your risk of heart disease and other negative outcomes. It’s dose-dependent: the more you eat, the greater the harm. That is mediated, probably, through saturated fat, which is seriously bad for you; salt, which is seriously bad for you; and their energy density. We know that energy-dense soft food promotes weight gain. It’s probably not simply because they’re tasty – ‘tasty’ is not a very formal word, so we can’t answer that precisely with research; it’s because they’re not satisfying. So you’ll eat them quicker than you could feel full.” The data was in, in other words, and yet the debate remained alive.
In fact, doubts were cast on that journal article pretty fast, when it was discovered the same week (October 2019) that one of the authors had ties to the meat industry. But TikTok and the wider manosphere – social media spaces populated by young bros looking for answers – didn’t seem to care about conflicts of interest. The “lion diet”, for example, which entails eating only the meat of ruminant animals, gained prominence online as the answer to everything: it could reduce inflammation, promote weight loss, solve skin complaints, improve mood. Basically, it could give you the constitution of a lion, and have you ever truly looked at one of those creatures in his own habitat? Is he not majestic? Does he look depressed to you? He does not. The videos, particularly from the UK, are often unbelievably gross: pale young men frying up boxes of the cheapest imaginable mince with cubes of beef fat (and who the hell knows where they came from), proclaiming that it kept them going all day for £1.30.
But it was not all gym bros. High-protein, zero-carb diets were still discreetly popular in what we might call the Anna Wintour constituency – she famously only ate steak and caprese salad, minus the tomatoes, for lunch. Amati describes these different generational attitudes: “My female clients over the age of 40 struggle to stop pinning their health on how thin they are. Thin equals healthy for them, and they often don’t eat enough food. My younger female clients are often fearful of food; many have tried elimination diets, undertaken unnecessary fasting regimes or removed food groups without a nutrition professional advising them or supporting them, and it’s sad to see how much fear certain influencers can cause.” So that’s the female meat-snack market in a nutshell: gen X still chasing the keto dream, while millennials and gen Z take a more … well, “neurotic” is a strong word; let’s call it the quest of the terminally online for everything to just work better.
Amati continues: “My male clients have less of a divide between generations, but they struggle with convenience and are often set unnecessarily high protein targets, which they then struggle to achieve without eating protein snacks and drinking high-protein drinks. What’s worrying is that more often than not, even young men in their 30s already present with cardiovascular risk factors like high LDL [a type of cholesterol] or elevated blood pressure.”
What’s extraordinary about this picture is not so much how our social and existential anxieties are mediated through food – although for sure, that’s something to think about – but how it all drives inexorably towards one single food: the processed meat stick or nugget. If you’re cutting out carbs to stay thin, there are very few foods you can eat as a snack. Even many vegetables are verboten. There is a side-category of twitchy gen X-er the kids call the “almond mum” (short version: whatever you ask for, you’ll get almonds), but really, all roads lead to chorizo (which saw a 28% increase in sales last year, in the UK).
Meanwhile, in the world of fitness, protein targets are nudging towards the impossible: if you take a weight-based approach, medics agree that 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight is fine, but most muscle-building advice would take one gram per kilo as a bare minimum, going up to two grams if you’re younger and training for an event, or if you’re older and trying to build muscle. You often see calculations based on men weighing 70kg and women weighing 60kg, but average weights are much higher than that: per the NHS’s figures in 2021, the mean weights of men and women, based on adjustments to self-reported weight, were 85.1kg and 71.8kg respectively. And 170g of pure protein a day is not easily done – a classic service-station beef stick is only 16% protein, and almost all the rest is fat.
Van Tulleken is more fair-minded, and points out: “Beef jerky can be quite lean, so that’s OK. It’s proteinatious, and protein is not bad for you, although people don’t need as much protein as the fitness industry often implies. It’s better than a chocolate bar; it might not have too much salt. The problem is, the lean, fairly low-salt dry beef becomes the poster child for the shitty, fatty version that’s covered in maltodextrin and sugar. So you can have a product that’s fine, and it ends up representing a category that is not fine.”
It would be outrageous, though, to brush past those products that are fine. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall makes his own charcuterie and has run courses doing so at River Cottage. He says, “These are, at their best, irresistible products.” There’s something about the time and imagination that goes into meat curing that unlocks the mystery of taste itself. You can tell what kind of life the animal lived, what it ate, where it hung out, who it was. “A slower grown animal,” he continues, “you’ve got more fat on it to play with, because it will have needed to put that on to protect it from the weather. That’s why you turn to old breeds that are well bristled and grow slowly. You’ll get marbling on that meat – the eye of a loin on an outdoor pig will have marbling, flecks of fat, like beef.”
Andy Rogers, who runs North by Sud-Ouest with his wife in New Ferry, Wirral, won the World Charcuterie award in 2023 and the BBC Food Programme’s best producer last year. He works on whole pigs, one at a time, “because it means they’re not part of some industrial production line. They’ve been rooting around and having a nice life.” He makes two products from the head alone, a fromage de tête nose-to-tail terrine, “a fancy French brawn that I ripped off my old boss in France”. And then on through the length of the loin, which he makes into a coppa, to the tougher, sinewy hock parts, that’ll be cooked into a cotechino. If he sells out, which he did after the food awards, it’s two months before he can restock, because these products take as long as they take. Although Rogers is reluctant to mythologise the complexity of the cured meat – “I’m not sure you can taste the acorns they’ve been eating” – he falls into an elegy when he tries to describe it. “That Spanish stuff is a class apart. The actual Bellota pigs who’ve been trotting round in a massive range, eating acorns in season, having to walk five miles to get water, they’ve got a really distinct, musty, nutty thing going on. They can age that so long because it’s so suffused with fat. That product is unrecreatable.”
“Curing meat privately, or at restaurant scale,” Fearnley-Whittingstall says, “you don’t have to use any additives at all, you can do that with salt.” It’s still going to have high amounts of many of the wrong things, but you just wouldn’t sweat it, any more than you would “try to regulate homemade brownies”, Van Tulleken says. “You can’t make them delicious enough and you don’t make them often enough, and when you want to binge on them, you have to make them. The issue is the industrial process. The cheap ham and bacon is a massive source of saturated fat, salt, a lot of it is quite sugary, and it’s probably also associated with other harmful factors like low incomes and generally poor diet.” Plus, you couldn’t make yourself long-term ill on high-quality cured meat because you’d go bankrupt first.
What’s happened with processed meat is a microcosm of how the risk-aversion of regular capitalism in fact creates greater risk, insofar as the “health and safety hoops to sell meat commercially demand the nitrates”, Fearnely-Whittingstall says. “If it’s going off the premises and into the world, it can only do that with the belt and braces of additives.” Meanwhile, the anxieties of late capitalism drive completely counter-productive behaviours; fixated on finding individuated answers to an obesogenic and carcinogenic environment created by corporations, we end up eating the very thing that makes us fat and gives us cancer. It’s actually pretty wild! But also, very tasty.
