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Most people I know have a strange relationship with the supermarket: friends, single people, families, married people, old people, young people, divorced people, sick people, healthy people, skinny people, frustrated people, hungry people, they all do most of their shopping at either Woolworths or Coles, the thrifty ones at Aldi. Culturally Australians are lazy shoppers. We don’t go out of our way to go to a speciality grocer or whole animal butcher to buy what we need for the week.
While this may not feel like a big deal, what it means is that we all have access to the same food on the shelves and in the fridges. We are told what to buy instead of having access to variety and diversity. For a lot of ticket items this isn’t a problem. It’s convenient to be able to find the same toilet paper every week / month / year, it’s reassuring to know that the pasta and the rice will be consistent and consistently available (although the push from both Woolworths and Coles towards brand-named pasta and rice products deserves a newsletter in and of itself. Fuck Coles pasta. Fuck Coles rice), and if you need tea bags they will be right there in aisle 4.
However, when it comes to meat and cured meat products this can be disastrous. There is little accountability within the meat industry in Australia regarding the treatment and processing of animals on their way to the supermarket shelves. Similarly, there is little visibility about the difference between buying meat at a speciality butcher and buying it at a supermarket (besides the obvious and glaringly distinct prices). It makes it hard for anyone to understand why it’s important to buy better meat (there will be a newsletter on the meat industry soon - Trust me, it’s not good) and I don’t just mean raw meat. It applies to cured meat too1.
It’s a sad reality that processed meats2 are bad for us. Despite the furore around the legitimacy of this, there really is unequivocal evidence that eating processed meat increases our risk of cancer dramatically. I was reminded today of this report from 2015. It’s clear. They hurt us. Even eating small amounts of processed meats with regularity (including ham and bacon) increases your chance of colorectal cancer by 18%.
We don’t speak about it often. This is a ridiculously fucked piece of information that we tend to just ignore. Why do we choose to ignore it? Because ham and bacon taste really good. There is little better than a bacon sandwich for breakfast or a ham cheese and tomato sandwich for lunch. Toast said lunch sandwich and things really get hot.
While there is no declared certainty around it, it is suggested that it is the chemicals involved in the processing and subsequent product life extension that could be causing cancer.
If you want to make cured ham or bacon at home it is really hard, time consuming and needs an amount of space that isn’t available to most people. However, you can cook ham hock very easily and very cheaply and it is very tasty. An ultimate alternative.
So in light of that, here is a simple recipe for boiled ham hock. Ham hock is otherwise known as a pork knuckle. It’s the joint of the pig’s leg that connects to the pig’s foot. While it’s not technically an ankle its location on the pig’s leg would have it correspond with where we would imagine its ankle to be. If there are any questions about its location, see the very basic yet informative image3 below4.
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