One of the biggest issues in this debate is the fact that the hot dogs and lunch meats of today are not what they were years ago. At one time hot dogs were called frankfurters made from quality ingredients and stuffed into a natural sheep casing which provided a great flavor, texture, and a snap when you bit into them. Even lunch meats had hand selected hand cut pieces of meat used in the process. The other bits of meat were sold to dog food processors.
In my opinion, the trash that goes into today's hot dogs and lunch meat products are mostly what was rejected in years past. The corporate mentality to increase profits by using less desirable pieces of meat in the process is a cancer of greed today's corporate food producers.
For those who have never had true frankfurters, sausages, or lunch meats made with good cuts of meat will never understand the difference. Today's normal products are made with mechanically separated meat (sometimes referred to as pink-slime). But the problem isn't all on the shoulders of the corporation's greed for profits, we as consumers also share in the blame because we allow them to produce it and we buy it.
Imagine if American consumers woke up one day and refused to buy this trash? They would have to produce a better product.
Go to a real butcher and buy handmade sausage, frankfurters, and lunch meats and see the difference in quality, yes you pay more, but you aren't buying trash meat; better yet make it yourself and control your own ingredients.
It's not the cure in the process that causes problems, the nitrites have dissipated into nitrite oxide when the cure is complete.
The fact is, most nitrate we consume comes from green vegetables. Nitrate we consume coverts to nitrite in our body, which is a anti-microbial agent in our digestive tract. Our own bodies product nitrites in our saliva to aid in safe digestion. To say that nitrites are bad for us is to say that the human body is flawed.
But that's my personal opinion, I still buy frankfurters from a butcher, I make my own sausage and hams because I want a better product that the trash that is offered at the store.
If we truly think with common sense and logic.... what are we really getting as ingredients for a $1.50 pack of hot dogs or lunch meat? You be the judge.
In closing I quote Michael Ruhlman..
http://ruhlman.com/2011/05/the-no-nitrites-added-hoax/
"Bacon is one of the greatest foods on the planet, but the food marketers are going to figure out a way to make you buy their bacon. So what they do is use celery powder and celery juice (note the asterisk on the label above) as their nitrate source (celery is loaded with nitrate) and are therefore are allowed to say no nitrites added. Why go to the trouble? Because we don’t know any better. Can we really be this stupid? I have only one word to say on this beyond an emphatic YES."
Also
http://magazine.good.is/articles/your-nitrite-free-meats-are-full-of-nitrites
"In a world where organic “nitrite-free” meats are anything but, think twice before you slap some meat on the grill this weekend."
EDIT...
"Earlier this year,
Cook’s Illustrated tested different types of bacon and found that two brands of "nitrate-free" bacon had
significantly more nitrites than their conventional counterpart. “If you want to avoid these compounds," they wrote, "you’ll have to avoid bacon—and any other processed meats containing celery juice—altogether."
.
