I shouldn't be eating either of you.

 

If there’s one foodstuff I can’t possibly support, it is deli meat. Almost all deli meat contains sodium nitrite, which is associated with an unappetizing buffet of cancers, like the gastric, esophageal, and colorectal. Cancers? Yucky! Yet the very idea of grinding multiple animal parts into a discrete food and then shaping it into a ball that can be easily gripped and slipped into a metal slicer is even yuckier, non? Being totally disgusted by deli meat is vital to my food identity, oui?

Or am I having a food identity crisis?

Recently, as a result of the most dangerous additive of all, peer influence, I ate several slices of mortadella, an Italian cold cut containing a customary and disquieting amount of visible white pork fat. According to one source, mortadella is no less than 15% cubes of fat derived from the pig’s neck. It is a horrific thing even to describe. So waddya mean ‘several slices’?

Clearly, traditional Italian deli meat is an intoxicating agent. My very character, previously so lard-wary and tumor-timid, was fundamentally altered by the first mouthful of mortadella. For once, my thoughts turned away from cancer epidemiology and toward strategies for optimizing pork flavor and texture. I discovered that by folding very cold, paper-thin rounds of mortadella in half, then in half again, one produces a light, savory, edible meat-handkerchief, ideal for stuffing in the mouth straight out of the refrigerator. As a result of my innovation, my companion and I ate 200 grams of mortadella, 30 grams of cubed pork fat, straight out of the deli paper before we even sat down to lunch. I wrote off the event as a moral aberration, filed it away with the time I drank a mickey of Absolut Citron, and blamed the whole thing on my companion.

Yet not too long after my mortadella pig-out, I found myself peering surreptitiously into a European deli cooler on Granville Island. There I had spotted a giant uncut loaf of cold Bavarian Leberkaese, a Germanic invention of corned beef, pork, bacon and onions ground very fine and baked to achieve a crunchy brown crust (of which it still possesses a thin strip when chilled and sliced as a deli meat). With a mouth-watering rush of nostalgia, I remembered that this delicacy once passed, to great acclaim, through the fridge of my childhood home and I had to have it. One hour and 300 grams later, I stood at the kitchen counter explaining to my companion exactly how the incredibly light, almost fluffy Bavarian Leberkaese was also his fault. He was more than happy to accept responsibility, in return for his (scant) 150 grams.

How to explain my double-dabble in sodium nitrites, my delicious departure from clean living? As always, such a conundrum calls for a Freudian approach. Mortadella and Bavarian Leberkaese are similar in that they both kind of taste like bologna, which I haven’t had since I was a child. We didn’t have bologna in my house more than a handful of times, but I occasionally ate it at other kids’ houses, most often on Wonder bread with mayonnaise.  My then-impression of bologna sandwiches on white bread with mayo was that they were absolutely spectacular. My opinion was the same on the occasion my mother bought an unsliced hunk of bologna, cut it into cubes, fried it in butter and served it with mashed potatoes just to be retro. This event was never replicated, and it glistens in my memory like melted pork fat.

As a child- if you will, a human being with an undeveloped brain and palate- I truly liked bologna; in fact, I liked deli meat generally. I even liked Spam. (One time, a friend’s mom went so far as to bake crispy Spam with brown sugar on top and as of today I am dangerously close to going off-wagon yet again to try to recreate this at home. You’ll be the first to know.) Thus, the leading explanation for my recent salume bender is a deep-seated yearning to return to my childhood, a totally justifiable crisis just days before my 29th birthday.

Or perhaps the truth is that mortadella, Bavarian Leberkaese, even Spam and bologna, are mind-bogglingly delicious- if your mind can be temporarily boggled enough, by peer pressure, or perhaps lemon vodka, to take the first bite. As a kid, I liked bologna and Spam because I didn’t think too much about them, not about their cancer-causing properties, not about their fat content, not about the animal that made them. Unfortunately, as an adult I think about all these things and so I edge most deli meats off my plate. But my disgust at them, I realize, arises from my developed brain, not my developed palate.

I plan to get right back on the wagon.