Deli is Short For Delicious—But Are Your Pastrami and Bologna Sandwiches Giving You Cancer?

The alarming warning from the World Health Organization's cancer research arm that goes like this: processed meats cause cancer, and red meat probably does too.

Of course, the potential risks of processed meat has been suggested before, but never in such blunt terms.

Processed meats are defined as any meat like ham or bologna that's altered by salting, curing, or some other method.

Most have beef or pork, but can contain poultry.

The report says such meats cause cancer.

It's back to school season.

Across the land, lunch boxes are being packed and sandwiches are being made, and many of them will contain deli meats, bologna, turkey or ham slices, even salami.

Which sounds as though it's kind of a problem if, in fact, deli meats cause cancer.

And deli meats are just what we're exploring this episode.

We, of course, are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley.

And this episode, episode we are all about the deli meats.

Cold cuts, charcuterie, salumi, deli meats, they're all more or less the same thing, but what the heck are they?

I mean, really, what is that pink square or round substance known as deli sliced ham?

And don't even get me started on that iconic American sandwich filling bologna, spelled like bologna, the Italian city.

Nikki, you are not alone in your confusion.

Lots of you have asked us about this topic over the years, and this episode we are going to figure it all out.

And though to many, if not most people, deli meats mean those slices of ham, or maybe bologna, to me, deli meats mean the Jewish delicatessen, and like pastrami or corned beef.

But that leads me to another question: why did Jewish delis become such a central part of not just the Jewish community, but the culture at large?

I'm thinking of Woody Allen, when Harry met Sally, Mrs.

Maisel.

All that this episode, plus the story of how the origins of Oskarmeyer bologna are tied up in the invention of that most curious and elusive of sandwiches, the McDonald's McGrib.

The U.S.

military is involved.

And of course, we'll get to the bottom of whether that slice of pastrami or turkey ham in your sandwich will kill you.

This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P.

Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics, and by the Burroughs Welcome Fund for our coverage of biomedical research.

Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

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You'll have bologna.

You know, if you you like, you know, hams, you're going to get into all kinds of different types of products there.

Holidays, you may have a cured and smoked turkey.

And then if you go into, you know, internationally, particularly in Germany, you know, other European countries, Italy, you'll have all types of things like, you know, prosciutto, Capicola.

There's thousands.

This is Wes Osbourne.

He's associate professor at Texas A ⁇ M.

And it makes sense that there's thousands of different deli meats because humans have been making them for thousands and thousands of years.

We cannot pin this down with any great certainty until roughly prehistoric times, the Bronze Age, when we start to see things like large gathering settlements, cave paintings, evidence of tools used for butchery alongside campsites, which would mean that at least we were smoke drying, right?

Two-thirds of the way to what we kind of think of as charcuterie now.

Jeremy Umansky is one of the chefs and owners of a fantastic restaurant called Larder Delicatessen in Cleveland.

He cures plenty of meat himself and has spent a lot of time researching why and how people have done it in the past.

So let's just kind of like throw a general pin about the dawn of agriculture and just kind of say that's when we started to actually codify the processes that we now call charcuterie.

And then they evolved over the next, you know, 10 to 12,000 years to what we have now.

But I'd be willing to bet a fair amount of money that we have been doing this for nearly as long as we've been Homo sapiens.

Because as long as we've been Homo sapiens, we've been dealing with the problem of how to make sure meat didn't go bad before we could eat it.

And salting and smoking and fermenting and drying, those were our pre-refrigeration answers for how to do that.

And those are the processes that are involved in making what we now call deli meat, or as Jeremy says, charcuterie.

It's all basically the same thing.

Like, more or less, that is charcuterie, right?

It's the process and the technique it isn't necessarily the ingredients you're working with as long as you do have the salt and you have some sort of muscle and you put it through a specific series of steps it is that charcuterie the science behind these steps is all to do with making meat inhospitable to microbes drink cheers let's start with the science of smoke the chemicals in smoke are antimicrobial so that's a handy trick to keep meat good and then microbes and fungi also need water to live so if you can cut down down on their access to that by drying the meat, which also happens during smoking, that's another plus.

So meat is around 75% water.

And again, bacteria love water.

So the more water in a product, the more prone it is to spoil.

Salt is great for getting water out of meat too.

When you pack meat and salt, it draws the water out of the cells, and that helps keep the bacteria away as well.

And while the smoke and salt kill microbes and get rid of water, at the same time, they're also infusing deep inside the meat and changing the structure of the meat itself in fundamental ways and also changing its flavor.

I mean, A, it's freaking delicious.

Honestly, if you bite into a thin slice of raw meat and then bite into a thin slice of meat that's become charcuterie, it is so much better.

And then on top of that, it was shelf-stable and easy to travel with.

Basically, it's not hard to see why cured meat would have caught on.

Salt, rubbed, smoked, brined, and pickled, whatever.

What we think of as salt, pure salt, it's sodium chloride.

But some salt had added preservation benefits naturally.

Salt in itself can be very pure, but oftentimes it tends to have many inclusions.

So, salt is often an amalgamation of different types of salts.

Among them is something called saltpeter.

People around the world in ancient Greece and India and China, they all figured out that certain kinds of salt were just better at preserving meat than others.

And it turns out that these salts have saltpeter in them, or what we now know is potassium nitrate.

Salts with saltpeter in them probably initially caught on because saltpeter has an aesthetic benefit.

The nitrate binds to a muscle protein that contains heme, the iron-rich compound that makes meat nice and red.

And it helps keep that red color stable so the inside of your cured deli meat remains a beautiful rosy pink.

Seeing that you could keep the color of the the fresh meat on that, I think right away was one of the things that triggered a lot of people to continue using this, even though they didn't necessarily understand the microbial action that was happening to keep them safe.

That microbial action Jeremy's talking about, what's happening is that in addition to keeping the meat from turning brown, salt peter kills microbes that can be really dangerous to us.

In particular, the bacteria that causes botulism.

Botulism thrives in low-oxygen environments, which means if you take a bunch of meat and dice it up and put it inside a bag, there's really no air in there.

Botulism can thrive.

Some cured meats are smoked or salted whole cuts, but then there's diced up meat put in a bag.

That's basically what cured meats like salami are.

So these salts actually prevent botulism from growing.

And that's not even the end of Salt Peter's benefits.

Of course, it reduces oxidation.

So if you have a fatter-type product, it doesn't go rancid as quickly.

And then you have longer shelf life.

Together, all these different curing techniques gave you better tasting, better-looking meat for longer, and so they were invented and used everywhere.

And everywhere around the world that preserved their meat, all the cultures put slightly different twists on it.

There was more preservation by pickling in sort of wet pickling and brining in places like Poland and Russia.

There was more smoking in places like Lithuania.

There was more spiced preparation.

David Sachs is the author of Save the Deli, and he and Jeremy both told us that some of that variation just had to do with what resources were available locally, whether people had access to spices or plentiful wood for burning.

Let's look at some cultures in like Tibet and Nepal where they're burning yak dung.

You don't want to smoke food in that.

That's good to heat your house and to put a pot on to cook, but you do not want to smoke your yak meat in yak with yak dung smoke.

So they, a lot of the foods that they would make, were just simply barely salted with Himalayan salts and then just hung out to air dry in the great mountains there.

Whereas in Russia, where David said they were doing a lot more smoking, Russians had plenty of trees to cut down to use for good-tasting smoke.

And then, like in Italy, where they had long burned lots of their forests and it was also really dry, they were more likely to salt and dry meat like prosciutto or to ferment it like salami.

Another thing that varied and still does is how different people eat their different cured meats.

If you go to Europe, you're still mostly seeing people getting charcuterie.

Thinly cut meats, cold meats arranged on a platter, having with, you know, some different foods and breads on the side.

Jeremy says that preserved meat was served differently in other parts of the world, like in China.

They don't necessarily like take a thin slice of it and put this little garnish and a couchrement with it and just eat a little bit of it.

They would then take that and they'd cut a hunk off of it and they would like put that hunk of dried meat in a pot of congee as they were cooking it.

They used their charcuterie much in the way that Europeans use things like salt cod and fat back.

But for most Americans today, the primary use case for deli meats is sandwiched between two slices of bread.

So, how did deli meat meet its soulmate, sliced rye?

To figure out how that perfect pairing came to be, we actually have to meet the deli, the delicatessen.

The word delicatessen comes from the Latin word delicatus,

and delicatus was an adjective that meant anything or anybody that or who was exciting, enticing, attractive, voluptuous.

It sort of had a whole range of meanings that were not specifically connected to food.

This is Ted Merwin.

He's the author of Pastramion Rye, an overstuffed history of the Jewish Deli.

And he said the idea of the delicatessen being a food store, that didn't really emerge until the late 1700s, early 1800s in Europe.

Society was changing, and people who made these sorts of delicacies started to be able to open shops and sell their wares to the public rather than just working in royal or aristocratic kitchens.

Germany really became,

in a lot of ways, the place that was the most identified with

these delicatessen stores.

After all, the delicatus part may have come from Latin or delicat from French, but Essen is German and it means to eat.

So a delicatessen was where you could get an exciting or enticing thing that you could eat.

It meant these often very large and very fancy establishments that sold all kinds of imported and fancy foods from all over the world.

And while there were plenty of Jews in Germany in the past, these newfangled delicatessens weren't necessarily exclusively Jewish at all.

The story of how the deli became Jewish took a couple of centuries and a shift in continents.

Because the stereotypical Jewish deli really was born in America.

But even in America, the original delis weren't Jewish ones.

You know, we talk about the success of waves of immigration to America.

The Germans were a pretty large one in sort of mid-19th century.

And so there was a big German population that was that had come to New York and lower Manhattan, and many of them ran delicatessens that had served, you know, brought worst.

Not too long after that big wave of German immigration, which is the wave that brought the deli to America, there was another wave of immigration, this time of Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe.

More than two million Jews immigrated to the United States between about 1880 and 1925.

This was a time of a particular peak of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic violence in Eastern Europe.

People weren't just being discriminated against, they were also being killed.

My family got out of Romania and Poland around this time.

Like most Europeans, at this point Jews had a long history of curing meats in various ways.

But that first generation of immigrants didn't come over and open delis.

Ted says they mostly weren't even buying food at delis.

First of all, they were working incredibly hard, often in the garment trade.

They were also mostly keeping kosher, so they wouldn't have bought a pork-based bratwurst.

And finally, they were incredibly poor.

But as the community grew and earned a little more money and put down roots, Jews did begin to open delis.

So you're talking about close to a million people in New York in a short period of time in a very dense area.

Like this was one of the densest populated places on earth at the time, in sort of the turn of the 20th century, all of whom are coming from all different parts of the sort of Yiddish-speaking world across Europe, a vast swath, all with their different styles of flavoring and cooking and preparation.

And this is where we start to see the origin of the classic New York Jewish deli, the kind like Katzas that my mom would drag me to when we went to New York City.

The kind that launched a thousand cold-cut plates and Borschtbelt jokes.

That story is coming up after the break.

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Jewish deli meats were traditionally a little different from those of their European neighbors for obvious reasons.

While the majority of European European delicatessen outside of the Jewish community was made with pig, the Jews would take those same methods and apply them to beef, to veal, to lamb, perhaps in some instances, and a lot of poultry as well.

David says beef, but even though they were allowed to and knew how to cure beef, they mostly didn't because Jews in Eastern Europe were mostly incredibly, incredibly poor, and they had been for hundreds of years.

Cows were expensive.

They took a lot of land.

There wasn't a lot of land, especially for Jews who weren't allowed to own land.

And so the majority of what they were eating was goose and duck and chicken, right?

So there was a lot more poultry because you could have geese and ducks in your backyard of your stadel or wherever you lived in Romania and Poland and Lithuania and so forth.

But in America, thanks to the Great Plains combined with the invention of refrigerated rail cars, beef was cheap and plentiful.

And with all that beef, Jews started to create the three most famous Jewish deli meats.

Let's go through what I call the Holy Trinity because it's a Jewish topic.

The Holy Trinity of Jewish deli meats are pastrami, corned beef, and tongue.

We'll talk about the boring one first.

Please don't at me, but really, who gets excited about corned beef?

Corned beef is brisket that has been cured, so basically marinated in a liquid that's salt.

maybe a little sugar and some spices, right?

It's basically like pickles, but with meat.

And then you boil it and then you slice it.

Corned beef was a pretty common way of curing beef.

It's now often associated with the Irish and eaten on St.

Patrick's Day.

But Irish immigrants only really started eating it in America because, like Jews, they were mostly too poor in their home country.

Next up, pickled tongue.

So why tongue?

I mean, why not?

It's a stunning, beautiful thing.

And once again, it happens to be incredibly delicious.

The back end of tongue is nearly, I would say it's two-thirds fat to muscle, whereas the tip is more muscle.

So it's high in fat.

It can hold up for long periods.

It's a very tough muscle.

So it can hold up for cooking for long periods of time.

So corned beef and pickled tongue are pretty basic.

The third member of the trinity is pastrami, and that's a little more involved.

Pastrami is that same cut of meat brisket or the navel,

which is a slightly different cut, very close to the brisket on the body.

So if the brisket is the chest, then the navel is kind of the belly, also fatty, also very sinewy, also very tough.

That is either pickled in that same sort of way and then taken out and dried and rubbed with spices, dry cured for a period of, you know, a week to two weeks, smoked, and then steamed to soften it up, sliced, and eaten.

I do love pastrami.

Pastrami seems to have originated in Romania, where it's called pastrama.

My Romanian ancestors would have been more likely to have eaten goose pastrami, but it's basically the same thing.

But its origins may go even further afield.

Arguably too, there's pasterma that comes from turkey, which is more of a cured, dried, fully dried meat.

Very similar spice set with like the black pepper and the coriander, but it is like a cured meat.

You could slice thin slices of it like you would a salami or prosciutto.

So there's definitely a link from Turkey to Romania with some of this tradition too.

Some historians think that's where the name comes from.

Basterma is a Turkic word that means pressing.

Apparently, Turkish horsemen in Central Asia would put meat in the sides of their saddles so their legs pressed against it as they rode.

The meat would get cured by having its water squeezed out while being pickled in horse sweat.

Sounds delicious.

If I'm going to be honest, I'd rather have the Jewish version.

Which also developed its own variations, thankfully none of them involving horse sweat.

Montreal smoked meat is essentially pastrami with a slightly different spice profile that was brought by Romanians and just happened to have found and developed its own sort of flavor profile isolated in the town where my parents came from in Montreal.

And New York style pastrami is

darker and more sugary than pastrami elsewhere.

But essentially that's that's what it is.

Whether it's Montreal or New York style, in general, I prefer pastrami to corned beef and Jeremy approves.

Corned beef comes right out of that brine and gets boiled and then is done.

Pastrami gets rubbed in spices, it gets smoked, then it gets steamed, then it gets gracefully put onto rye bread with mustard and sauerkraut and eaten with a huge smile.

While the person next to you eating the corned beef is like, this is only half as good.

You only cooked it half the way.

Again, sorry, corned beef lovers, but we agree.

Corned beef, pickled tongue, and pastrami might be the holy trinity, but at the American deli, you'll also find roast or smoked turkey, salami, and bologna.

Those would traditionally be pork products, but obviously they were made of beef if you were in a Jewish deli.

So is this the moment where I finally discover what on earth bologna even is?

Actually, okay, so

in Italy there is really no bologna.

There is mortadella.

Jeremy is bringing up Italy because bologna is spelled like the Italian city Bologna.

And so to understand where bologna comes from, it's definitely not originally Jewish, we have to go to Italy.

Mortadella, Bologna's ancestor, dates all the way back to the ancient Romans, and it was such a delicacy that the Pope created a legal definition for it in the 1600s.

Mortadella is also different from pastrami or tongue or even prosciutto in that it's not a single cut of meat that's being cured, it's ground meat that's being formed into a sausage.

Literally, I want you to think buttercream frosting.

You literally got to get the meat to almost that texture.

And then you stuff it into a casing and you poach it off gently.

That's where it gets its smoothness.

In America, these smooth textured, large cylindrical mortadella-like sausages, these round deli meats, they're called bologna.

Because it comes from the Bologna area, Emilia-Romagna, there's a city.

They say Bologna.

We say bologna.

You might be wondering why?

I mean, I was.

Honestly, who the hell knows?

But somebody at some point was like, I could sell more of this calling it bologna instead of mortadella.

Bologna, bologna, tomato, tomato, whatever.

However you pronounce it.

Even in America, it was not traditionally served on bread.

So, how did the deli start offering deli sandwiches?

This was a New York City love story.

The deli meats themselves may have come from the old world.

The custom of putting meat between bread so you can eat it with your hands is no doubt as old as time.

But when these two great culinary traditions came together in the fast-paced bustle of New York City, sandwich greatness was born.

On the one hand, it made sense.

These delis and the meat they served had become really really popular in New York and the Jewish community by the 1920s.

And if people were working super long hours in the factories, which is what they were doing, well, a sandwich is just easier to grab and go.

But also, at this point in history, the sandwich in general was having a moment.

In 1924, the New York Times ran a story under the headline, Sandwiches Flourishing, which basically said that the sandwich, previously a light bite for a picnic or parlor tea, the sandwich had become lunch.

In large part, this was because of the invention of a brand new revolutionary technology, which we've talked about on a previous episode, and that's the bread slicing machine.

Now you had ready-made slices of bread, and you could pile on beautiful slices of pastrami.

And eat the resulting stack of carbs and protein for lunch inside the very deli where you bought it because these delis had now put in seating too.

And the delis had their own particular atmosphere, which was definitely not fine dining.

White subway tiles, sawdust on the floors, seating for 60 in a space that should really accommodate 25.

I mean, you're cheeking jowl with other people.

It's loud.

The steam of the meat, you can smell it.

You're kind of bathed in it everywhere.

And so, so, you know, it feels like

Katz's, right?

Katz's deli in various different shapes and forms is one of the oldest delis.

I think it's the oldest Jewish delicatessen anywhere.

It's certainly the oldest in New York.

And so what did it feel like?

It felt like that.

Loud, bustling, informal to the point of like, you know, utilitarian and kind of perfect.

And it felt uniquely Jewish.

Okay, yes, not all Jews, but really it's common at Jewish family meals to have people talking over each other and jumping in.

It's kind of loud.

People are cracking jokes.

And so there's a classic stereotype of a waitress in a Jewish deli that tells you, when you tell her your order, she says, oh, honey, you don't want that.

And then she tells you what you'll be ordering instead.

You know, paradoxically, like, there was something that was hamish that was kind of homey about going to the deli because who else would talk to you like that except for like your uncle or

you know,

your brother-in-law or something like that.

For second and third generation Jews in New York City, the deli was a place to go and be proudly, emphatically Jewish in public.

And they were very attached to not just to the food, but as I really focus on in my book, really to the Deccatusan as this gathering place for the Jewish community.

It was what sociologists call a third place, not home, not work, but another important community spot where people can gather.

The spirit of the delicatessen was always, it was like someplace that people could just hang out for a little bit.

A local politician could get up on a soapbox and, you know, say, vote for me for town council.

They were these like fantastic community spots, almost like a rec center, but without a pool.

You know, barrels of pickles to swim in instead.

But it just this gathering place.

People would be in and and out.

They'd be busy.

People would be shopping for things to eat later, things to eat now, just to hang out and talk.

But delis weren't just important in New York Jewish culture.

They became iconic in American culture too, because New York Jewish culture played such a big role in shaping American culture.

In 20th century New York, you really had

the birth of the American entertainment industry with vaudeville and Broadway and television, sort of comedy, music coalescing.

And many of the people involved in that, especially vaudeville and early Broadway and TV, were Eastern European Jews or the children of them or the grandchildren of them, who again, you know, occupied these spaces as their sort of home native spaces.

And that became part of those traditions.

And so they built it into the cultures.

There's a song about a deli from that Jewish king of musical humor, Alan Sherman.

As a kid, my parents and I used to sing his song, Hello Mara, Hello Fara about summer camp.

His tribute to the deli sandwich is a different song but still quite the banger.

Do not make a stingy sandwich, pile the cold cuts high.

Customers should see salami coming through the rise.

Or you have iconic scenes in, for example, like in the 70s and Woody Allen's Annie Hall, and then obviously in the 80s in when Harry met Sally.

Yes!

Yes!

Yes!

Yes!

Oh!

Oh!

Oh, God.

Oh.

I'll have what she's having.

Let's all take a moment to appreciate one of the greatest scenes in movie history set in the one and only Cats's.

And yes, Meg Ryan is not Jewish, but Billy Crystal, Rob Reiner, and of course the smart lady, Rob Reiner's mother, who knows an orgasmic deli sandwich when she hears one, all very much New York Jews.

The Jewish deli remains iconic, if not orgasmic, to this day.

The marvelous Mrs.

Maisel just came out in the past few years.

It was supposed to take place about a half century ago and a lot of the most important meetings happened in the deli.

Do not make me cry at the stage deli.

I don't want you to cry.

The stage deli was another one of the big New York delis where deals were made and stars came to eat and hang out.

And the sandwiches themselves were actually named after the stars of the day.

There was a whole tradition of naming sandwiches.

Which has also been immortalized in popular culture.

Actually, one of the best examples is an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

It's the first episode from season four.

It's called the Larry David Sandwich.

And it's about Larry David finally getting his name up on the board, you know, in terms of having a sandwich named after him

at...

His favorite deli.

It's called Leo's.

And oh, guess what?

Leo's so born.

You know,

they named a sandwich after me.

Are you kidding me?

Oh, you're kidding me.

That's a sandwich.

That's wonderful, man.

That's the board.

You've arrived.

I'm on the board.

Larry David, Jewish.

Ted Danson, definitely not Jewish.

Everyone loving the Jewish deli.

Long before Larry David got his sandwich, those sandwiches were getting named after famous Jewish comedians like Mel Brooks and Sid Caesar.

And even back in the 1930s, they were not only named after superstars, they were also supersized.

Because Jews were super excited that they were no longer poor, and what could be a better sign of abundance than lots of deli meat stuffed into a sandwich?

But it's actually at the stage deli and its rival the Carnegie deli that the super stuffed deli sandwich was born.

And they had this sort of sandwich war, I think, in the 70s and 80s of like, well, we have, you know, eight ounces of meat, well, we have nine, well, we have ten, well, we have twelve.

And onwards until you literally have to dislocate your jaw to even get your mouth around the sandwich.

This era of stars and supersized sandwiches seems like it should have been the heyday of the deli, but actually delis were already on the decline.

The real peak was in the 1930s when there were more than a thousand delis in New York and Jews even started to open them as they moved around the country.

At the same time, deli meats were starting to become popular with non-Jews too, because Gentiles were getting to know Jewish foods, like while fighting alongside Jews against Hitler.

There's this very famous slogan of, you know, send a salami to your boy in the army, as my grandparents would say.

But the reality was that, you know, for Jewish GIs who were serving overseas, many of them really wanted that taste of home and shared it with their platoon mates or whatever.

And so, you know, people who hadn't had any exposure necessarily to Jewish food before had their first taste of it.

So it seems like the deli should have been poised to be an even bigger hit after the war.

But Jews were getting richer.

They were becoming lawyers and doctors, and they didn't want to work in their parents' deli.

That was the good news.

But the other not at all good, extremely tragic thing that happened in 1940s Europe, of course, is that pretty much all the Jews that were still living in Eastern Europe were gone.

The Holocaust kind of ended the world that this cuisine came from.

People either were killed or they left.

And so there were no more Jews from Poland and Lithuania and Russia and all these areas.

And so,

that's the difference.

Because if you have a Mexican restaurant and the family's like, all right, we're done.

We're getting out of here.

Kids go to law school.

There's going to be another family from Mexico who's going to want to come and serve lingua tacos, take over that restaurant, open their own restaurant, open a taco stand, do it, find a way to make it work.

You don't have that with Eastern European Jews anymore.

Obviously, this is hardly the biggest concern post-Holocaust.

But I do have to ask: what about all those Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, who now had a taste for a deli sandwich, even if they didn't want to run a deli necessarily, what did they do when they wanted a pastrami sandwich?

No problem.

As time went on, they were able to find deli meat basically anywhere.

Sometimes it's almost too available.

Like the kinds of food that you could only eat in a deli, like pastrami, are now, you can now have anywhere.

You can go into like a Subway or a Quiznos or any one of these like franchises and have pastrami.

So it's like delis have lost that sort of like what made them special, I think.

What happened was that deli meat got absorbed into the American industrial food system and it kind of went viral.

That's coming up after the break.

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This month on Explain It To Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers.

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That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.

My bologna has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R.

My bologna has a second name, it's M-A-Y-E-R.

When I was a kid, this was, yes, a commercial, but it's also something my friends and I just sang randomly on the playground, whatever.

It was ridiculously catchy.

Oh, I love to read it every day.

And if you

Oscar Meyer started out as a German sausage-making company in Chicago.

They were famous for their hot dog wieners.

But in the 1950s, they came up with something that sounds even more delicious, meat glue, which is an excitant that comes out when you kind of toss and turn pieces of meat.

And the Oscar Mayer Company figured out that this was something very handy and they actually patented it.

This is Anastasia Marx de Salcedo.

She's been on the show before in an episode called Marching on Our Stomachs and she's the author of the book Combat Ready Kitchen.

Meat cells have a lot of things inside them.

The useful one in this case is a protein called myosin.

It turns out that it's a very, very sticky protein.

One end of it can stick to fat, one end of it can stick to water or other proteins, and so it can kind of bind everything together.

The Oskar-Meyer company discovered that tumbling meat together with salt would squeeze this myosin out of the cells.

So it's either got to be a mixer or it's got to be what we call a tumbler, but it allows that salt to work through and solubilize those proteins.

And when you pull it out, you'll get this kind of a sticky exudate on it.

So it's almost like a meat glue.

So far is so gross.

But if you were a meat scientist in the 1950s, this discovery raised a very exciting possibility.

Could you use this meat glue stuff to stick together cheap meat scraps and form brand new boneless cuts of meat that would sell for more?

The idea was to take like scraps of beef and literally restructure them to form like a boneless steak.

It would eventually be called restructured meat, but the glue wasn't quite enough to get a meat company all the way there.

What needed to happen next was the invention of the meat flaker.

It was a machine that you could shove the cheapest chunks of carcass into and end up with literally meat flakes.

The flakes were key because if you mixed them with the glue, you ended up with a texture that felt more like a muscle than a sausage.

The final step in all this was discovered by the military because they wanted to ship chicken and steak cutlets to the men and women overseas without spending too much.

There was the discovery by the Natick Center itself that the addition of a very common chemical phosphate allowed sort of the whole pieces, the molecules within this refabricated meat meat to kind of stay together but still be juicy.

And then you could form that juicy, fabricated, restructured meat into any shape you wanted.

Wes's thesis advisor when he was first studying meat science was a guy called Roger Mandigo, and Roger was the guy at the Natick Center, the U.S.

Military Research Lab, who figured this all out.

What the Army loved was that you could use this technology to come up with all sorts of meat products.

The first thing they made was a pork chop.

But one of the claims to play that Roger did, and we did this a couple of times, is that we also did it with beef and we could actually make steaks.

So they were restructured steaks in the shape of the state of Nebraska.

The military started serving these restructured cuts of meat to soldiers in the 1970s, but they also shared the technology with industry.

So, you know, within a couple years of soldiers getting to dine on a, you know, a fabricated cutlet, McDonald's was test running what became the McRib.

What'd you say this was again?

McDonald's calls it the McRib sandwich.

It's a new kind of cue.

McRib?

I don't see any bones.

Hey, who wants bones in a sandwich?

We're telling the story of the McRib in our special supporters' newsletter.

But the point is, this technology was not only useful for making random bits of meat into a cut like a boneless pork chop, it was also good for turning scraps into, say, slices of smoked ham.

So I think it was probably pretty easy once you have control of these processes to, you know, the sky's the limits here.

Which is how you end up in a world in which Subway's cold-cut combo, a deli sandwich that contains bologna, salami, and ham, it's all made out of turkey scraps, not pork.

And it's the reason all those meats are also a perfect circle shape.

A ham would never be a perfect circle in real life, but when you make it out of flakes that are glued together, the sky, like Anastasia says, is truly the limit.

This is basically how industrial deli meat is made today.

Oscar Meyer, Boarshead, they're using these technologies to mush bits together to make anything.

And it's also why the end result is so cheap.

Part of that, of course, is because of our industrial meat system, which makes all meat way too cheap, but part of it is because they can use all parts of the animal.

Actually,

these kind of restructured meats are the ultimate in nose-to-tail eating because they use everything.

Yum.

But our point is that all of this together made the bologna sandwich and its sliced deli meat counterparts the lunchbox staples they remain to this day.

Even though deli meats have officially been labeled as carcinogens.

Prior studies had established similar connections, but the WHO was the most prominent health organization to specifically say processed meats can cause cancer.

This pronouncement took place in 2015, but the understanding of what was going on in deli meat, what the issue was, the research on that started about 100 years earlier.

The culprit is our old friend Salt Peter, the potassium nitrate-laden salt that did such a good job killing bacteria and keeping deli meats nice and pink.

During the process of curing meat, that nitrate turns to nitrite.

Scientists figured that process out, then they also figured out that it was the nitrite itself that did all the work, so deli meat makers came to skip over that conversion step and just added nitrite from the beginning.

Then, what happened was that in the 1950s, scientists discovered that a nitrite-related compound, a chemical called nitrosamine, caused tumors to grow in rats.

And so researchers started to be concerned about our exposure to nitrite.

And unfortunately, it was discovered that certain meat products that are cured with sodium nitrite can produce compounds which are potentially carcinogenic.

Robert Tureski is a cancer researcher at the University of Minnesota, and he says that our body can convert nitrites into nitrosamines.

Robert told us that we usually can just pee out the nitrosamines.

But sometimes the reaction that happens while our body is trying to get rid of the nitrosamines accidentally generates compounds that damage DNA.

And if that damage occurs, say, on the machinery that's involved in suppressing tumors, well, that's when you have a potential problem.

This is pretty complicated science, but the studies have been done on all of these processes, and in general, they're well understood.

What's known about the chemistry of these compounds, how they're formed and how they're metabolized in our body, how they cause mutations,

changes in our gene composition that can lead to cancer, all these things are well known now.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, as this was all being teased out, governments started to regulate the amount of nitrite allowed in deli meats, and companies responded to the anxieties of consumers by seeking out alternative methods of curing meat so that their deli meats could be labeled as uncured and with no nitrites added.

But they still needed to find something that would basically do the same thing, which is, as we said, keep the meat pink and kill botulism.

Remember vegetables, they always say eat your vegetables, right?

And they have large, large, large volume of nitrate.

So if you take celery, for example, which has a very high concentration of nitrate naturally, and you powder it and you add that powder to your bologna, Bingo.

It works just like saltpeter.

And weirdly, you can then label the finished product naturally cured, even uncured, and no nitrite or nitrate added, which it's not, but you can label it that way.

It's a little complicated on the reasoning why, because it goes back to some of the code of federal regulations that are in force right now.

But basically,

it's a difference between adding nitrite directly into a product versus adding nitrite that is in a different source being added to the product.

So

that's, it's kind of a strange thing because we're still curing it.

It may be considered natural, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's safer.

The labeling is confusing, but that's not the only confusing part.

Because while meat cured with celery powder doesn't seem to be safer than other cured meat, celery itself with the nitrates doesn't seem to be harmful.

Scientists think it's because of a couple of things.

First, the veggies have other substances in them that help combat cancer.

Meanwhile, and this is still being figured out, combining those veggie-derived nitrates with meat seems to activate them somehow so that when they hit your gut, it's more likely to make those damaging compounds.

So, celery powder used to cure meat appears to be different than just eating celery and a steak.

And like Rob says, this celery-cured meat, it's often labeled uncured, but it doesn't seem to be any safer than nitrite-cured meat.

But right now, many people would pick up a packet of this quote-unquote uncured, no nitrite-added ham or bologna, and they would logically conclude that there's no nitrite in it and thus there's no risk of cancer, which is not true.

Food scientists at Consumer Reports tested 31 varieties of deli meat for nitrates and nitrites.

CR's testing found that among the meats labeled cured and uncured, the nitrate and nitrite levels were essentially the same.

And this is why the nonprofit, the Center for Science and the Public Interest, has a petition in front of the U.S.

government to change the regulations so these products products would have to change their labels.

They could no longer make the claim of being nitrite-free on the package.

That was back in August of 2019.

Now, USDA did say that they were going to make a change to where they were going to call a curing agent anything that contained nitrite in it.

The final ruling has not come out yet.

Five years later.

But recently the USDA did say that their new rule will come into effect in January 2026 and deli meat companies are already beginning to panic.

As it happens, Wes has been working on a solution for these companies.

It's a new way of curing meats that was inspired by how our own bodies work.

It's not yet quite ready for prime time, but he thinks he's getting close.

We'll have that story in our special supporters newsletter.

In the meantime, though, say you want some deli meat in your sandwich.

How concerned should you be?

So the strongest data on a link between deli meat and cancer is for colon cancer.

It increases your cancer risk.

If you have 50 grams or a deli sandwich every single day of the week, it will increase your risk by about 18%.

18% sounds like a lot, but Rob pointed out that actually the overall risk for colorectal cancer in the U.S.

is roughly 4%.

So if you increase that by 18%,

your lifetime risk is still less than 5%.

In comparison, tobacco smokers, I'm guessing

if you're smoking

two packs of cigarettes per day for for your lifetime, I believe that probably the lung cancer instance is probably close to 20%.

So there's a big difference.

Basically, the point is that the cancer risk is nowhere near the risk of smoking.

But Rob says that doesn't mean you should just ignore the risk.

So the bottom line is what I tell people is that

to minimize your risks, have a varied diet.

It's not a smart thing to eat

deli sandwiches for lunch and dinner seven days a week.

In short, enjoy your bologna sandwich in moderation.

And speaking of enjoyment, I am here to tell you that you can do a lot better than the supermarket's standard restructured offerings.

And one place you can find artisanal and delicious deli meat is in Jewish delis.

We told you that Jewish delis were in decline, which is true, but there's also been a rebirth in the past couple of decades.

There's a great one by me in Cambridge called Mamala's, and they now have a bunch of locations around Boston.

Two of these kind of new wave delis just just opened across the street from each other in my neighborhood in Los Angeles.

And in Cleveland, you can go to Jeremy's deli called Larder.

As a personal steak, I had heard a lot of like Jewish delis are going extinct.

And I was like, I'm going to do my part to prevent that.

So I kind of view larder as like,

you know, my attempt to steward Jewish food culture in North America.

Jeremy makes traditional deli meats with good meat, cured the old-fashioned way, so you can go and order these old-fashioned favorites and know you're getting something that's going to taste great.

But he's also a modern chef, and he's been playing around with all sorts of new ideas, like curing meat with the microbe that's super popular in Japan called koji.

It's usually used to make things like miso and soy sauce.

We actually talked about this in a previous episode.

We use all sorts of techniques.

And it depends like what type of meat we're making.

But one thing that we always use universally in any of our processes is, and Cynthia, you you know, you've eaten some of it, is koji.

So, you know, it's important to have those modern sensibilities and that contemporariness about your food.

That's the only way any of our traditions are going to survive, right?

They have to be delicious and they have to be attractive to the people who are here and now who want to eat them.

Because ultimately, the key thing that defines deli meat is this ability to take less desirable...

desirable pieces of the animal and use all our creativity and culinary technique to make it it utterly delicious, which Jeremy says is really the most important thing about it.

Deli meat is delicious.

I think we could just put a period there.

Thanks this episode to Jeremy Omansky, Ted Merwin, David Sachs, Robert Tureski, Wes Osborne, and Anastasia Marks de Silsedo.

We have links to their books, restaurants, and research on our website, gastropod.com.

Thanks, as always, to Claudia Geib, our amazing producer, and stay tuned.

We'll be back in a couple of weeks with another brand new episode for your listening delight.

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