The Case Against Deli Meat

Photo: Bobby Doherty for New York Magazine

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

In January 2023, Terrence Boyce was hired by the deli-meat maker Boar’s Head to straighten out some problems in one of the company’s nine U.S. processing plants. Boyce is a sanitation manager who advises food producers on how to improve their cleaning procedures, and Boar’s Head’s factory in Jarratt, Virginia, was filthy. State inspectors contracted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service had found mold, leaky pipes, rusty machinery, and live insects, among other things you don’t want touching your lunch meat. A few months earlier, the agency had warned Boar’s Head that the facility’s conditions amounted to an “imminent threat” to anyone who ate the beef and pork cold cuts processed there.

But when he arrived at work, Boyce didn’t sense much urgency. For starters, before he could assess the plant’s cleanliness for himself, he was required to complete a three-month training program in which he shadowed the facility’s managers and then wrote a report on what each one did. “I didn’t really get to begin my own job until late March or April,” he says. Once he was allowed to make his rounds, he says he saw signs of negligence everywhere. Mixers sprayed meat onto walls and ceilings, where it was left to rot. Drains weren’t being cleaned daily. There was fat, grease, and protein buildup on equipment. (“I was like, ‘Why does this equipment have rainbow-colored streaks on it?’”) Boyce recommended changes to the plant’s sanitation protocols — “I made a big stink about what we needed” — but says he was mostly rebuffed.

“Upper management said, ‘We’re Boar’s Head. We’ve been doing this for years, and it’s always been okay,’” remembers Boyce. “So I asked, ‘Then what did you bring me here for?’” He says he now suspects that he was hired as a condition of a USDA Food Safety Assessment — sort of a performance-improvement plan for meat-processing facilities — and that his bosses never intended to take his advice. Instead, according to a document signed by the assistant plant manager, Boyce was asked to cut costs by reducing the amount of cleaning products used by 5 percent. Nine months into the job, he was fired. (A Boar’s Head spokesperson tells me, “The statements of a single former employee do not reflect our practices at Boar’s Head or those that are standard across the industry.”)

Then, in the summer of 2024, ten people died and 59 were hospitalized with listeriosis, the biggest such outbreak in more than a decade. (In 2011, tainted cantaloupe had killed 33.) Most of those who got sick, across 19 U.S. states, had eaten Boar’s Head’s Strassburger Brand Liverwurst. Guess which moldy, bug-infested processing plant it came from?

Boar’s Head, which was founded in Brooklyn in 1905, had spent a century building a premiumish image as the top-tier sandwich meat in middle-tier delis. Overnight, it became the Boeing of charcuterie. The company recalled more than 7 million pounds of food — spanning 71 types of packaged meats and cheeses, along with those intended for slicing at deli counters — from retailers in 49 U.S. states plus Puerto Rico, Mexico, the Cayman Islands, the Dominican Republic, and Panama. Boar’s Head discontinued liverwurst in all of its factories and closed the Jarratt plant indefinitely. Six wrongful-death lawsuits have been filed, a class-action suit is in the works, and the USDA says it’s investigating its own handling of the case.

Then consumers went right on eating cold cuts. The week the Boar’s Head recall was announced, sales of deli meat — a $16 billion-a-year market — fell just 8 percent, according to the food-research company 210 Analytics. Over the past three months, sales of meat in deli aisles are down only 10.9 percent, according to retail-data firm Circana. At my local supermarket and bagel shop, both of which received recalled meat and still have Boar’s Head stickers on their deli cases, employees tell me their slicers are as busy as ever.

Why should one deadly bacterial outbreak spoil our appetite? In lots of ways, cold cuts are a perfect food, a bromatological miracle of flavor, stability, consistency, and convenience. They’re loaded with delicious preservatives that extend their shelf life past that of any natural meat product. They can be eaten straight from the fridge, providing instant sustenance to the busy and lazy alike. They travel well — to the office, to school, on picnics and road trips — and unlike with peanut butter, you can eat them in public without fear of sending bystanders into anaphylaxis. They’re a comfort food that will satisfy any 4-year-old, but they can also be made highbrow with one squirt of fancy aïoli. They’re an all-purpose solution for every lunch-related need.

But maybe it’s time we looked at them a little harder. 2024 is shaping up to be the year of foodborne illnesses: In the months since the Boar’s Head outbreak, there have been at least half a dozen other listeria-related recalls, including ones affecting mushrooms, salmon, TV dinners, and frozen waffles in October alone. Around the same time, one person died and 34 were hospitalized with E. coli after eating onions served at McDonald’s; in mid-November, several national grocery chains recalled bags of carrots, also due to potential E. coli contamination. It can feel like a scary time to eat anything you didn’t grow or slaughter and cook yourself. And if all these outbreaks and recalls are really a sign that something has broken in the U.S. food system, then deli meats are among the riskiest things you could consume.

Photo: Retailer Photo: Retailer

Modern deli meat is an answer, millennia in the making, to two of meat’s most fundamental problems: It spoils quickly, and it’s kind of a pain to cook. Its origins date back to at least 3000 B.C., when the Sumerians flaunted their civilized nature by salting and drying fish and game to keep them from rotting. The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans advanced the practice, grinding their meat, mixing it with spices, and stuffing it into animal intestines, creating early sausages. These techniques spread and evolved over centuries, and by the Middle Ages, artisans in Europe were making salami, mortadella, and other meats that were cooked as part of their preparation, enabling them to be eaten cold.

Cured meats arrived in the U.S. in the second half of the 19th century, when German and Jewish immigrants opened the first delicatessens in New York City. These were small-scale operations that mostly served other immigrants. During World War II, soldiers needed shelf-stable, easily transportable meat, leading to innovations in canning and vacuum-sealing. “Those technologies were adapted for consumers,” says Ted Merwin, author of the book Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli, “and what could be better than meat that comes beautifully wrapped in plastic?” Oscar Mayer, once a single Chicago deli, and Boar’s Head, a small meat distributor, both scaled up, transitioning to factory processing and supplying packaged deli meats to supermarkets nationwide.

Somewhere around this time, deli meats split into two broad categories. There were the traditional varieties like corned beef, tongue, pastrami, and prosciutto, which were and still are made and sold locally at delicatessens in their original form. But in most minds, deli meat became synonymous with cold cuts — the new mass-produced, presliced, ready-to-eat meats such as bologna, ham, and turkey.

But cold cuts represented a conceptual leap beyond their progenitors — more a simulation of meat than meat itself. Unlike classic deli meats, those plastic-wrapped blocks behind the deli counter do not all come from the same muscle or even a single animal. To make a typical loaf of cold cuts, many animals are slaughtered, exsanguinated, chilled, balded, cleaned, disassembled, deboned, tossed into a large industrial bowl, run through a set of high-speed rotating knives, ground into a pastelike goo the consistency of pancake batter, mixed with a cocktail of preservatives and binding agents, poured into molds that mimic the animal’s anatomy, cooked back into a solid, vacuum-sealed, and labeled for shipping. “We have these 2,000-pound stainless-steel combo bins that we fill with pork trimmings that all go into the chopper to become cold cuts,” says Edward Mills, a professor emeritus of meat science at Penn State. “To fill one, I would have to have dozens or hundreds of pigs.” One bite of cold-cut ham, in other words, may contain the remains of a pig’s entire extended family.

Thanks to cleverly wholesome marketing — “My Bologna Has a First Name,” etc. — these avant-garde meat products became family-friendly staples. They also became, against some odds, a health food. In the early 1970s, Americans developed a new fixation on nutrition and exercise, and cold cuts, which contain large amounts of sodium and saturated fats, were almost a casualty. But then along came Robert Atkins, who, in his 1972 book, Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, laid out the rules of his high-protein, low-carb diet and told his followers they could enjoy “cold cuts galore.” (Just hold the bread.) By decree of the king, protein became the holiest macronutrient in trendy eating, and because deli meats were an easy source, they kept their good name. In the ensuing decades, a series of protein-rich fad diets — Paleo, keto, South Beach, carnivore — would make similar allowances, which likely helped cold cuts avoid the stain that besmirched other processed foods like Doritos. “Not only were cold cuts allowed by Atkins,” says Merwin, “they were the best possible thing you could eat.”

Photo: Bobby Doherty for New York Magazine

All of this manipulation and food science was bound to come with side effects. Deli meat’s two biggest selling points — its extended shelf life and the convenience of being edible without cooking — make it a great vector for listeria, which can grow in soil, water, and animal poop. Fresh meats we cook at home at temperatures hot enough to kill most bacteria. Deli meats, though, are typically served cold, so when you eat one, you should assume it’s crawling with whatever contaminants it picked up on the long journey from the processing plant to your sandwich. And unlike most bacteria, listeria can live in low temperatures, which means it thrives on foods that are stored in fridges for weeks. It has also been known to leap from one meat to another on deli counters and slicers.

Listeria acts as a parasite in humans. Once inside the body, it can survive stomach acid and move into the intestines, where it multiplies. If you’re an otherwise healthy young person, listeria may just give you a fever and diarrhea, but in severe cases, it can enter the bloodstream, resulting in sepsis, or the nervous system, causing meningitis or encephalitis. In pregnant women, it can cross the placenta. Invasive cases of listeriosis can be deadly to children, fetuses, the elderly, and the immunocompromised. Its mortality rate can be as high as 15 percent. (Salmonella’s is less than one percent.) “I usually avoid deli meat,” says Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports and the former deputy undersecretary for food safety at the USDA. “For people who work on food safety, there are certain foods that you stay away from because you understand that they pose a higher risk. It’s almost not surprising to me when there’s a deli-meat recall.”

Despite all the attention that has been paid to the Boar’s Head listeria recall, the exact mechanism of the contamination is still mysterious. In September, the company announced that an internal review had determined the cause was a “specific production process that only existed at the Jarratt facility and was only used for liverwurst.” Asked for elaboration, a Boar’s Head spokesperson told me, “While we won’t comment on the specifics of the Jarratt plant, we acknowledge that what occurred this past summer did not meet the high standards that have underscored our business since our founding.” (Also, besides Boyce, none of the facility’s 500 employees would talk to me on the record, presumably to avoid jeopardizing future work. Some have been offered jobs at Boar’s Head’s nearby plant in Petersburg, Virginia.)

But experts I spoke to told me there isn’t anything unique about the way liverwurst is processed that makes it more vulnerable to listeria contamination than other deli meats. It’s typically made by grinding and emulsifying pork liver with fatty cuts and seasonings, stuffing the mixture into casings, and then cooking it to at least 165 degrees, which should kill any bacteria it might have collected in previous steps. “I don’t know the specifics of Boar’s Head’s liverwurst-production process,” says Joseph Sebranek, a professor emeritus of animal science at Iowa State University. “But if you think about it, the liverwurst would have to have been contaminated after cooking, maybe by contact with slicing or packaging equipment that hadn’t been properly sanitized. Or maybe it was just undercooked.”

The Jarratt plant’s inspection reports contain evidence that supports both of these theories. In a violation recorded by a USDA agent in June 2023, a Boar’s Head associate working in the liverwurst cook-tank department “was observed on his cell phone.” The temperature of the cook tank “was supposed to be continuously checked,” says Boyce, in order to guarantee it was hot enough to kill bacteria. “How many checks did that employee miss because he was looking at his phone?” Then again, it’s possible the contamination happened later in the process. In July 2024, a USDA agent spotted condensation on surfaces in the facility’s post-cooking areas, including on ceilings near where liverwurst was cooled. Listeria flourishes in moisture, so perhaps a few sinister water droplets rained death from above. (This explanation might be bolstered by a wrongful-death lawsuit filed in October on behalf of a man who had allegedly eaten Boar’s Head Tavern Ham cold cuts but no liverwurst. According to the Jarratt plant’s inspection reports, condensation was also found in the room where ham was cooled.)

Within this mystery, however, lies an even more pressing one: Why didn’t the USDA intervene? Since the Boar’s Head Jarratt facility opened in 1990, inspectors from the agency were present every day, at least once per shift, as required for all U.S. processing plants that supply meat for distribution across state lines. After the outbreak, some of those inspectors’ reports were made public. Between January 2022 and July 2024, when the plant suspended operations, the facility was cited 176 times for noncompliance. (A plant can be found in noncompliance over something as small as a loose floor tile or as large as a failure to meet pathogen-control standards.) By September 2022, agents had raised enough objections over the factory’s cleanliness to trigger a Food Safety Assessment, an audit in which a meat plant must either substantially improve conditions or face corrective action. In an especially bad case, the USDA can remove its inspectors from a facility, which effectively shuts it down. But the results of that audit are unclear — the USDA has not released them — and the plant was allowed to keep processing meat, even as it seems to have become more revolting over time. During a June 1, 2024, inspection, a USDA agent saw black mold in a room where meat was cured. On June 10, there was “heavy meat buildup” on the walls of one room, “approximately 15–20 flies” in a vat of pickling solution, and a “steady line of ants” entering through the cracked door of the next room over. On June 26, there were “whitish, discolored muscles of meat lying near the trash compactor with flies surrounding them.” (The first listeria case was reported in May, but the Jarratt plant was not identified as its source until late July.)

As tragic as the Boar’s Head listeria outbreak was — among those killed was an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor; another victim lived but had to pause chemotherapy treatments for leukemia while she fought the infection — it could have been worse. Thankfully, not that many people eat liverwurst anymore, probably because it’s gross even when it’s not covered in lethal illness. If the listeria had spread via turkey or roast beef, it likely would have made more people sick — and it might have been harder to trace. In 2021 and 2022, 16 people across six states came down with listeriosis, out of whom one died and another suffered a miscarriage. Seven of the victims lived in New York, and of them, five were determined to have eaten sliced meat or cheese from NetCost Market Delis in Sheepshead Bay and Staten Island. But the scope of the outbreak meant the CDC was unable to identify a more specific supplier or SKU. “Tracing listeriosis is tough because of the long incubation time,” says Carl Custer, a former Food Safety and Inspection Service microbiologist who helped with investigations. (Symptoms of listeriosis usually present within one or two weeks, but in some cases they may take up to 70 days to appear.) “I imagine epidemiologists probably asked the victims what they had eaten over the past two weeks. Liverwurst would be easier to remember” than more common foods.

What’s more alarming is that if the outbreak hadn’t happened, the public likely would never have found out about conditions at the Boar’s Head Jarratt plant. After the recall, journalists made Freedom of Information Act requests for the factory’s inspection records. These documents are not typically released to the public for any meat-processing plant, and they can be so hard to come by that even Boyce says he has had to make FOIA requests for the records of the facilities he’s worked in. (This is supposedly, in part, to protect “confidential business information.”) “There should be total transparency because it would be a significant incentive for these companies to clean up their acts,” says Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal, who called for a USDA internal investigation into the agency’s response to the Jarratt plant’s repeat infractions. “But the meat producers don’t want these reports to be made public, for obvious reasons.”

As a compromise, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service publishes “Quarterly Enforcement Reports” on its website. The purpose of these reports is to reassure the meat-eating public, four times a year, of the actions the agency takes to “ensure that the products that reach consumers are safe, wholesome, and properly labeled.” Each one includes a list of the U.S. meat-processing facilities that were problematic enough to warrant punishment, ranging from a formal warning of possible disciplinary action (an NOIE, or “notice of intended enforcement”) to a full suspension of operations. In theory, these documents should be a way to let consumers know which meat plants are unsanitary before it’s too late. But, for reasons that have yet to be explained, the Boar’s Head Jarratt plant never received even an NOIE prior to the listeria outbreak, so it was never named in an enforcement report. (A source tells me the factory’s suspension will be noted in the next report, which will be published in either December or January.)

“It’s hard to look at this and not think that there’s a more systemic problem,” says Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America. He mentions the Peanut Corporation of America, whose salmonella-tainted nuts killed nine people in 2008 and 2009. Managers at the company initially neglected to notify Texas authorities that they had opened a factory in the state, so it went four years without federal inspection. They also created fake certificates of analysis claiming their products were safe. “PCA was led by this criminally fraudulent bunch, and so the conditions in their plants were never disclosed to the government. But in the case of Boar’s Head, there were federal inspectors in the plant every day,” Gremillion says. “They were uploading their reports to the federal inspectors’ database. And yet all of those horrific noncompliance reports never led to any action.”

So if the sanitation problems at the Boar’s Head Jarratt plant could persist without intervention or a public warning from the USDA, how do we know similar conditions, or worse, aren’t present in other meat-processing plants? “When you see inspection reports like the ones for this Boar’s Head plant, you think, What else aren’t we hearing about? ” says Jory Lange, a food-safety lawyer. “What other plants are just ticking time bombs waiting to cause hospitalizations and deaths?”

Boyce wonders the same. “I’ve worked with all the big-name meat companies. Most meat plants are bad, and some are really despicable and shouldn’t be processing.” He tells me about one filthy fresh-meat plant that, blessedly, burned down and another in the same state that’s probably still full of “black mold and big cockroaches.” He also sends me the USDA inspection records for a Perdue fresh-poultry slaughter-and-processing factory in Lewiston, North Carolina, that produces meat for Trader Joe’s and Wegmans. According to those documents, USDA agents found 115 noncompliance violations in the plant — including “foul odor,” “carcasses with fecal material,” and “live roaches too numerous to count” — in just June and July 2022. (A Perdue representative tells me after receiving these noncompliances, the company took “immediate corrective actions that addressed the USDA’s concerns,” including a deep clean and hiring a new pest-control company. But the plant operated continuously through this process, and its conditions never made the news.) “Boar’s Head,” Boyce says, “was the one that got caught.”

In September, I made an FOIA request for the USDA FSIS inspection records for Boar’s Head’s other U.S. meat-processing plants, including facilities in Virginia, Arkansas, Michigan, and Indiana. I have not yet received an official response to my request, but the USDA told reporters from the Associated Press and USA Today that it would not release these documents because doing so could “interfere with” and “hinder” potential law-enforcement investigations. “I’m a former prosecutor and I can’t understand why disclosing them would hinder any investigation,” says Blumenthal, whose office has been seeking the same records but has not been able to access them either. A Boar’s Head spokesperson also declined to provide me with these reports but said, “All Boar’s Head meat processing facilities are under USDA inspections and, following the Jarratt incident, they have been thoroughly reviewed by regulatory officials, third-party experts, as well as by our own internal teams.”

I also requested the inspection documents for several other deli-meat producers, beginning with Dietz & Watson, Hillshire Farms, Hormel, and Oscar Mayer. None of these companies has any pending investigations, so, I naïvely thought, there should be nothing to prevent the timely disclosure of their inspection records. Turns out I’d miscalculated. Employees from the USDA’s FOIA office told me the records could take a while to produce and offered to first provide a simplified spreadsheet that would show the number of noncompliances each plant had received but not specify what those noncompliances were. At press time, the USDA had provided neither the inspection records nor the spreadsheet. A spokesperson for the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service says, “FSIS’ investigation into Boar’s Head remains ongoing. FSIS expects to share more information once the investigation is completed.”

As a Hail Mary, I contacted the other deli-meat companies directly and asked if they would voluntarily release their own inspection records. Maybe, I thought, they would see an opportunity to prove to consumers that their plants adhere to basic standards of cleanliness. But I was wrong again. Oscar Mayer ignored multiple requests. Dietz & Watson said it would send their reports but not before my deadline. A Hormel rep told me, “We are proud that our noncompliance rate is lower than the threshold rates set by USDA for public-health significance,” but added that I’d have to wait for the USDA to handle my request. A spokesperson for Tyson Foods, the parent company of Hillshire Farms, sent me a boilerplate statement — “We have extensive processes in place across our business to manage food safety and work in partnership with the USDA in our facilities” — and also opted not to share its reports.

If any of the above suggests a cozier relationship between the USDA and meat producers than there should be, that’s because there probably is one. There’s a conflict of interest baked into the foundations of the USDA, which is tasked with contradicting missions: to ensure the safety of the nation’s food supply and to promote the economic growth of the agricultural industry. “I get the sense that the USDA gives preferential treatment to the big meat companies,” says Gremillion. “And there’s also kind of a revolving door between them. Al Almanza was the USDA’s deputy undersecretary of food safety until 2017 and then he became the head of food safety at JBS,” the multinational meat-processing corporation. “And even the agency’s inspectors, just being in the plants and working alongside the plant employees, identify with the industry.”

Another problem is that big meat may just be too massive for any federal agency to police. Experts have been warning us for decades that consolidation in the industry threatens the safety of our meat. In the U.S., the production of beef, pork, and poultry is now majority-controlled by just four companies in each category. As of 2018, Cargill, JBS, National Beef, and Tyson supplied 85 percent of all beef to American consumers. (In 1977, the top four beef companies accounted for just 25 percent of production.) When so few players devour that much of any market, the market is said to be “captured.” These companies often wield considerable lobbying power, which they use to shape policy in their favor.

And meat-safety regulations are being loosened in all kinds of strange ways lately. In 2019, the USDA unveiled its New Swine Inspection System, which eliminated restrictions on how many pigs could be slaughtered per hour and permitted some plants to have their own employees, instead of federal agents, make initial inspections of carcasses for signs of disease or fecal contamination. (In 2021, a judge reinstated the old speed limit of 1,106 dead pigs per hour, but the USDA has let the NSIS continue on a trial basis in some plants.) In 2020, as COVID brought worries about food shortages, the USDA granted waivers to 15 large poultry-slaughter plants to speed up production lines, allowing them to kill 175 birds per minute instead of the previous max of 140. This program has since been expanded to 47 facilities. In 2023, the USDA made drastic cuts to pathogen testing in food plants for 2024, planning at least 54,000 fewer lab tests than the nearly 220,000 conducted the previous year. The reduction resulted in 7,392 fewer scheduled tests of ready-to-eat foods like deli meats. And there’s no telling what deregulatory chaos the second Trump administration might sow. At press time, our incoming president had not yet named his pick for secretary of Agriculture — but he might not need one at all if Elon Musk, co-commissioner of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, follows through on talk that he’ll cut $2 trillion from the federal budget.

Even when deli meats are made under perfectly sanitary conditions, dangers remain. Cold cuts and other processed meats, such as hot dogs and bacon, have been linked to some of the least desirable major health conditions. Many studies now agree that daily consumption of just one or two slices of deli meat — i.e., less than half what it takes to make a decent sandwich — are associated with significant increased risk for heart disease, type-2 diabetes, dementia, stroke, and colorectal and stomach cancers. In 2015, the World Health Organization classified processed meats as a Group 1 carcinogen, in distinguished company with tobacco, asbestos, and plutonium. (This is not to say deli meats are necessarily as bad as these other things, just that there is strong evidence they all can lead to cancer.) Particularly worrisome is deli meat’s link to colorectal cancer, which is rising among young people; it’s now the primary cause of cancer death for men under 50 and the No. 2 cause for women of the same age group.

A couple of meat-industry sources caution me that the studies that found these links are observational, which means they show associations rather than proving cause and effect. But “those studies have been done all over the world, on people that in some cases have been followed over decades,” says Kathryn Bradbury, a nutritional epidemiologist and senior research fellow at the University of Auckland, “and they’re all pretty consistent.” In her own 2019 study, Bradbury found that a single daily serving of processed meat coincided with a 20 percent increase in one’s colorectal-cancer risk.

There are a number of culprits behind these elevated risks, including sodium, which can raise your blood pressure; saturated fat, which can raise your bad cholesterol; and nitrates and nitrites, which are the preservatives that make most deli meat what it is — they turn it pink, enhance its flavor, and inhibit bacterial growth. Nitrates and nitrites are generally harmless on their own, but when added to meat, cooked, and sent through the human digestive system, they can be converted into more reactive compounds called nitrosamines. In the colon, nitrosamines can damage DNA cells, leading to tumors. Because of this, many deli meats are now labeled “nitrate-free” or “uncured” — but this is just a sneaky work-around. Instead of synthetic nitrates or nitrites, producers may add celery juice, which contains naturally occurring nitrates that are molecularly identical and have the same health implications.

So while you might opt for lean turkey breast instead of fatty bologna, or organic and antibiotic-free cold cuts over conventional ones, or a sandwich from a boutique deli instead of Subway, it probably doesn’t make much difference. “It reminds me of American Spirit cigarettes, where the gimmick is that they have fewer chemical additives than other cigarettes,” says Dr. Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee on Responsible Medicine, which has advocated for vegan diets. “But they have tobacco, which is the thing that kills you. With deli meat, it doesn’t matter if it was made in a nice deli or if somebody massaged the animals while they were sending them to slaughter. What matters is that you’re putting this stuff in your digestive tract.”

The good news is an occasional cold-cut sandwich probably won’t kill you. “I wouldn’t say I never eat processed meat. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing,” says Bradbury. But, says Barnard, “if you’re eating these foods every now and then, it just rekindles your desire for them. It would be smarter to find healthier substitutes that you genuinely like.”

Terrence Boyce, for one, has decided to play it safe. “I don’t eat deli meat,” he says. “I don’t need all that sodium.”

Production Credits

Photographs by Bobby Doherty

,

Styling by Michelle Gatton

Related

• Could Liverwurst Take Down Boar’s Head?