Joanne McNeill: Health crusaders ruin fun

I warned smug anti-smokers years ago that if you allow tobacco nazis to vilify smokers, once health crusaders get a taste for fear-mongering and witch-hunts, they won't stop there.

Bacon is the new tobacco.

So went sensational headlines after the International Agency for Research on Cancer placed bacon and other processed meats in its Group 1 category of carcinogenicity - along with cigarettes and asbestos - because eating 50 grams of bacon a day increases the risk of developing colorectal cancer by 18 per cent.

Red meats are in Group 2A which means they're only probably carcinogenic.

As a persecuted smoker, progressively impoverished by punitive taxes, I was wryly amused by the howls of outrage from bacon lovers and meat producers.

I warned smug anti-smokers years ago that if you allow tobacco nazis to vilify smokers, once health crusaders get a taste for fear-mongering and witch-hunts, they won't stop there, they'll move on to something you love... and so it has come to pass.

Bacon deprivation doesn't bother me - smokers can't afford meat anyway. We're already forced to live on pickled cabbage.

But there is good news ... or bad depending on your point of view.

Lifestyle choices might contribute to the manner of your ultimate departure, but whether you indulge in the many contemporary health crimes - sunbathing, bacon, smoking, alcohol, riding motorcycles with the wind in your hair and consuming white death in the form of sugar, salt and cream to name but a few - or not, your risk of death remains the same at 100 per cent.

Even the most virtuous among us will still need cemetery plots eventually and given the top-heavy grey demographic, demand for cemetery space, crematoriums, places to inter and sprinkle ashes and alternative burial practices is only going to grow.

Fortunately though, just in time for our annual topsy-turvy, colonised observation of northern hemisphere death festivals - Halloween, Samhain and Guy Fawkes - when, as an astrologer wrote delightfully, the veil between the seen and the unseen is at its thinnest - the NZ Law Commission released its report on Death, Burial and Cremation, recommending timely changes to the Burial and Cremation Act 1964.

Recommendations include requiring funeral directors to publish itemised charges, formal recognition of tikanga Maori, DIY and eco funerals, and allowing family cemeteries on private rural land.

Anyone like me who has ever had the terrible misfortune - suddenly and in shock - to have to organise a loved one's funeral will appreciate any measures to tailor rituals and reduce exorbitant costs.

As for burial plots, immediately after widowing I imagined I'd be buried next to my late beloved in short order, assuming my demise was imminent because when a long-term partner dies it just makes no sense to be alive.

Years later though and miraculously still upstanding, I was gobsmacked to attend a neighbour's funeral at our precious local cemetery only to discover he was to be buried in my hole. Once recovered from the shock I started to feel better, as though someone else occupying my intended grave made it less likely that I will drop down dead anytime soon.

Who knows, with a law change there might even be time to open a private cemetery in the bottom paddock before the awful day?

Meanwhile, let's barbecue bacon, sack the health crusaders, abolish tobacco taxes, fire some rockets, pop some corks, and raise a toast to living happily ever after if we still can.