The lipid hypothesis did it. The idea that fat and dietary cholesterol cause obesity and heart disease.
Here in Poland there are still many dishes that require lard as a cooking oil - "chrust" or angel wings, a friend pastry known all over the Slavic world is one that comes to mind.
Heavily salted lard, often with bits of bacon, apples and onion is used as a spread on dark bread. It's amazingly delicious, especially in the winter with some sour pickles. These are traditional winter foods here - salted lard would hold forever and sour pickles are a seasonal delight.
The dishes do not really require lard although it is indeed the most popular fat used in these recipes. The good old recipes used cleared butter rather than lard for dishes like chrust, pączki and other deep fried sweets.
That's only half the story though. It also helps that a P&G manager by the name of John Burchenal acqui-hired a way to cheaply hydrolyze vegetable oil, much cheaper than lard.
The money spend making crisco look 'healthier' than lard has left timeless traces in the general public.
The original form of crisco is so unhealthy that the now called trans-fats are banned in most countries.
However the damage is done, and people still look for other hydrogenated vegetable oils instead of animal fats. Like my friends buying canola margarine instead of real butter.
The lipid hypothesis did it. The idea that fat and dietary cholesterol cause obesity and heart disease.
That's only half the story though. The factually wrong part (fat in == fat deposited). The other part, that is still factually correct and hence a good reason to avoid lard, is that saturated fats absolutely and unequivocally lead to atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease.
I'm surprised how easily the 'bad' fats are getting a free pass in the name of decriminalizing 'fats', in the bleeding-edge of dietary pantheon.
> saturated fats absolutely and unequivocally lead to atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease
This isn't true at all. Too much saturated fat, perhaps, does, but this idea that if a drop of saturated fat crosses one's lips, you'll die a horrible death in 5 year is just plain silly.
Advocate that no, but I know people (ok a person, vegan),who I consider sane in all other bits of their lives, who believe the first half of that straw man (if not the timeline bit). Diet and health make people act completely nuts - and things you think are straw men are sometimes things people actually believe.
There are a lot of people, including myself, that disagree that saturated fats are unhealthy. If you read a book like
The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet [1]
there is a lot of evidence to the contrary. There is a whole school of thought that polyunsaturated fats are the bad ones, while saturated or monounsaturated are good.
I'm eating a Low Carb High Fat (LCHF) diet, also known as keto (ketosis) diet, where I eat many saturated fats.
It's funny that a 'mediterranean diet' is often touted as a way to encourage people to use olive oil and salads but that around the actual mediterranean cooking with lard is pretty standard, and they seem healthy enough.
The mediterranean countries do largely use olive oil as the cooking fat, though they of course also eat other things. But olive oil is the default thing you cook with, in contrast to northern Europe, where lard and butter are traditional. The seven countries that consume more than 5 L/person/yr of olive oil are all conspicuously mediterranean: Greece, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, and Tunisia.
The linked article's claim that only Crete has this style of diet in Greece is strange, also. It's not even the part of Greece it's most associated with, let alone the only one that follows it (the region most known for its olive-oil cultivation/cuisine is Peloponnesus).
You're definitely going to be called a weirdo should somebody see you cooking with butter there. And at least in Spain as far as I know, even cooking with sunflower oil is frowned upon.
Never heard of it before, sorry. Though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle says he's Lithuanian and his name "Jurgis Rudkus" is also rather Lithuanian than Polish. I believe Lithuanians do not like to be mistaken for Poles, despite (or maybe because of) much common history.
Interesting article, but perpetuates the misunderstanding of that Sinclair's "The Jungle" was intended to be all about food hygiene, rather than an indictment of the awful labor conditions in the meat industry.
Lard does make better pie crust than vegetable shortening -- no joke.
Near DC, we had some friends with a farm on the water near Annapolis. They had some cherry trees, sour, red cherries, that they had cared for properly and, then, a lot of fresh cherries. So I offered to make a cherry pie.
They had no vegetable shortening but did have some lard; so I used lard. I cleaned, pitted, and cooked the cherries with sugar and corn starch, partly guessing on quantities from a poor cookbook. Then for the pie crust, I just did what I'd done a few times with shortening. The lard based pie crust was much more delicate -- the raw crust tore during handling!
But the resulting pie was terrific, especially the crust!
If can get some fresh cherries and lard, go for it! Or just make little cherry tarts!
I grew up in North East Scotland and therefore must have consumed a vast amount of lard in the form of "rollies" (AKA rowies/butteries/Aberdeen-rolls).
I have fond memories of consuming rollies that were completed soaked in melted butter on a trawler somewhere in the North Sea - about the only pleasant memory I have of that particular trip...
I never put any thought in to what butteries were made from but the salted taste and texture was absolutely delicious and plenty a lunch-money coin was spent on them! Ironically the reason I wouldn't eat them now that I do think about ingredients is all the flour.
Another favourite from that era was a scotch beef pie that contained a layer of mashed potato and a small clump of baked beans on top of that.
You mean just a Scotch Pie? I've never been clear on what was inside them, I just remember eating them at Pittodrie as a kid and then being dubious about them as I grew up.
Plain old Steak Pie (i.e. what those who didn't grow up in Scotland would probably interpret "scotch beef pie" as) though are fine and I miss them dearly - as do my fellow expats who are from NZ, they've got a bit of a pie culture too as I understand.
I wonder if many of you have ever actually cooked with lard? The stuff stinks when heated up to the point it makes me retch. It's not fun stuff, and its more widespread use would make life even more difficult for vegetarians.
Growing up in the 70s in the UK, we used it for all frying, etc. Everyone did, but switched away at the start of the 80s because the new message was "sunflower oil is healthier".
Lard also makes me retch if I smell or taste it nowadays. The only reason I buy it is to make food for birds (lard + sunflower and other seeds).
My preferred fat for cooking is my own home rendered beef dripping. I can get a huge bag of it from my local butchers for dirt cheap. Chop it up, stick it in the oven for a couple of hours (normally while I have a roast dinner cooking) and then filter it.
The flavor is incredible and I can guarantee that the fat is from free range animals with zero additives.
Health is only part of the issue. The growth of ethnic minorities worldwide whose dietary restrictions keep them away from lard is probably very significant.
Devout Hindus, Muslims, and Jews won't consume products containing lard derived from pigs. I'm surprised that factor wasn't covered at all in this article.
Very true. I'll often ask when I'm dining out whether something was cooked with lard, especially at Mexican restaurants. Nearly everything in Mexican restaurants is cooked with lard.
I've never bought a jar of goose or duck fat. We will just cook a goose or duck and collect the fat afterwards. The product isn't as pure, but you're getting a whole, tasty meal out of it, so it's much more economical that way.
I have been cooking with lard for about 20 years. It's just something that my family never stopped using. I learned to cook from my father and his grandmother, and she always asserted the superiority of lard over Crisco, even going so far as to setup blind taste tests (that 85 year old woman was more of a scientist than most of the scientists I know today). Growing up in a rural area, it was readily available in all of the grocery stores. Even though most of the stores here in Alexandria carry it, they usually only have it in small tubs, about the size of a large tub of sour cream. The stores back home had it in bulk-sized canisters of all the same sizes that Crisco came in.
I'm also quite a fan of collecting bacon fat. Filter it through a paper towel first and it makes a wonderful oil for cooking eggs and sauteing vegetables. I've been known to cook an entire pack of bacon in the morning just to have the oil available for making dinner. Having cold, cooked bacon available in the fridge for the next week is a nice bonus.
I think the side dish (сало) is similar but not identical to lard. Lard is processed by melting and separating the fat from the original tissue, while сало is not processed this way.
Sounds similar to lardo [1], which is a false friend of lard. Lard in Italian would be called strutto. Funnily enough lard in French is just bacon, and lard is called saindoux.
I remember just a few years ago everybody being afraid to eat meals made with coconut oil as well, but, thank god, it's omnipresent now and red palm oil is quickly catching up (which is not necessarily good for the natural habitat affected, so, be selectively when you buy it). Ansel Keys is to be blamed, he fake evidence to shape the Lipid hypothesis and he himself didn't abstain from saturated fats and meat.
I'm not sure how applicable this is to the US. But here in the UK the decline of Lard, (which was everywhere when I was growing up as a child) could be also attributed to the fact that there has been an increase in the number of vegetarians and ethnic minorities. These groups dietary demands would have a strong influence on restaurants and takeaways that are looking to cater to the largest audience size as possible.
I agree. I think in some places in North America, a growing population of, for example, Muslims, may have had some influence into the move away from lard in certain restaurants.
The omnipresent Canadian chain, Tim Hortons, for example, stopped using lard in it's baked goods in 1997 and I seem to remember at the time this was partially due to a lobby from Muslim community groups.
In Germany Lard is generally not used for cooking anymore. Instead plant based oils are used or concentrated butter (called Butterschmalz, similar to Ghee).
But at least in the south it's available in every supermarket in several kinds. Some pure, some spiced. It's most commonly used as spread. But it's a matter of taste. Some fancy restaurants serve the bread they serve in advance not only with butter but also with lard.
Similar: popcorn used to primarily be cooked in coconut oil. Then we had the campaign against saturated fat and theatres switched to vegetable oils. Decades later we discover that the MCTs in coconut oil are awesome for cardiovascular risk.
McDonald's french fries were cooked in beef lard until the late 1980s, then they switched to vegetable oil under pressure from activists to be more "healthy."
Now we realise that not only were the lard-cooked fries more crispy and better tasting, they were probably healthier (relatively) as well.
I am not sure if it is good are bad but i know a state(Kerala) in India where entire food is cooked in Coconut oil and it is awesome and i have not seen their heart or other health point well in comparison to other states.
I think the matter is that eat what is naturally available in the environment you live and it should be ok. Also with food act always like dont have money to spend more than what you really really need then we should be ok.
It is a saturated fat - that is for sure. And the medical establishment has said that saturated fats are bad for you since the '60's or so. However, if you go over the literature, there isn't a lot of good science to back it up. I personally think the medical party line is wrong, and has harmed so many people.
I've stopped eating carbs over the summer. There is a "correct" moderate amount of protein to eat, hence I eat lots of fat (including saturated) to make up the rest of my calories. I've lost 33 pounds so far.
I am beginning to wonder if Woody Allen wasn't prescient with his movie Sleeper. /s
On a side note there is much of food and dietary research from the 50s onward that needs to be reviewed if not done over. I am still fascinated by the fight over salt, something as a cook I never believed as I cannot imagine cooking without it. Having the majority of relatives on similar diets who lived into their 90s its either genetic or just, well its anecdotal at best.
["It seems funny," Silver says, "but for thousands of years this was the thing that people cooked with.]
Not true. Olive oil use go as far as 5000BC. Lots of other animal fat were used too.
Germanic countries used Lard a lot, they needed enormous amount of fat to survive the winter. By the way, in my opinion Germanic food is one of the worst in the world, and I had traveled a lot.
They also used a lot of butter.
Going to the north people used seals, whales and even bears.
In North America they ate Buffalos, in Ecuador they ate llamas. In China they used lots of different fats.
Only a small amount of people in the ancient world ate big amounts of lard in their food.
Here in Poland there are still many dishes that require lard as a cooking oil - "chrust" or angel wings, a friend pastry known all over the Slavic world is one that comes to mind.
Heavily salted lard, often with bits of bacon, apples and onion is used as a spread on dark bread. It's amazingly delicious, especially in the winter with some sour pickles. These are traditional winter foods here - salted lard would hold forever and sour pickles are a seasonal delight.