“If smoking is so bad for you, how come it cures salmon?”

“If smoking is so bad for you, how come it cures salmon?” is a funny one-line saying. The joke was printed in “Your Morning Smile” in The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario) on September 5, 1992.
   
“Smoking will kill you. Bacon will kill you. But smoking bacon will cure it” is a related joke.
   
 
Wikipedia: Curing (food preservation)
>Curing is any of various food preservation and flavoring processes of foods such as meat, fish and vegetables, by the addition of combinations of salt, nitrates, nitrites, or sugar, with the aim of drawing moisture out of the food by the process of osmosis. Many curing processes also involve smoking, spicing, or cooking. Dehydration was the earliest form of food curing. Because curing increases the solute concentration in the food and hence decreases its water potential, the food becomes inhospitable for the microbe growth that causes food spoilage. Curing can be traced back to antiquity, and was the primary way of preserving meat and fish until the late 19th century.
       
5 September 1992, The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario), pg. 1, col. 3:
YOUR MORNING SMILE
If smoking is so bad for you, how come it cures salmon?
 
Google Groups: bit.listserv.skeptic
Dinobirds
Paul Willis
6/13/98
(...)
If smoking kills, how come it cures salmon?
 
Google Groups: rec.travel.air
Question on legal materials to bring on a US domestic flight
Retired
7/7/00
:hi
:piece of info
:if smoking is bad for you how come it cures salmon???
 
Bare Knuckle
Letters to Viz
ToneMonkey
« on: May 14, 2008, 03:35:12 PM »
This made my otherwise bad day a bit brighter.  Thought you lot might like a laugh.  These are letters sent in to Viz:
(...)
If smoking is bad for you, how come it cures Salmon?
Stalker, Bournemouth .
 
Twitter
James Box
‏@boxman
If smoking is bad for you, how come it cures salmon?
4:48 AM - 27 Aug 2008
 
Google Books
Two Nuns In A Bath
By Geoff Tibballs
London: Constable & Robinson, Ltd
2009
Pg. ?:
If smoking is so bad for you, how come it cures salmon?
 
Twitter
Matt Sayward
‏@mattsayward
if smoking is so bad for you, how come it cures salmon?
6:42 PM - 24 Feb 2009
 
Facebook
Frooty Tooty
December 10, 2014 ·
another thing too…. If smoking is bad for you, how come it cures Salmon?
 
reddit
If smoking is so bad for you
submitted July 28, 2016 by _TheChainsOfMarkov_
How come it cures salmon?