I want to eat more bacon

Don't tell me it's bad for me

We are surrounded by nutrition advisers, professional and amateur. Everyone seems to have an urgent need to tell us what to eat and how much to eat. Eat more vegetables, eat less meat, eat more protein or maybe less protein, use olive oil not butter, use less salt.

Do NOT eat bacon or sausage. Ok that’s where I part ways with nutrition advisers and I will explain why.

In the senior community where I live, the food is amazingly good. You can have scrambled eggs for dinner and ice cream for breakfast if you want it. So why do so many of my neighbors spend endless time complaining about the food or telling others what to eat? It might be because they don’t have much else to do. Still the need to control and manage everyone else’s food not just your own, is endemic to these communities as well as popular media.

When I first joined the Dining Committee in my residential care community, I had heard there was a vegan resident who had the reputation of being pretty evangelistic about her advice. She was the only vegan among 200 people who were mainly meat eaters, and fewer than half a dozen in our community were consistently vegetarian. Because of her advocacy, a vegetarian option was added to the daily menu, and many meat eaters found the options tasty and occasionally chose them over meat dishes. Despite these conversions, the vegan resident went beyond advocacy and wanted us all to eat a version of the Mediterranean Diet called the Mind Diet (The Mediterranean-DASH-Intevention for Neurogenerative Delay). This diet emphasizes fruit, all kinds of vegetables, whole grains, fish, occasional chicken, beans, and nuts. Doesn’t sound bad, does it? It discourages and actively opposes fried foods, pastries and sweets, red meat, butter, and cheese. Offering this option was one thing; requiring it for everyone was something else.

That’s where bacon comes in. It’s not red meat, but it is often listed as something we should avoid. The main reasons are the fat content and chemicals used to add a smoke taste. Like much of the meat we eat, we rarely know how or where the animals were raised. For me and our family who raised and butchered our own pigs and bought only bacon made without any preservatives at a special place called The Corralitos Market, a ban on bacon would have been disruptive and nearly blasphemous. Bacon was a staple in our diet and in the heritage of my husband’s family, and becauses our pigs were raised eating real leftover restaurant food and their meat was smoked with wood not chemicals, the result was purely delicious.

Did eating bacon damage our health or cut short my husband’s life? Apparently not. He lived to 85 and did not die of heart disease. His cholesterol was 135. He was diabetic, and that did cut into his preferred foods like potato salad or zwiebach (a bun with a smaller bun on the top). Bacon, however, did not seem to harm him. It didn’t seem to stick to his arteries at all. While our children didn’t eat as much bacon as we did, they seem to be healthy to this day, and I, despite higher cholesterol, have the good kind of HDLs and don’t appear to be suffering either.

When I joined the Dining Committee I was concerned at the bad rap given to bacon and sausage on our menu. I announced I was joining the committee to represent bacon and be sure we had it on the menu whenever possible. The vegan resident was aghast. But the real issue became much clearer. It wasn’t just whether we could offer more bacon on the menu. It became whether or not one person could dictate what we all would eat on a daily basis. With our average age of mid 80s, would it make any difference in our health status at this point in our lives if we ate bacon?? Would we live even one week longer if we refused to go on the MIND diet? And most important of all, perhaps, would we be happier if we stopped eating the foods we really liked? The Dining Committee eventually reached a compromise that included such a variety of options that everyone could find something that fit their taste and their health status. Kudos to their flexibility.

This interaction has caused me to think a lot more about what I currently eat, what I want to eat, and what I should eat. Not a day goes by that another product I buy or a food I love is deemed to be unhealthy. The problem is that food dictators are not content to tell you what you ought to eat, they want to enforce that advice on everyone. In the end (and at our age the end is not so far away), I believe we should be able to make our own choices without feeling guilty or being miserable. We may not be able to live longer if we eat bacon, but I’m not sure banning it will add more than a minute or two to our lives. More importantly, we will enjoy the time we have more. As one of my husband’s uncles once said on his deathbed — “I wish I had eaten more bacon.” Those are not going to be my last words!