Why Bother?
I don't know why, but I seem to be on a
bacon roll lately. I promise I'll change the subject soon, but let me
tell you about this first; I had my first encounter with low-sodium
bacon the other day. And it went about the way I expected it would.
I cook breakfast almost everywhere I
go. It's about the only non-Italian cooking I do. Breakfast, or prima
colazione, is not a big thing in
Italy. Coffee and pastry, usually consumed standing up. Not
me. Give me a big, full, decadent breakfast. I've been cooking such
meals for about fifty years. I've cooked breakfast for two and I've
cooked breakfast for two hundred. I've prepared it in state of the
art home and professional kitchens and I've fixed it over open
campfires. And the star of the show is always bacon.
I'm particular about my bacon. When I
have a choice, I use Benton's bacon. When I don't, I get good quality
bacon from my local meat market. My third choice is locally sourced
bacon from places like Whole Foods or Fresh Market. If I have to buy
bacon from a supermarket, I get the premium brands. Believe me, the
few pennies you save buying cheap, second rate bacon are not worth
the trade off in flavor and quality. And it's terribly uneconomical
in the long run. The cheap stuff, being mostly fat and water, cooks
away to nothing. You might save a nickel at the cash register, but
you'll lose a dollar in the pan.
Anyway, I was visiting in New England
and I was asked to cook Sunday morning breakfast. In my own kitchen,
I use fresh eggs from a nearby farm, locally sourced potatoes that I
hand select, fresh-baked bread or biscuits, whole milk and fresh
butter from a local dairy. And, of course, my butcher's bacon. On the
road, I sometimes have to deal with what's on hand, and in this case,
that included supermarket eggs, generic bagged potatoes, 1% milk and
low-sodium bacon. I knew I could work with the eggs and the spuds,
but I balked at the idea of using water masquerading as milk. I sent
out for the real thing. But I decided to give the low-sodium bacon a
try.
The first thing I noticed was that the
bacon was sliced so paper thin I could practically read the label
through it. I'm accustomed to bacon that weighs in at sixteen to
twenty slices per pound. With this stuff, I peeled off fourteen
slices and still had nearly half of a twelve-ounce package left.
Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty or more slices per
pound. The slices from my butcher start out just shy of eleven inches
long and cook down to a length of about eight inches. The low-sodium
product I was using shrank from ten inches to about four. The flavor
was pleasant enough, but there just wasn't much of it.
I know a lot of people fall victim to
the words “low,” “reduced,” and “free.” They think these
products are somehow healthier and better for them. They're really
not, because anything labeled “low,” “reduced,” or “free”
has been processed to make it that way. Processed beyond the already
high level to which most regular food is processed. As a result, it's
generally more expensive, and usually the overall dietary benefits
just aren't that great.
For example, a thin, skinny little
strip of low sodium bacon contains 100 milligrams of sodium. A
similarly thin slice of regular bacon contains about 120 milligrams.
The 16/20 bacon I prefer has about 180 milligrams of sodium per
slice. Now, allowing that the current recommended daily sodium intake
is no more than 2,300 milligrams for healthy adults and 1,500
milligrams or less for people with high blood pressure, how much
difference are you really making using “low-sodium” bacon? About
60 milligrams for a three-slice serving. Or 240 milligrams if you're
using a decent quality bacon. And, as with most “healthy”
products, you're paying through the nose for all that extra “health.”
By the time it cooked up, the low-sodium bacon yielded less than half
the weight and volume of the same number of slices of regular bacon.
And it cost more.
Logic, folks, logic. If you want to
reduce your intake of sodium from bacon, don't waste your money on
low-sodium bacon. Buy regular bacon.....and just eat less of it. It
would take four slices of the low-sodium bacon I cooked the other day
to provide as much meat as two slices of my good quality,
medium-sliced regular bacon. That's 400 milligrams of sodium for the
“low-sodium” versus 360 milligrams for the regular. Where's all
the “health?”
The only way to derive any health
benefit from low-sodium bacon – or “low” anything else, for
that matter – is to consume unreasonably large quantities of it. If
you want less sodium from bacon, eat less bacon. As much as I
love, love, love my bacon, I only cook it as the major part of a meal
once a week. And I might cook up a slice or two now and then to add
to a sandwich or to crumble over a baked potato. My average weekly
bacon consumption amounts to maybe five strips. That's 900 milligrams
of sodium from bacon per week. And
if my doctor ever feels that that's going to kill me, I'll knock off
the sandwich and the potato and reduce my intake by almost half. And
it'll be good, hearty, meaty, flavorful, satisfying, honest-to-Porky
bacon, and not some
weak, shrunken, shriveled, processed approximation thereof, reduced
in size to a form measuring the length and breadth of my index
finger.
I'm ready for the
criticism I'm going to receive at the hands of nutritionists and
dieticians who constantly flog “low,” “reduced,” or “free”
as the answer to all dietary issues. These are the same folks who
spent decades telling us that eggs were going to kill us before
improved science forced them to backtrack and say, “Ooops! Never
mind.” I'm not a dietician or a nutritionist. I didn't even play
one on TV. But I do have a functioning brain that allows me to sort
out the sensible from the stupid. And if you're concerned about
sodium and salt, doesn't it make more sense to eat less food that is
more salty than it does to eat more food that is less salty? If you
want to blow your dough on “healthy” food that is overprocessed
and overpriced, good on you. I'll stick with eating real food, thank
you. I'll just eat less of it.
Low-sodium bacon?
Nah! Not really worth its salt.
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