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.

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........

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