Thank EU for saving our bacon

"Thank God for the EU" are words I could never thought I would say, write or even think so it comes as rather a shock to find myself actually praising the Eurocrats.

It seems that we needed Brussels to save our bacon or at least tell it like it is so, under new legislation, any bacon with more than five percent water - which is most of the rubbish sold in our supermarkets - will have to be labelled as bacon with added water.

The supermarkets and food producers were never going to do it, not when you can flog water at up to £6 or so a pound - that's about 15 times more than you pay for Perrier - and the Government was never going to upset the cosy food apple cart for the benefit of mere consumers. Remember customers don't offer ex-ministers and mandarins lucrative jobs or hand out hefty donations to the party, so only count, and even then only marginally, come a General Election.

Inevitably the food trade are up in arms at this threat to their profits - not a lot of people are going to be rushing to buy "slurp the difference bacon with added water" - but they are spouting such cobblers that the only conclusion you can come to its that they think we all thick.

A few years ago, having found some supposedly better quality Tesco bacon turned into a sort of ham soup as soon as you attempted to fry it, I wrote to the company only to get a reply claiming that that was how customers liked it. The person who replied omitted to mention which particular secure medical facility was home to the customers who liked it that way so it was impossible to check his claim.

But the same mantra is still being spouted in a last gasp effort to maintain the healthy profit on water sales. The British Meat Processors Association are claiming that the water is needed to dissolve the curing salts, ignoring the fact bacon can be produced with virtually no water, while some prat from the British Retail Consortium, which is the supermarket's lobbying group, claims that it will make bacon less moist, less succulent and less tender when it is cooked.

This ignores the fact that supermarkets sell dry cured, minimal water content bacon as a premium, better tasting product. I don't recall them marketing the supposedly good stuff as "more expensive but less succulent, moist and tender than the cheaper stuff so don't waste your money" bacon.

Not only that the spokesperson claimed that it would confuse customers and there was no evidence they wanted to change. No evidence? Ask any customer if they are satisfied pouring away a panful of unappetising white gunk before they can even think of frying the bacon they are cooking - and ask if they are happy paying the equivalent of £6 for a small bottle for the stuff they are pouring way.

The BRC is also warning that it will altar the taste and texture of bacon - if so then this legislation is getting better and better. I remember in the days before the technology had been developed to pump up bacon, ham, chicken and all manner of meats with added water - to make it more tender, moist, succulent etc . . . oh and did I mention profitable, my mum used to start breakfast by frying the bacon.

The bacon used to produce fat which was then used to fry the eggs and as bacon and eggs were placed on plates the fat was then used to produce fried bread.

All right you could hardly claim it was a cholesterol free diet but that is what bacon used to be like, you could actually fry it rather than boil it, it was full of flavour and you could even get crispy bacon if you wanted it. With EU help we might even get back to those halcyon days.

Meanwhile when you next buy bacon have a look at the ingredients on the back, particularly the pork content. Currently to be called bacon, rather than bacon with added water, the water content should be no more than 10 per cent. Yet a trial by Which? found some bacon on sale had 13 per cent water and it is not hard to find bacon with less than 90 per cent pork. The more pork the less you are being ripped off and the nearer you are getting to what bacon should be like. Let's not wait for 2015, let's stop buying bacon soup now.