Bacon, egg and chips are boons to humanity

How did it happen so fast? Four hundred years of wisdom reversed in a single generation, 4000 if you discount the potato. But let me begin at the beginning.

Last week I wrote about bacon, egg and chips. My purpose was, well, let’s not worry about my purpose. Let’s look at the effect. And the only effect I have to go on is the response that reached me in the form of phone calls, emails and good old-fashioned letters.

My correspondents fell broadly into two camps. The first camp was nostalgic and dogmatic. They had fond memories of bacon and egg, and firm views on how to cook chips. All agreed that double cooking was essential. Several said the only proper cooking medium was lard. But a few confessed to having resorted to the frozen supermarket chip that asks only two things of the cook: a functioning oven, and spiritual death. You could sense from their tone that they hated themselves for it.

The other camp, though unfailingly polite, addressed me as one might address a disabled, solo round-the-world yachtsman. They combined a mild wonder at my courage with an utter disbelief at my stupidity.

For they shared a view you’ll find expressed throughout the media, an orthodoxy that it is heresy to defy, which is that a plate of bacon, egg and chips, generously sprinkled, lest we forget, and they certainly did not, with salt, is, in and of itself, by definition – wait for it now, though surely you know the word that’s coming next – unhealthy.

For somehow in the last 40 years food has been divided into two types, healthy and unhealthy, and bacon, egg and chips sits emphatically on the unhealthy side. To eat it is to commit a crime against one’s wellbeing.

And if at this moment you are saying to yourself, well, yes, they’re right, bacon, egg and chips are indeed unhealthy, then consider this: you’re on your own – not now, of course, right now the zeitgeist’s with you – but historically.

Let’s start with salt. Salt has been traded and cherished since Noah was a boatie. Not only does it enhance flavour, it also cures and preserves meats. Without salt there would have been no human civilisation. Salt is a gift to mankind.

So’s bacon. It’s the cured belly of a pig. People have eaten pigs for ever (just as pigs, it should be noted, when given the chance, have eaten people.) The morality of killing and eating another species can be questioned, but the benefit to health cannot. Bacon is nutrition. Nutrition is a good.

Ditto with eggs which we’ve been eating since we were huntergatherers. You can debate whether collecting eggs is hunting or gathering, but not whether eggs are good for us. Eggs are nutritive by definition.

And as for the potato, the Spanish brought it to Europe in the 16th century, and it’s been popular ever since. So popular indeed that when Ireland suffered a potato blight in the 19th century, half the people starved and the other half emigrated.

All the ingredients then of bacon, egg and chips have been with us for millennia. They haven’t changed. They remain the boons they always were. What’s changed is us.

Just 50 years ago we saw food as food. Since then in the West we’ve got rich, fat and lazy, and increasingly terrified of dying. And we’ve transferred the blame for all this onto certain foods. It’s that simple.

(Though I will concede, in the interests of fairness, that on its own a plate of bacon, egg and chips cannot be said to constitute a full and balanced diet. It lacks a sausage.)

Salt has been traded and cherished since Noah was a boatie. No only does it enhance flavour, it also cures and preserves meats. Without salt there would have been no human civilisation. Salt is a gift to mankind.