Walk down the refrigerated aisle of any American grocery store and you’ll find bacon and ham wearing labels that sound like a clean bill of health: “uncured,” “no nitrates or nitrites added.” The packages cost more. Shoppers pay the premium because they believe they’re buying something safer for their families. Most of them are wrong — and remarkably, the label is following federal rules.
Here is what the label doesn’t say. Those products are cured — with nitrites derived from celery powder rather than a synthetic additive. Recent polling commissioned by the Coalition Against Nitrites found that 55% of American consumers don’t know that products marketed as “uncured” or “no artificial nitrite” may still contain nitrites from natural sources. That’s not an informed market. That’s confusion, at scale.
