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.
And the twist that most shoppers would never guess is that this is not food companies slipping something past the government. Under USDA regulations written decades ago, only meat cured with synthetic nitrite counts as “cured.” A product cured with celery-powder nitrite must be labeled “uncured” — and, more remarkably still, “no nitrates or nitrites added.” The misleading label isn’t a marketing trick that regulators failed to catch. It’s a marketing trick the regulations require.
The chemistry, however, doesn’t care about the source. Scientists have made this point for years: nitrites from a vegetable extract behave exactly like nitrites from a factory, including the capacity to form the same compounds during processing and cooking that worry cancer researchers. There is no “natural” exemption in a molecule.
USDA saw this coming. In 2020, its Food Safety and Inspection Service recognized the concern and announced plans to modernize the rules — prohibiting “uncured” and “no nitrate or nitrite added” claims on products cured with nitrites from any source. It was the right call then, and it is the right call now. The rulemaking simply was never finished. Completing it wouldn’t be a course correction; it would be a promise kept — and a win for every shopper who reads a label.
This isn’t a leap into the unknown. In Britain, France, Denmark, and Italy, genuinely nitrite-free bacon and ham are no longer niche products — they sit on ordinary supermarket shelves at ordinary prices, made safely and profitably. Honest labels are what make that market work: when “nitrite-free” means nitrite-free, the companies that actually innovate get rewarded, and the companies that merely relabel get caught.
Federal food policy has, of late, put renewed emphasis on transparency — on telling the public plainly what is in their food. Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration took a welcome and important step, moving to stop food companies from quietly declaring their own ingredients “safe” without so much as notifying regulators. The “uncured” label deserves the same scrutiny. Finishing this rule is the rare reform that serves that goal without controversy. It requires no ban, no new agency, and no taxpayer dollars. It takes nothing off the shelf. It asks one thing: that the label tell the truth.
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It is also worth being clear about what this is not. Nobody is coming for your bacon. The case for honest labels is not a case for banning anything — and consumers understand the difference. Poll after poll shows broad support, across party lines, for precisely this kind of reform: not prohibition but information.
The fix fits on a label — which is fitting, because that’s all anyone is asking for. If a product contains nitrites, from any source, say so. Reserve “uncured” for products that are actually free of them. FSIS has already done the hard part by recognizing the problem. Publishing the proposed rule this summer would finish the job — and give shoppers labels they can finally take at face value.
William Timmons represents South Carolina’s 4th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.