A need to get to the meat of the issue

It’ll be interesting to see how Maple Leaf Foods addresses recent findings linking processed meat to cancer

The Maple Leaf Foods website offers a couple of fast and easy recipes for bacon lovers.

To master Maple Sesame Candied Bacon, one simply coats rashers with maple syrup, cayenne and brown sugar, followed by a sprinkling of sesame seeds. Bacon Peanut Brittle combines bacon bits with nuts (cashews are fine, too), butter, cayenne, sugar and cinnamon.

The list of savoury recipes is long, no surprise given bacon’s ubiquity, which has thus far defied predictions that its frenzied popularity is about to go bust. The Wendy’s Baconator burger, for example, is adorned with six “fresh-cooked, never microwaved strips.” Bacon-flavoured potato chips are everywhere. Little Caesars girdles its square deep-dish pie with the stuff. And so on.

Bacon’s cultural impact continues to extend beyond the kitchen and grocery store shelves. Last month, Oscar Mayer launched Sizzl, a dating app to assist the lovelorn in finding their soulmates “in life and in bacon.” I’m just not going to comment on that.

The bacon trend has been happy news for Maple Leaf, a serial money loser that continues to pull itself through a radical restructuring that has seen it shed assets outside of what it calls “the protein market.” Last year, it jettisoned Canada Bread — sold to Grupo Bimbo of Mexico. In 2013, it said goodbye to pasta and sauce maker Olivieri — sold to Ebro Foods of Spain.

The company, which added Schneiders meats to its brand line more than a decade ago, aspires “to become the best protein company in the world” and will report third-quarter earnings Thursday.

Sharper analysts will want to hear the company’s response to the latest nitrite/ nitrate warning from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The IARC — the World Health Organization’s cancer agency — deemed processed meat to be a Group 1 carcinogen “based on sufficient evidence (the WHO’s italics) in humans that the consumption of processed meat causes colorectal cancer.” (That’s an 18-per-cent increased risk per 50 grams a day of processed meat.)

Both the North American Meat Institute and the Canadian Meat Council were quick to call out the IARC on its methodology. NAMI’s vice-president of scientific affairs accused the agency of having “tortured the data to ensure a specific outcome.”

It didn’t help matters that the agency included red meat in its report. The Canadian Meat Council erroneously accused the agency of having ignored the proven benefits of some. Yet the full text of the monograph — you can read it in Lancet Oncology — acknowledges both the important micronutrients (B vitamins, iron and zinc) as well as “high biological-value proteins” in red meat.

The critical clamour obscured the fact that the processed-meat industry has been struggling for decades with the nitrate/nitrite issue. The Canadian Cancer Society provides a helpful backdrop: “Nitrites and nitrates are not cancer causing themselves, but in certain conditions in the body they can be changed into by-products called Nnitroso compounds such as Nitrosamines and Nitrosamides. N-nitroso compounds are associated with an increased risk of cancer.”

Maple Leaf doesn’t contest the potential formation of those compounds — a number of studies and reports are post- ed on its website. But the company underscores the fact that the causative link, the causal relationship, is missing.

Yet it has also worked to remove synthetically produced preservatives from some products, thus acknowledging a wariness on the part of consumers who want nothing less than all-natural foods with no added nitrites.

That trend is unstoppable. The company spent four years developing its Maple Leaf Natural Selections and Schneiders Country Naturals sliced meats, removing, for example, sodium nitrite. (Some consumers may still be surprised to learn that the replacement preservative — cultured celery extract — is a natural nitrite source. Thus those processed meats can’t claim to be preservativefree.)

We know that additives are essential to the curing process. They protect against such harmful bacteria as botulism, and the country’s food and drug regulations mandate their use.

What we don’t know is whether the concerns raised by the IARC will impact consumers’ buying habits.

Maple Leaf should address that point this week and prepare itself for an increasing awareness that 50 grams of processed meat — half a hotdog or a couple slices of bacon — doesn’t jibe with current foodie trends, which, like all trends, are bound to be fleeting.