As Eric, a technician in his 20s, sat at a café in London’s Soho on Thursday morning ready to tuck into a breakfast fry-up of sausages, bacon, eggs, potatoes and toast, any thoughts about possible health repercussions were taking a back seat to his appetite. Asked about the World Health Organisation’s declaration this week that bacon, sausage and other processed meats were carcinogenic, he shrugged.
“It feels like everything is at risk of giving you cancer these days, so I don’t feel it’s a reason to stop eating,” he says. “I do eat a lot of meat but not much bacon. You can only try to eat healthier.”
In popular culture, too, the reaction to the cancer report has been a resolute “hands off my bacon”. On The Late Show, presenter Stephen Colbert said only the waft of frying bacon could get his two teenage boys out of bed in the morning. “You think they’re going to come running down the stairs to the scent of me washing kale?”