Is there more sensation than sense over cancer risk in processed meats?

AS if we’ve not got enough to worry about, official proclamations now appear to knock bacon butties off the menu.

So that’s another thing to worry you to death: just when you’d been struggling with whether to drink more or less red wine in order to lengthen or shorten your life; with whether to eat a low fat fruit yoghurt for lunch or the full fat Greek stuff to keep your weight under the most recent recommended line on the body mass index graph; with whether never to eat a pudding again or gorge on that packet of ginger nuts, hell-bent on a diabetic coma. Because now, the Sunday roast’s going to give you cancer.

Or is it?

Well if you eat little else but beef burgers and sausages and bacon sandwiches, eschewing equal or greater quantities of fruit, vegetables and pulses, maybe there is a statistically greater chance of you developing bowel cancer.

These recent pronouncements by the World Health Organisation, following their analysis of hundreds of studies, at first give the impression that processed meat such as bacon and ham and other cured meats are seriously dangerous and, despite the guidelines given along with the story, should actually be avoided. But the announcements seem to have been so clumsily handled that they even give the impression that a sirloin steak will definitely shorten your life.

It’s not even clear if there is any actual news here, rather than the noise being made by the WHO being the news itself. First of all, what did they actually say? They told us that they’d looked at processed meats and decided that at certain levels of consumption, they’ve seen a slight increase in the chance of bowel cancer. Therefore, this puts processed meats in the same frightening category of anything else that causes cancer which includes cigarettes and asbestos. But such a category also includes such things as sunlight, sunscreen lotions, coffee, x-rays and so on. So that’s helpful.

And red meat consumption? Well, that’s been put in a different category: one of possibly causing cancer; if eaten in certain unknown quantities; maybe. That’ll please the meat industry then.

What the announcements don’t seem to say, or if they do, little of the news media haven’t been able to convey it, is what the diets and lifestyles and customs of the cured and red meat eaters in the studies have been like.

The pronouncements contribute to a feeling akin to panic by alerting us to the classifications of the products based on evidence, rather than what the risk actually is. We all know that people have died in motorcycle accidents as they have in car accidents; so both forms of transport can be placed in a category of “not totally safe to life and limb”. But what’s the relative risk? For which one are the insurers likely to charge more? Which of the activities are going to make you lie awake worrying if your love one’s late back while travelling via it?

And which potential activity should I worry about my children taking up: smoking or eating the occasional bacon sandwich? However the latter would seriously worry me if I didn’t see them eating proportionately more fruit and vegetables in their diet than cured or red meat-based protein. But, if their diet is really that bad, they’ve nobody else to blame other than themselves – plus maybe the way they were brought up at home and the way they were educated.

It’s difficult to sort the sense from the sensation in such news as the WHO’s recent report. But it’s obvious that a varied diet mitigates one’s risk. We really must learn to use our common sense.

Tripe and onions

There’s nothing more likely to cause a Marmite moment than tripe, and, of course, Marmite. My experience is that the majority of people will curl up their faces at the suggestion of eating tripe. However, that’s almost certainly based on them never having had it or, possibly, them having a bad experience of it at some time in their lives. Even a high quality, well-aged steak can leave one with a bad impression if not cooked properly.

While I can’t see me persuading many to try tripe as a result of reading this recipe, it may be helpful for those who, like me, had tripe as a child and actually liked it but have never cooked it. Trying it again in recent years, I realised it is different from most other foods we eat, but it had lost none of its comfort-food characteristics. We occasionally put it on our menu to the delight of a (small) group of customers.

So whether you’ll try it or not, as a matter of interest, here goes.

 

Tripe and onions

(Serves two)

200g tripe

One onion – finely sliced

Milk

Double cream

A handful of parsley – chopped

Sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper

Wash the tripe and place in a pan, covered with cold water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes. Remove from the heat and drain off the water. Rinse under cold running water and then cut the tripe into one inch pieces.

Return to a clean pan and cover with milk, adding the sliced onions and bay leaf and again bring to the boil. Turn the heat down, cover and simmer for at least two hours.

Now, to make the sauce, you have a choice. You can either thicken the milk with flour and butter to make a traditional white sauce or you could, as we do at Oldfields, pour the milk through a colander into another pan, add a little cream to the milk and boil to reduce until it thickens to a gravy-like consistency.

Add the tripe and onions, taste and season with salt and pepper. Just before serving, add the parsley before spooning into warmed bowls. Just like your Granny used to make.

Oldfields Eating House

18 Claypath

Durham, DH1 1RH

Tel: 0191-370-9595

For further recipes, go to www.billoldfield.com

Oldfields Pantry ready meals are available direct from the restaurant on Claypath in Durham on 0191-370-9595 or go to www.oldfieldspantry.co.uk for delivery by mail order.

Twitter: @eatoldfields