This story doesn't really explain what killed lard in Europe. They don't sell Crisco or any other kind of shortening here in Norway, for example. Norwegian recipes often call for butter, but rarely for lard. Few things are ever deep fried and in pie crusts, we use butter, not lard. The closest thing you can find to shortening in a Norwegian supermarket is coco fat. The only thing I know of that was traditionally cooked in lard is donuts, which are literally named lardrings (smultringer) in Norwegian.
What happened in Norway is that butter was rationed because of WWII and they introduced margarine (another product of hydrogenation) as a substitute, and after the war, it was promoted as a healthier alternative to butter.
Lard must've been around, especially in other parts of Europe than Norway, but I doubt these domestic American events killed it.
I often see Americans attempting to explain why things happen in their country by pointing to domestic events, with said events failing to account for an identical thing happening all over the world.
> This story doesn't really explain what killed lard in Europe.
It's NPR. It's an American news channel. It's not trying to detail the history of Europe.
I don't mean to take this out on you because your comment is informative and interesting, but I'm really getting frustrated with this so often being the top comment's criticism on HN, or being the top responding criticism to the top comment on HN. Simply put, it's a Eurocentric criticism. It always reads like, "Why didn't this journalist consider Europe when they wrote this piece?"
Perhaps it's different on European sites, but American sites don't bother contextualizing which nation they're talking about because the context is already self-evident to the primary Anglo American audience. News stories don't appear in English as a lingua franca; it's just the primary language.
It's not that we don't care about Europe. It's just too far away. Europe just isn't the default American context. We don't qualify our journalism if it's only about America.
I think there is another way to read that comment. That lard is also unusual in Denmark, but the mechanisms being presented here don't really fit. In other words, there are other mechanisms at work, and perhaps that calls into question the narrative...
Of course it could just be that they are different places.
Thats how I read it. If they reason that lard went away in the US is not the same reason it went away in the EU, then what is the EU reason and does the EU reason cast doubt on the US reason.
The original comment makes it sound like lard was never really there to begin with in Europe, or at least Scandinavia. There was no "going away" in Europe, so nothing to really inform the hypothesis on it's fall in the US.
This is definitely not true in the UK - cooking with Lard was a huge thing in my grandparents generation, but almost unheard of amongst my peers. I'm 40.
What has changed is people's views of what's healthy, and Lard is considered hilariously unhealthy, to the point of it being a joke.
But people used to deep or shallow fry with it, use it in pastry, cook with it in all sorts of ways. It was also a poverty food during and after WWII - bread and lard is cheap enough and calorie dense enough to keep workers going through the day.
Here's a quick and easy take for you: Denmark is an entirely different culture with an entirely different consumption history. Their recipes call for butter, and their replacement was a veg-oil product.
Looking at some fast consumption stats (current, and I'm lazy here but I'll assume this probably link to historic consumer trends) Denmark is top 8 in milk consumption per capita but don't even show up in the top 40 for pork consumption.
My guess for why they don't use lard: They never really did. If you have a dairy/beef based food culture and minimal pork you probably aren't going to use pork lard because it's just not around.
It wasn't "killed" in Denmark (anecdotal old Danes, please feel free to prove me wrong here) because it was never the de facto fat for these applications.
Edited to add: "Approx. 90 percent of the production is exported and is thereby essential to the Danish economy and the balance of trade." They currently produce a decent volume of pork and then ship it out of country.
Input from a Dane, albeit not an anecdotal old one: We did use more lard in the old days, as well as beef tallow and horse fat, for specialty recipes. Duck and goose fat were also highly prized, as they are to this day.
I have a couple of pre-1900 recipe collections, with the oldest recipes being from a 1616 cookbook. The old recipes do tend to use significantly more rendered fats than we do today, I think mostly because it's an inevitable byproduct of butchering and preparing meat, and you wouldn't want anything to go to waste. Butter took time and effort to produce, but rendered fat just had to be collected while you were cooking.
However we've always been heavy dairy consumers, so it makes sense that it would be our primary culinary fat. It's such an ingrained part of our cuisine that in the mid-20th century, our TV chefs made "plenty of butter!" their catchphrase.
We also had the great margarine replacement during/after WWII, and the eventual realization that trans fats were even worse than saturated fats. Even though margarine is now free from trans fats, I think most people are still skeptical of it, and prefer butter.
This is interesting. My impression from across the sound is that the Danes love their pigs and everything that comes from them. I must confess I've pointed out the svinefedt in a Danish store to a fellow countryman and we had a good chuckle about you guys...
Come on, I must have been raised in another Denmark from a parallel universe then?
Fedtemadder (lard on bread) is an essential part of the danish smørebrødsbord (open sandwich table). It is common to use lard instead of butter on speciel occasions, like Christmas for example. And it tastes great :-P
I've only been living in Denmark for 4 years, but nearly every single julefrokost or påskefrokost I've been to used lard instead of butter as the initial layer for the smørrebrød.
Fried pork is the national dish of Denmark. They eat a lot of pork.
Their own official statistics [1] show 54.6kg/capita (120lbs) in annual pig meat consumption, which would put them at a solid #1 in the pork.org table. However, they admit that the statistics are probably about twice that of the real consumption due to border trade. Realistically they are placed similar to the US.
As other commenters have guessed: I was calling the narrative into question. Lard was once common in Europe (if not necessarily in the Nordic region) and now it isn't. Could it be that something other than this domestic narrative killed lard?
The same is true of other trends both in America and elsewhere. For example, in Norway, we perceive rural areas being abandoned in favour of urban areas as a problem to be solved. We pretend that this problem is domestic, and that we can solve it domestically, but we are actually looking at a global trend, yet no one points this out when it is discussed.
I think that 99% of the time when Europeans make what you perceive as annoying "Eurocentric" observations, they are actually calling cause and effect into question. If an effect occurs on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Americans are attributing it to domestic causes, that would seem to be the wrong conclusion, because what, then, caused it to simultaneously happen in Europe?
It might take a lot of time to research even more material to get a wider context, but that half of a paragraph that contextualizes and compares situations to other parts of the world are often the most interesting parts of such stories, at least to me.
I don't agree. Humans are just naturally more concerned with what's close to them or what directly interacts with them. It's just part of the normal signal to noise filtering.
In the US, unless you live in certain coastal cities, the overwhelming majority of people you meet are from the US and living within 100 miles of where you're at. So, the context of almost all the important information that you need on a daily basis to survive is going to be about the US and about your state. If there's a massive flood of the Mississippi and you live in Missouri, you might know someone affected, or at least be impacted due to the economic damages.
If a German lives near the French border, isn't he naturally going to be more concerned about news of what's going on in France? He's going to meet French nationals much more often than others and French culture is going to have a pretty direct impact on his daily life. If there's a major fire in Strasbourg, he's going to be interested in what happened. He might know some of the casualties, directly or indirectly. Maybe he dated a girl from the University. If there are riots due to poor management of the crisis, or a sewage leak into the Rhine, all these things can affect him directly. Just because he lives nearby.
Do either us Americans or the German need to know about what's going on in Vietnam? Only in the broadest sense. If there's a tsunami that hits Da Nang, it's unlikely to affect anybody we know personally, unlikely to affect our daily life, unlikely to affect our larger economic lives (even if our countries send aid). It's tragic. We certainly care that people died and that they need help. It just isn't a tragedy that touches us personally. Vietnam is not part of our default context.
Your entire argument is bogus in the context of this story. It has nothing to do with "caring more about people close to them".
The manufacturing and consumption of lard in the U.S. is a technology/tradition inherited from the parts of the world Americans emigrated from. And the development of the hydrogenation process and its implementation as a consumable product (replacing lard) was shared between Europe and the US. (Reference is made to this in the article). Thus the experience in Europe (and elsewhere) is directly relevant to the topic under discussion and comments from non-Americans on the situation in their countries are also directly relevant.
I don't see why you can't have similar outcomes from different causes when a social circumstance is involved.
What killed lard in Europe? Different things. Probably even different things per country if you get very specific about it.
Merely exploring only American causes to an American result, doesn't make the article bogus and that criticism is what everyone is responding to because the OP said:
> I often see Americans attempting to explain why things happen in their country by pointing to domestic events, with said events failing to account for an identical thing happening all over the world.
>What happened in Norway is that butter was rationed because of WWII and they introduced margarine (another product of hydrogenation) as a substitute, and after the war, it was promoted as a healthier alternative to butter.
Margarine was extremely popular in the US for a time (and there's still plenty of it in grocery stores). Among health conscious people, butter was looked on with suspicion as recently as 20 years or so ago. (I ran/run weekend hiking trips sometimes and 20 years ago, I would definitely have gotten dirty looks if I only bought butter. Today no one cares.)
Crisco was pretty popular at one point in the US but AFAIK it's receded quite a bit. I don't do a lot of baking but I don't really see it in recipes these days. And lard is still not in mainstream use at all.
I get the impression you're generally better off sticking to (whole fat/"normal"/etc) versions of products and simply being aware of portion sizes than substituting or diluting things just because there's some health fad going on against something in it like cholesterol or fat or sugar. Have a breakfast of eggs with real butter and a glass of whole milk, use full real mayonnaise instead of some sickly-tasting light version, have a burger, just watch out for daily calories. An exception of course if if you have a particular medical condition that requires a special diet.
"All you have to do is eat less. Two words: Eat. Less. That's all you need to know about weight loss. Eat less, I guarantee you'll lose weight. It worked in Changi. It worked for Ghandi - no love handles on that man! But remember, eating less will not work unless you actually eat less." - Dr Rudi
"All you have to do is breath. Two words: Just breath. That's all you need to know about not dying from asphyxiation. Just breath, I'll guarantee you'll not die from asphyxiation. It worked for me. It worked for James LeBron - no asphyxiation signs on that man! But remember, just breathing will not work unless you actually just breath." - Dr Rudi (probably) to an Asthma patient
I know there is some small proportion of the population who physically cannot refrain from overeating. That doesn't change the fact that for the vast majority, eating less IS an option, which is good because it's literally the only way to lose weight apart from surgically removing things from your body.
All that aside, yeah, Dr Rudi probably would say that because he's a satirical caricature.
Health conscious people prefer margarine to butter on a hiking trip? Must be some pretty relaxed trips: Food is fuel, the more calories the better!
I carry peanut butter and Crisco on my backpacking and canoeing trips...they're heavy, but nutritionally dense! A peanut butter jar might last you two months at home, but you can likely expect to be packing the empty jar out with you after a week in the woods.
Most people doing weekend trips don't suddenly abandon their day to day eating habits and start eating jars of peanut butter and mayonnaise.
ADDED: That wasn't intended as snark but my observation is that most people on weekend dayhike trips or even multi-day backpacks maintain fairly conventional eating habits even if they're not energy/weight optimal. I certainly do.
The calories aren't the issue; as far as I know butter and margarine have about the same amount per serving. Margarine was preferred because it was thought that the saturated fat in butter was going to clog your arteries and kill you.
You do seem unreasonable and unnecessarily combative in this subthread. I've had to read over it several times to figure out how your comments are appropriate replies, and I’m not seeing it.
That commenter wasn't mounting an argument for a position on whether or not "saturated fat in butter was going to clog your arteries and kill you" - just explaining the thinking behind those who preferred margarine.
But it's also not "established science" that "saturated fat is bad for health". If it were that simple, any food containing saturated fat would never appear in the "healthy in low-moderate quantities" section of a mainstream recommended diet chart.
Clearly that's not the case, and clearly many experts have different things to say about this topic.
So, please stop throwing around accusations of "science denial", when any person who engages seriously with this topic knows that it is still a matter of ongoing research and discussion.
This is an appallingly bad-faith style of discussion. You must know full well this terminology is used for its evocative link to holocaust denial.
Not that it should make a difference to how you conduct yourself, but I’ve had cause to research this topic in order to get myself through serious health issues. So I know what it looks like when people are or aren’t engaging with this topic with honesty.
It’s a deeply important topic that deserves better than crap like this, particularly from a longtime user of this site.
Not only saturated fat isn’t bad but at worst neutral, but also LDL is not “bad” when measured as concentration, which is the main argument against sat fats on the page you linked. There is plenty of research on this topic.
You should be careful about making blanket statements like "established science" and "science denial".
It makes you come off as an extremist, and in fact, the page you linked makes no such claims and is far more moderate. It talks only about potentially harmful dietary fats.
> Research about the possible harms and benefits of dietary fat is always evolving. Current evidence suggests that the smart play is to focus on choosing healthier fats and avoiding the less healthy ones.
Researchers (particularly those in the field of nutrition) have got things completely wrong before. An important part of being a good scientist is knowing the limits of the current body of research.
That is not true even on difficult hikes. You need more calories then normal, but it is not like you would suddenly had to eat tripple portion of everything else you die.
Also, it is not like extreme cardio or weight lifting. You can go on for hours without eating. It won't feel great, but won't be big issue either.
Besides, for long hikes and climbs, people minimize weight. Bin of peanut butter to go through in two days sound excesive.
Bringing butter, peanut butter or mayonnaise on a hike is not about eating more but about carrying less.
300g of butter for example is about 2150 calories, enough food for a day for a small person. Compare that to pasta and you would need to carry more than 1.6 kg for the same amount of calories. If you're going on a five day hike you're carrying 8 kg of pasta vs only 1.5 kg of butter.
That said I only bring butter and mayonnaise on week long hikes, for weekends or day trips I don't bother.
Pasta sounds like highly theoretical food for a hike. I have yet to see anyone who would carry pasta or similar food for a hike as main source of calories. Sounds impractical and waste of space. Or raw butter which would melt in the heat. Also, eating 300g of butter as energy source for whole day sounds like one of those things that makes your stomach go real bad.
Quick energy in sugary food weights a little and comes in gazimilion sources. Proteins bars or dry meant are easy to get, weight a little and have enough calories. Both are slow calories.
But besides, already traditional bread and ham or sausage or bacon or whatever are good enough for day hike. Or any kind of already cooked meat that can survive a day. You do not need more for one day. For more days, you need to consider more then just calories in the thing. Which where pasta like food or canned food comes into play - people carry it because they want real food to actually fills stomach and comfort of it, not because they would worry about being unable to fill calories. Besides, you can hike on caloric deficit.
Carrying 1.5kg of butter as primary source of food for 5 days hike sounds like one of those things that gets hikes cancelled second day and someone needing help to get back.
Crisco was pretty popular at one point in the US but AFAIK it's receded quite a bit. I don't do a lot of baking but I don't really see it in recipes these days. And lard is still not in mainstream use at all.
I bought some lard at Safeway just last week. It can be had, but it's usually in the dustiest, lowest, most-hidden shelf in the baking aisle.
It's excellent for deep frying, and economical because it can be used over and over and the flavor only improves. (Unless you burn something.)
Find a Mexican grocery or butcher. They often have fresh lard as a result of making carnitas. It’s so much better. For cooking you can also save bacon grease or render chicken fat and skin (which also gives you tasty chicken cracklings).
Natural animal fats as well as making stock are great ways to level up your cooking game.
Lately I've been boiling up cheap bones and offcuts. You get a few L of stock and a few hundred mL of fat – enough to last the week unless you're deep frying.
In a Polish restaurant, i had a starter of lard on bread - you get some slices of bread, and a pot of lard with little flecks of gherkin or something in it. I wasn't all that taken with it, i have to confess.
But in Britain we do have, or once had, something distantly related:
> In a Polish restaurant, i had a starter of lard on bread
This sounds like something they could do in Ukraine. Was the large a solid piece, or a spread? Eating solid pieces of pork fat is very normal in Ukraine.
Pork lard is eaten in the same way across Eastern Europe, not just in Poland or Ukraine, i.e. also in Hungary, Romania, the former Yugoslavia, and Russia and among Russians in Central Asia.
You can find lard in Spain pretty easily some stores even have lard from ibérico style pigs with a much deeper flavor. I imagine most Southern Europe and Eastern Europe has easy access.
used to cook a lot with lard in the last 5 years in austria, after discovering that many supermarkets stock it. right now i prefer clarified butter. the only vegetable oil in my pantry is pumpkin seed oil for salads. margarine is banned in my household; my mother used to use it but switched back to butter and lard in recent years.
It sounds as if lard was never a very big thing in Norway whereas it was at one point in the United States. It seems as if it could just be a coincidence what happened in the States and in Europe.
"The only thing I know of that was traditionally cooked in lard is donuts"
Makes a huge difference with cake donuts. They are crispy on the outside, and moist, and hold cinnamon/sugar on the outside. Haven't had one in quite a while though...all the US donut stores use vegetable oil.
So did margarine continue displacing butter after WWII?
If TFA were generalized some, it would help explain what killed lard and butter in the US. The lard-to-Crisco and butter-to-margarine narratives have much in common. Different companies were involved, but it was all enabled by hydrogenation. And there were the same (now known to be bogus) health claims vs saturated fats. Health claims that were undoubtedly sourced, at least in part, by sellers of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.
One of the biggest high-profile product launches of the 90's was for the margarine brand "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!", which launched with a huge ad campaign featuring the then-faddishly-popular male model Fabio.
Interestingly enough what seems to have killed lard, at least the most common domestic use of it (making fries), in France and Belgium really is hydrogenated vegetal oil. Fries simply taste better. And it's also much worse for your health.
Since it was commercialized just after WW2 and lard had been used as a butter substitute during the war there was a favourable context for it to happen.
Lard is still used extensively in butcher shops as part of pork preparations (rillettes, grattons etc.). Mostly traditional/regional stuff.
The lard you find in supermarkets is tasteless, hydrogenated dross, fit only for making soap.
If you want actual lard, and you don't want to pay through the nose to get it from a specialty provider, you can visit your local butcher and ask for fat trimmings (tell him you're going to feed them to your dog if he has any misgivings) and render it yourself. It'll cost you next to nothing and it's extremely good for you.
While you're there, pick up a few marrow bones too. And some offal.
I get about 40% of my calories from lard/tallow, and I've never felt better.
Finding bone marrow, fat trimmings, or most of the cheap by-product of whole animal butchering is not as easily available even from a good local butcher.
Some butcher still do, I manage to find some stuff in halal butcher and random butchers around town, but 40 min travel to find a bag of bone is not something you do past the exitement of the first time.
Context for those not in the know: the Belgians excel at fries (pomme-frites/frites) in a way that other nations can't even imagine. If you find yourself in Belgium, you should get some frites. If you're there in mussel season, get a moules-frites.
My favorite joke about Belgium is that the world's largest friterie/frituur is on the border between Holland and France.
> I often see Americans attempting to explain why things happen in their country by pointing to domestic events, with said events failing to account for an identical thing happening all over the world.
I often see American colonies who labor under the delusion they have agency. Lard going away in Norway is much like Lysenkoism being popular in communist Poland.
The main reason lard wasn't sold was because the health industrial complex blamed fat for heart disease and a whole host of other health conditions. This started the low-fat food trend which brought way more carbs into our diet which eventually led to the low-carb diets which spurred a renewed interest in animal fat like lard.
In other words, there was a lot of argument from authority that precipitated this, not just corporate profit seeking (which was also significant).
In fact most people ignored the dietary guidelines, as people generally do, and kept right on eating fat. In the decades since those guidelines were released people have increased calorie intake of all kinds across the board.
Which is why even though sugar consumption peaked years ago, and is now in decline, obesity and all its related diseases are at an all time high.
I am surprised to hear that sugar consumption peaked years ago. I was under the impression that when accounting for sugar added to products, it has continued to increase.
As for obesity, I blame the weaponization of the sugar/salt/fat balance towards making processed foods more addictive.
This is the problem with the whole "carbs are making us fat" narrative. Sugar consumption peaked in 1999. But consumption of chicken and cheese has gone through the roof since then. As you can see from the charts, the decades where people were supposedly loading up on carbs were also decades where meat consumption exploded.
Americans are eating too much of everything, basically. A lot of the health benefits attributed to various diets are just the intrinsic benefits of losing weight.
- Vegan dishes enjoy nowhere near the popularity of low-fat foods in the anti-fat wave of the 80s and 90s. Not even close. It's still a minority of restaurants that offer any vegan options.
- The main argument for plant-based diets isn't that they're healthier (though a minority of folks do argue such), but that they're less cruel to animals and are more environmentally friendly. In contrast to arguing that low-fat diets are healthier, both of those assertions are uncontroversial.
Personally, I still eat meat, but have moved (aside from eating out, which I do rarely) to buying all of my animal products from farms that are certified for specific animal welfare conditions. And, well, I also always have some lard in the fridge. Where I'm from, people tended to save rendered pork fat in their fridges.
> Vegan dishes enjoy nowhere near the popularity of low-fat foods in the anti-fat wave of the 80s and 90s. Not even close. It's still a minority of restaurants that offer any vegan options.
> Personally, I still eat meat, but have moved (aside from eating out, which I do rarely) to buying all of my animal products from farms that are certified for specific animal welfare conditions.
Whenever I hear people say this, I'm really sceptical. Does this mean never buying any products with animal ingredients? Nothing that has butter or milk, no ice cream, never a turkey sandwich or anything with egg or gelatine in it, like candy? Because if you do, they most probably don't come from farms certified for their animal welfare.
I'm not trying to attack you personally, it's just that I suspect that you either exclude the majority of animal products you consume, or you're one of the rare people that never buys anything with a list of ingredients.
If you're the latter, that's great, because I think that's a very good way of knowing exactly what you eat. I want to get better at eating from basic ingredients myself, where I snack on things like an apple or nuts and not something with 5-10 ingredients.
> Whenever I hear people say this, I'm really sceptical. Does this mean never buying any products with animal ingredients? Nothing that has butter or milk, no ice cream, never a turkey sandwich or anything with egg or gelatine in it, like candy?
Yes, that's what I mean by that. Anything with animal products I buy from organic shops (which in Germany are required to meet animal welfare standards) or from farms with one of two other animal welfare standards (without the organic requirements attached). The only real exception that I regularly make is buying chocolates that my wife particularly likes. But we're talking about a couple hundred grams of chocolate per year.
It helps significantly that I enjoy cooking and buy next to nothing pre-packaged. I make just about everything myself from fresh ingredients, and the thing I don't come from the above mentioned shops. Things like ice cream, mayonnaise, etc. I make myself.
Do I end up eating some stuff that doesn't meet my standards? Of course. But far, far more of that comes from eating out, or eating at friends' places, etc. than stuff that slips through in my own grocery shopping.
That's funny, just the other day I needed some lard for a paté. I called around without luck and eventually bought suet from a specialty butcher and left it in the crock pot on low overnight.
Then I needed another half-pound and tried calling up the butcher at our local grocery store. He said he could set aside some suet for me, and I picked it up later that day. It was less than a dollar a pound. He said as long as I called in the morning he should have some for me, but otherwise they just tossed it.
When I was Googling for how to render lard, the recipe I landed on had a long story about how it was Canadian canola farmers who killed lard. I guess it's always nice having someone to blame. :-)
Anyway I'm saving the paté for Sunday, so I can't yet tell you how it turned out. :-)
Whenever I cook bacon, I always cook it in the oven. In addition to keeping things relatively clean (as opposed to cooking on the stove top), it also makes collecting the rendered pork fat much easier – you just tip the baking sheet and trickle into whatever container you use.
In this way I accumulate lard with a mild smoke flavour and I use it for a variety of other things. It's not enough to deep fry of course, but it's enough to use a few spoonfuls here and there to add some flavoured fats that I would not be able to otherwise.
I usually have a jar of bacon lard in the fridge mainly because i love to fry hot dogs in it. For other things (mainly pastry crusts), I've never had trouble finding lard in 1-lb blocks at the supermarket.
I do the same and I cook anything that requires grease or oil with my saved up bacon fat - eggs, pancakes, etc. It's wonderful. I've even used my bacon fat in chocolate chip cookies - amazing.
I make bacon the same way, in a glass casserole. I'll pass the fat through a coffee filter or a round of cheesecloth before refrigerating it. Use it for everything: it's a near-total replacement for butter/shortening/cooking oil. Olive oil we keep around for dressing salads.
Put some in the frying pan until lightly coated - then add eggs for scrambled eggs. Throw in some shredded cheese, pepper, and seasoned salt. Top with either salsa or a mixture of 50% ketchup, 50% tapatio.
The best lard is Armor brand. You can usually find it in the Mexican isle at walmart. Sure it is hydrogenated but pie isn't exactly health food to begin with. And strangely, lard crusts are better than butter.
The only problem is I make pie a couple times a year when the tub is big enough to have a pie making factory. Then again it is so cheap its not a big deal.
I use the Armor brand lard for pie crusts or anything that requires lard. There is another brand of lard that is sold in one pound containers shaped like butter containers. I have found that brand (snow.. something or other) has had a rancid taste about every time I've bought it.
The directions for making pie crusts using butter usually instruct the freezing of the butter cubes before working it into the dough so that it doesn't blend too much upon working with it.You might try spooning the lard into a bowl and putting it in the freezer for a few minutes to harden it a little. The trick with pie crusts and biscuits seems to be not over working the dough. Just work the ingredients enough to be the right stickiness and your good to go.
Hmm, I always take the fat straight out of the fridge and cut it with a knife so my fingers don't warm it too much. I'm certain I didn't over-work it. If anything, maybe I should have worked it a bit longer to give it some structure.
I usually keep it refrigerated so it's the right consistency and blends well with flour. Remember to keep everything cool when making pastry crusts and make sure your hands don't warm the fat too much.
Now I know why those Vietnamese Banh Mi Paté is so tasty. I find fat give great flavors to most food I've cooked. Tried 1% fat lean ground beef for burger once... it was such a big mistake on my part.
Most likely from beef, yes: suet is to beef as lard is to pork, according to my understanding. (Could also be from mutton, though.)
I haven't tried a direct comparison; my local butcher saves me a big hunk of suet (at no charge) from time to time when he's been processing a beef animal, and it's lovely once rendered. Maybe I should ask him about lard next time I'm in there.
I remember going to my great-grandmothers house in Indiana. They had a farm, and they had lots of pigs. My mother brought one home as a kid, it was a runt and they kept it in the house and named it peanut butter.
Back to the topic at hand. There were pots full of lard in the basement, and they stored pork chops and sausages in the lard! You'd just go down an pull some out like it was a refridgerator.
Sliced potatoes, fried in lard, with pork sausages. One of my favorite meals to this day. And I have the cast iron pan my great grandmother used to make the exact same meal.
The lard went in the pie crusts as well. And I imagine in countless other things I never knew about.
I remember hiking in the mountains when I was like 14 yo when I saw a jar of lard in my friends backpack. I was confused at the time as to how he was going to eat it since most food we carried was canned and had little or no bread with as to cut down on volume.
When we reached our destination at night my friend put the jar by the fire, the lard melted and all I could see was a jar filled with sausages in liquid lard. They were absolutely delicious I remember
My favorite lard story comes from my business partner.
Every Sunday night the boarding school he attended in grade school would have an ice cream social. They always got the cheap ice cream from the local ice cream shop cause it tasted 'better'.
One Sunday, they forgot to put the leftover ice cream away and by Monday morning, it still hadn't melted. When they asked the shop why, they were told is was mostly made of lard.
They got the more expensive ice cream from then on.
Something sounds off about that. Never mind enough lard to keep it solid at room temp, there's usually no added fat in ice cream. Just what's in the cream/milk. I'd expect it to taste/feel wrong and don't see how it could be cheaper.
If you’re anywhere near a Mexican meat market/grocery store with a carniceria attached, make sure to try the in house rendered lard (and the chicharrones/crackling!). The white, tubbed, Armour brand lard simply doesn’t compare.
Should be caramel colored with some bits in it, sold in a bag, and very, very cheap!
In-house is the key. The Mexican markets around here sell lard in containers on the shelf, but it's all hydrogenated. And there's just no comparison.
I used to be able to get pork fat for next to nothing at local grocery store butcher sections, and would render it myself. Now no one has it. Not sure why.
With the rise in popularity of the ketogenic diet I would imagine producers/sellers of lard should be seeing a significant increase in demand for their product. Make it fair-trade, free-range, and organic and you sell for 3x... everyone wins!
A good pie crust has both butter and lard, as separate bits that are not mixed. They melt at different temperatures.
The best lard comes from near the kidneys. Good luck finding some, or even just lard that isn't adulterated in some way. The lard I can find has been hydrogenated or has added TBHQ or BHT.
I was obsessed with "leaf lard", the stuff near the kidneys for a while. I was told that it makes a superior pie crust so finally my wife gave me a jar for my birthday. It's very expensive and, in my opinion, totally not worth it. I can make a better tasting crust that's just as flaky with plain old butter.
Which isn't to say lard isn't great, I render it out when making slow-cooker pork and use it for tamales or as a frying oil. I just don't like it in pastry.
Hydrogenating lard is such a depressing concept-- the entire point would be as a more healthful alternative to hydrogenated and highly processed oils, but I guess processing is a hammer to which everything is a nail...
Perhaps surprisingly, natural lard is mostly unsaturated fat. It's only about 40% saturated, which means it has poor shelf life without hydrogenation to increase the saturated fat percent.
If you really care about pie crusts, finding a good source of leaf lard is the #1 requirement. I tried a few pre-rendered brands, and it was all expensive, not particularly fresh, and tastes weird... Eventually I found a farmer who sells unrendered leaf lard, and after a few false starts at rendering it (too hot, and it'll taste too meaty), I've started making essentially perfect pie crusts.
In Australia it never went away. Copha is a natural part of truly awful family recipies like rice-crispie choc cakes, or christmas treats made with dried fruit and suger.
We also have a huge immigrant diaspora (40% of the population either are from overseas or within 1 or 2 generations) and a huge amount of traditional cookery is preserved in aspic here, whilst the homeland has gone full burger, you can still get echt-lard recipe cooking from nonna or her cousins.
The CSIRO diet and nutritionists tried very hard to make lard punishable. They basically failed. Now keto is fashionable its going to be even harder (like my arteries)
Whoops! Having said which. The shelf where copha is sold in Coles and Woolies has beef dripping including organic beef dripping. Three choices.
Virtually every link matching a search on "substitute" and "copha" is of course arguing for using vegetable shortening in place of lard but the reverse clearly works: if you know how to use copha, you can substitute lard for a more intense flavour.
Soy beans are a top 5 food allergen. In the US, soy beans get into almost everything because most "vegetable oil" and margarine is made from it.
We had to remove soy beans from our diet and we are much healthier as a result. A lot of people who have digestive issues could probably trace the problem back to an intolerance of soy beans. It took us a lot of trial and error to figure this out in our case.
We found we could only get decent lard off of etsy.com, or from an rural butcher. The best lard is from grass fed animals, which has better taste/nutrition.
While soy oil is quite common, soy allergies seem to be to the protein, not the oil (or lecithin for the chocolate lovers out there). According to wikipedia,
> Some food contains soy-based ingredients that are not considered allergens under national regulations, and thus not labeled, for example, foods cooked in highly refined soy oil, which is considered safe due to absence of soy protein.
I only have one food allergy that I'm aware of - soy protein. AFAIK, it was caused by my mom following a fad in the 70s and giving me soy milk or soy-based formula. I was sick all the time until my dad got fed up and gave me cows milk. It's too bad, I like tofu.
I don't eat lard, but I do render the fat from chickens I cook and keep it. I'll cook with chicken fat. And when you render it with onions, you can fry the skin as "gribenes" or spread the onion/fat mixture on toast as you would butter.
For people who don't eat dairy and meat in the same meal, chicken fat is widely used. I'd imagine it has some similar qualities to pork fat.
It's still commonly used in Southern and Soul food in the US too. I'm staying in Virginia right now and all the local grocery stores have lard and fatback.
I was inspired to try baking from The Great British Baking Show and was really surprised to find how difficult it was to find lard for my pastry dough. Bring it back!
Yeah, pretty easy to find in US stores but it's the cheap kind that can have pretty strong flavors, not something you can use to replace oil or butter.
You can get (organic, not hydrogenated) lard from Whole Foods (or Amazon Prime Now, if you don't want to go to a store and you’re in one of their service areas.)
re: great British baking show - caster sugar is also hard to find in the US. (you can buy superfine but it only comes in very small bottles and is very expensive)
C&H has superfine sugar in 4 lb packages, but they're the old cardboard milk carton style rather than the paper bag bricks used for granulated. They also have "Bakers Sugar" in fairly large print. Domino also sells it, but the grocery store site I checked only shows it in 12oz plastic bottles.
Or give it a bit longer and you've got icing sugar (or powdered sugar, as I think it's called in the States).
In virtually everything I've baked, though, it works fine to just use granulated. You may have to work a little harder to make sure it's truly all dissolved, that's all.
The other thing you use caster/superfine sugar for is for some cocktails. Basically, it's a lot easier to dissolve in cold (or at least room temperature) liquids than regular granulated sugar is.
Just the other day I saw a pack of gummy "fruit" candy which is basically gelatin and sugar in the store. It was advertised with pictures of fruit with a large label that said how it is fat free.
"Look how healthy this is for you kid, it's just like real fruit and it doesn't have any fat, perfect!".
Lard is pretty easy to make, and homemade lard is _much_ better than the hydrogenated stuff you get in the grocery store. It's as simple as dicing up pork fat, covering with water, and simmering until what was left of the diced chunks starts to sizzle and brown a little (those chunks, btw, are incipient pork cracklins, which are their own reason to make lard).
A good reason to end up with a whole bunch of pork fat is to buy a whole skin-on pork shoulder, which also gives you the skin to cook with the fat and then fry.
How porky is homemade lard? One challenge I heard of for lard crusts for pie is that sweet pies don’t do well with a strong savory pork flavor. (They recommended leaf lard, which is made from specific pork fat and pretty tricky to find).
My mum used to make her own. She said her mum used to cook with lard and food just didn’t taste as good with alternatives. She also felt it was healthier to use animal fat than chemicals.
Now I see signs for “no pork, no lard, no msg” and it makes me sad. All the best things and I can’t have any of it :(
Every time I see yet another article claiming lard and saturated fats aren't bad for your cardiovascular system, I feel like I have the ethical obligation to remind everyone how this is false. Please don't fall for fads, ask your doctor or take professional advice on this issue. Everyone would like to eat more fatty meat and lard-fried potatoes, but they will clog your arteries. It's an annoyance but it's a fact. Don't die following a dumb trend.
I appreciate your concern, and your moral obligation to try and tell people. I do not mean to be rude to you, but your understanding is outdated and wrong.
Saturated fats are actually good for you as these fats are required for a healthy metabolism and endocrine system. They also comprise a good portion of your cell membrane.
Saturated fats and cholesterol do not clog your arteries. We initially thought that because it was present in atherosclerosis, but it turns out we were blaming the responders to the crime scene, and not the actual cause: inflammation brought on by high carbohydrate diets. Note: if you read further into this, big food companies were also involved in influencing the negative stance on fats by our politicians back in the 50s, helping create our current obesity epidemic.
I'm on mobile, but will link to current research when I remember. Also, source: I do research at a medical research university in the div of cardiology/endocrinology.
I can walk into either of the two major grocery chains here in St. Louis and buy lard off the shelf. So I find this interesting when comparing my other experience of going to Chicago's big grocery chain, one day a few summers ago, looking to buy a whole turkey and told they only carry those at Thanksgiving. That was shocking to me as that, too, can be bought locally at any time.
We make our own lard, rendered from pig fat (usually from around the kidneys), which is readily available for cheap (I buy 5 lbs for a few dollars from a pasture-based farm, so likely cheaper if you get it from a more industrial farm). We also render our own suet. Haven't needed to use vegetable oil for a while now. Love lard, makes all vegetables taste 10000 times better.
As a French, I was really confused by the conversation here, until I realized, unlike other words common to English and French, the English word for lard does not have the same meaning as the French word for lard, where it means bacon.
Here in France lard is used a lot, most replaced by butter (and olive oil in the South) in recipes.
I guess "saindoux" is the closest translation for lard. I've more often seen people cook with animal fat (goose and beef, mainly) as opposed to "saindoux". That was only for specialty recipes, though. As you've indicated, in the south where I grew up, olive oil was by far the fatty substance of choice. In ratios of 10-20 to 1, I would estimate.
For me frying anything on lard smells just horrible and I still remember, from my late childhood, meat and onions fried on lard that gave me huge stomach ache every time I ate them.
When it comes to frying I prefer anything other than lard. It's only slightly above used motor oil.
Lard is still good to cook with. Cook bacon and store the grease in jars in the fridge, and it can last for ages. Wonderful for scrambling eggs, and pies crusts made with anything but lard just don't compare.
Interestingly, it's still going strong in Japan. It's one of the factors that make it so difficult to be vegetarian/vegan in Japan - even Bread may contain 'shortening' (generally made of lard).
It's a bit strange; you'd think the land of 'harmony' would be having a large vegan population, but nearly everything in the country, from chips to bread have some form of animal product in them.
Northern Italy too. In Emilia everything contains lard, including bread. Town fairs still feature prominently a special kind of bread fried in lard, and it is considered a delicacy. I cannot imagine how vegetarians or Muslims can actually survive here.
Welcome to Ukraine! Lard and Salo [1] are pretty much the main national dishes here. A healthy delicacy that's welcome on any table and is sold on every meat market.
Lard is still very popular here in Romania. It's used extensively for cooking and frying. It's also consumed as a bread spread (salted and topped with onions, paprika etc).
Meat and sausages stored in lard are also a delicacy. The lard preserves and tenderises the meat.
Things have changed a lot since 2012. The Keto/Paleo/LCHF movement has definitely increased demand for new cooking oils, including animal fats. At Whole Foods, I regularly see beef and duck tallow + pork (lard) prominently displayed now.
As I understand it, the desire of US meatpackers for leaner "healthier" other-white-meat pork led to breeders selecting for leaner pigs. There may actually be less pig fat left over these days.
Of course, this means that your porkchops, pork loin, pork ribs, bacon joints etc. will be leaner and drier and tougher than the ones your grandmother or great-grandmother got from her butcher. I've heard old people remark on this numerous times.
This was not universal around the world, though. This place:
http://www.ginzabairin.com/ seemed to indicate that in Japan, flavor and mouth feel were more important than ever-increasing leanness in porkchops...mmmmmmmmmmm
I used to know the answer to that from relatives who had a meat packing plant in town. Tallow, according to the internet. If memory serves, any fat that is mishandled also goes off to make tallow.
One answer is soap. Maybe a decade or two ago, it was possible to buy bars of "soap" that were made from detergent rather than actual soap. A useful advantage was that it didn't produce soap scum in areas with hard water. Zest advertised this: "You're not really clean, till you're Zest-fully clean."
Today, the same brands all list lard and tallow in their ingredients, and the detergent is gone. I'm betting that lard and tallow are cheaper. I use detergent based liquid body wash for this reason, since we have hard water.
Animal fats and soaps are still used in some industrial processes as lubricants, because they're non toxic and cheap. An example is some kinds of sheet metal forming and drawing.
But I doubt those uses can consume the entire production of lard and tallow, which must be quite a lot.
They sell it as lard. I live in the Midwest and I'm really surprised to hear all these people saying lard is hard to find. It's in all the grocery stores here.
Duck fat is sublime for frying potatoes and things like Yorkshire puddings. It's also quite easy to procure - all you need to do is get a whole duck, score the skin with a knife, and roast it in the oven (flipping it and draining the fat every hour or so) until you've rendered as much as you can out. Not only do you get a pint of delicious fat that will keep for ages in the freezer, you also get roasted duck meat that you can do whatever you please with (personally, I like to shred them up and eat them with a bit of slaw and hoisin as street tacos).
You can if you want, but I don't usually bother. All of the solids will settle out to the bottom anyway if you let it cool down to room temperature before freezing. If you want to go the filter route, a cheesecloth would likely be good enough.
Animal agriculture is one of the top causes of climate change ( https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank ). As we face a ~10 year deadline to avert climate catastrophe, now is not the time to bring back lard.
Is there a Godwin's Law kinda thing for climate change? I mean, you settle down to read a nice discussion about lard and then whammo... climate change.
Climate change affects and is affected by almost every industry on Earth and is the biggest problem facing humanity. It makes sense for it to be discussed on nearly every topic because it is relevant to every topic.
I'll wager a buck in 10 years you (assuming you don't die from something unrelated) will be here and the world will still be here pretty much as it is today except with a few more whizbang gadgets. And people will still be screaming on the internet about how we're all doomed in 10 years unless we make some annoying irrelevant change like stop eating bacon but something sensible and proven like nuclear power?, nah why bother it won't make a difference.
You cannot use that page alone to make this determination. You need to click through the links, where they show how they derived those numbers. In general, they aren't breaking down sources of emissions, they're breaking down potential solutions with reasonable adoption rates.
Edit: this view also ignores that lard is mostly thrown away currently. Using it would actually reduce waste. It won't realistically be a problem until the demand for lard outstrips demand for other animal products such as meat and their hides.
It's a tough subject. Most saturated fats either come from animals, tropical plants or are produced synthetically via hydrogenation. The trajectory seems to have been animal to partially hydrogenated plant oil to tropical oils. I don't think palm or coconut oil is going to compare favorably to lard from a purely environmental perspective. The world is burning down the last of the rainforest to make room for palm oil plantations.
The most rational solution is to go back to hydrogenated oil. The partially hydrogenated oils in Crisco and margarine contain trans fats, which are clearly unhealthy and should be avoided. However fully hydrogenated oil does not have this problem. Unfortunately I doubt the consumer is going to be able to appreciate this difference. I lump this solution with nuclear power: clearly the best solution but too scary to be adopted by the public.
>> The most rational solution is to go back to hydrogenated oil.
Or just use olive oil that is high in monounsaturated fats and depends on olive trees that are not amenable to industrial production.
As a bonus, you won't find any research, old or new, be it the purorted result of "lobbying", conspiracies, etc, or not, claiming that olive oil is bad for you.
Olive oil works ok for most purposes but it is fairly expensive and much fussier to work with given the lower sat. fat content. Though it is very stable when pure, olive oil can go rancid fairly quickly when incorporated into processed foods or baked goods. Lard, margarine and tropical oils have the benefit of being shelf stable even when part of some other baked good (e.g. Oreos).
There is an overwhelming amount of evidence for human-cause climate change. It is one of the most well-studied effects in the history of science.
If you have enough evidence against it to disprove all of that, I would love to see that, and so would the Nobel prize committee. You'll be rich and famous, so please, post your work.
The whole history of lard is a microcosm of how media sensationalism can mislead the public.
It starts with Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." As the article notes, the book describes how meat-packing workers in turn-of-the-century America would sometimes fall into vats of rendering lard and be incorporated into the final product.
> Journalist Mark Sullivan warned readers of Our Times to avoid "the error, practically universal, of classifying Sinclair and his 'Jungle' with the 'Muckrackers.'" They are "utterly different... in their methods." The best of the muckrakers "confirmed everything," while Sinclair was a "propagandist" whose account of "conditions in the stockyards did not purport to have any more than the loose standard of accuracy that fiction demands for local color and background." Even that was rejected by Ralph Chaplin, a socialist who grew up in the vicinity of the yards and packinghouses and was living there when the novel appeared. In his autobiography Wobbly, Chaplin said of The Jungle, "I thought it a very inaccurate picture of the stockyards district which I knew so well."
Decades later, journalists did another hit job on lard, sensationalizing thin research on nutrition until it turned into a national panic.
This story doesn't really explain what killed lard in Europe. They don't sell Crisco or any other kind of shortening here in Norway, for example. Norwegian recipes often call for butter, but rarely for lard. Few things are ever deep fried and in pie crusts, we use butter, not lard. The closest thing you can find to shortening in a Norwegian supermarket is coco fat. The only thing I know of that was traditionally cooked in lard is donuts, which are literally named lardrings (smultringer) in Norwegian.
What happened in Norway is that butter was rationed because of WWII and they introduced margarine (another product of hydrogenation) as a substitute, and after the war, it was promoted as a healthier alternative to butter.
Lard must've been around, especially in other parts of Europe than Norway, but I doubt these domestic American events killed it.
I often see Americans attempting to explain why things happen in their country by pointing to domestic events, with said events failing to account for an identical thing happening all over the world.
> This story doesn't really explain what killed lard in Europe.
It's NPR. It's an American news channel. It's not trying to detail the history of Europe.
I don't mean to take this out on you because your comment is informative and interesting, but I'm really getting frustrated with this so often being the top comment's criticism on HN, or being the top responding criticism to the top comment on HN. Simply put, it's a Eurocentric criticism. It always reads like, "Why didn't this journalist consider Europe when they wrote this piece?"
Perhaps it's different on European sites, but American sites don't bother contextualizing which nation they're talking about because the context is already self-evident to the primary Anglo American audience. News stories don't appear in English as a lingua franca; it's just the primary language.
It's not that we don't care about Europe. It's just too far away. Europe just isn't the default American context. We don't qualify our journalism if it's only about America.
I think there is another way to read that comment. That lard is also unusual in Denmark, but the mechanisms being presented here don't really fit. In other words, there are other mechanisms at work, and perhaps that calls into question the narrative...
Of course it could just be that they are different places.
Thats how I read it. If they reason that lard went away in the US is not the same reason it went away in the EU, then what is the EU reason and does the EU reason cast doubt on the US reason.
The original comment makes it sound like lard was never really there to begin with in Europe, or at least Scandinavia. There was no "going away" in Europe, so nothing to really inform the hypothesis on it's fall in the US.
This is definitely not true in the UK - cooking with Lard was a huge thing in my grandparents generation, but almost unheard of amongst my peers. I'm 40.
What has changed is people's views of what's healthy, and Lard is considered hilariously unhealthy, to the point of it being a joke.
But people used to deep or shallow fry with it, use it in pastry, cook with it in all sorts of ways. It was also a poverty food during and after WWII - bread and lard is cheap enough and calorie dense enough to keep workers going through the day.
I still use Lard for roast potatoes, it is excellent at the job. But it is definitely unusual to use it at all at this point
I bet that is good. I occasionally use duck or goose fat and they come out fantastic that way too. But that's quite conventional at this point!
ugh... and hence why fried bread is often an option for cooked breakfast at the greasiest of greasy spoon caf's
Here's a quick and easy take for you: Denmark is an entirely different culture with an entirely different consumption history. Their recipes call for butter, and their replacement was a veg-oil product.
Looking at some fast consumption stats (current, and I'm lazy here but I'll assume this probably link to historic consumer trends) Denmark is top 8 in milk consumption per capita but don't even show up in the top 40 for pork consumption.
My guess for why they don't use lard: They never really did. If you have a dairy/beef based food culture and minimal pork you probably aren't going to use pork lard because it's just not around.
It wasn't "killed" in Denmark (anecdotal old Danes, please feel free to prove me wrong here) because it was never the de facto fat for these applications.
Edited to add: "Approx. 90 percent of the production is exported and is thereby essential to the Danish economy and the balance of trade." They currently produce a decent volume of pork and then ship it out of country.
Input from a Dane, albeit not an anecdotal old one: We did use more lard in the old days, as well as beef tallow and horse fat, for specialty recipes. Duck and goose fat were also highly prized, as they are to this day.
I have a couple of pre-1900 recipe collections, with the oldest recipes being from a 1616 cookbook. The old recipes do tend to use significantly more rendered fats than we do today, I think mostly because it's an inevitable byproduct of butchering and preparing meat, and you wouldn't want anything to go to waste. Butter took time and effort to produce, but rendered fat just had to be collected while you were cooking.
However we've always been heavy dairy consumers, so it makes sense that it would be our primary culinary fat. It's such an ingrained part of our cuisine that in the mid-20th century, our TV chefs made "plenty of butter!" their catchphrase.
We also had the great margarine replacement during/after WWII, and the eventual realization that trans fats were even worse than saturated fats. Even though margarine is now free from trans fats, I think most people are still skeptical of it, and prefer butter.
This is interesting. My impression from across the sound is that the Danes love their pigs and everything that comes from them. I must confess I've pointed out the svinefedt in a Danish store to a fellow countryman and we had a good chuckle about you guys...
It's interesting because I've never seen or heard of anyone actually buying one of the packets of svinefedt (pig lard) - but I guess someone must be.
Come on, I must have been raised in another Denmark from a parallel universe then?
Fedtemadder (lard on bread) is an essential part of the danish smørebrødsbord (open sandwich table). It is common to use lard instead of butter on speciel occasions, like Christmas for example. And it tastes great :-P
I've only been living in Denmark for 4 years, but nearly every single julefrokost or påskefrokost I've been to used lard instead of butter as the initial layer for the smørrebrød.
I was referring mostly to cooking, but it is true that we are very fond of lard as a replacement for butter on bread, usually for special occasions.
Lard, aged cheese and mustard on a slice of rugbrød is still a favorite of mine.
Fried pork is the national dish of Denmark. They eat a lot of pork.
Their own official statistics [1] show 54.6kg/capita (120lbs) in annual pig meat consumption, which would put them at a solid #1 in the pork.org table. However, they admit that the statistics are probably about twice that of the real consumption due to border trade. Realistically they are placed similar to the US.
Ergo, your take is based on a flawed assumption.
[1] https://agricultureandfood.dk/prices-and-statistics/annual-s... (click "Statistics 2017 Pigmeat", page 45)
Entirely was. This is why looking up ALL the reliant stats instead of just some is important.
I retract my hypothesis.
As other commenters have guessed: I was calling the narrative into question. Lard was once common in Europe (if not necessarily in the Nordic region) and now it isn't. Could it be that something other than this domestic narrative killed lard?
The same is true of other trends both in America and elsewhere. For example, in Norway, we perceive rural areas being abandoned in favour of urban areas as a problem to be solved. We pretend that this problem is domestic, and that we can solve it domestically, but we are actually looking at a global trend, yet no one points this out when it is discussed.
I think that 99% of the time when Europeans make what you perceive as annoying "Eurocentric" observations, they are actually calling cause and effect into question. If an effect occurs on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Americans are attributing it to domestic causes, that would seem to be the wrong conclusion, because what, then, caused it to simultaneously happen in Europe?
It might take a lot of time to research even more material to get a wider context, but that half of a paragraph that contextualizes and compares situations to other parts of the world are often the most interesting parts of such stories, at least to me.
>It's not that we don't care about Europe.
You then follow up with three sentences proving this exact point. The reason it's not our "default context" is because we don't care.
I don't agree. Humans are just naturally more concerned with what's close to them or what directly interacts with them. It's just part of the normal signal to noise filtering.
In the US, unless you live in certain coastal cities, the overwhelming majority of people you meet are from the US and living within 100 miles of where you're at. So, the context of almost all the important information that you need on a daily basis to survive is going to be about the US and about your state. If there's a massive flood of the Mississippi and you live in Missouri, you might know someone affected, or at least be impacted due to the economic damages.
If a German lives near the French border, isn't he naturally going to be more concerned about news of what's going on in France? He's going to meet French nationals much more often than others and French culture is going to have a pretty direct impact on his daily life. If there's a major fire in Strasbourg, he's going to be interested in what happened. He might know some of the casualties, directly or indirectly. Maybe he dated a girl from the University. If there are riots due to poor management of the crisis, or a sewage leak into the Rhine, all these things can affect him directly. Just because he lives nearby.
Do either us Americans or the German need to know about what's going on in Vietnam? Only in the broadest sense. If there's a tsunami that hits Da Nang, it's unlikely to affect anybody we know personally, unlikely to affect our daily life, unlikely to affect our larger economic lives (even if our countries send aid). It's tragic. We certainly care that people died and that they need help. It just isn't a tragedy that touches us personally. Vietnam is not part of our default context.
Your entire argument is bogus in the context of this story. It has nothing to do with "caring more about people close to them".
The manufacturing and consumption of lard in the U.S. is a technology/tradition inherited from the parts of the world Americans emigrated from. And the development of the hydrogenation process and its implementation as a consumable product (replacing lard) was shared between Europe and the US. (Reference is made to this in the article). Thus the experience in Europe (and elsewhere) is directly relevant to the topic under discussion and comments from non-Americans on the situation in their countries are also directly relevant.
I don't see why you can't have similar outcomes from different causes when a social circumstance is involved.
What killed lard in Europe? Different things. Probably even different things per country if you get very specific about it.
Merely exploring only American causes to an American result, doesn't make the article bogus and that criticism is what everyone is responding to because the OP said:
> I often see Americans attempting to explain why things happen in their country by pointing to domestic events, with said events failing to account for an identical thing happening all over the world.
>What happened in Norway is that butter was rationed because of WWII and they introduced margarine (another product of hydrogenation) as a substitute, and after the war, it was promoted as a healthier alternative to butter.
Margarine was extremely popular in the US for a time (and there's still plenty of it in grocery stores). Among health conscious people, butter was looked on with suspicion as recently as 20 years or so ago. (I ran/run weekend hiking trips sometimes and 20 years ago, I would definitely have gotten dirty looks if I only bought butter. Today no one cares.)
Crisco was pretty popular at one point in the US but AFAIK it's receded quite a bit. I don't do a lot of baking but I don't really see it in recipes these days. And lard is still not in mainstream use at all.
I get the impression you're generally better off sticking to (whole fat/"normal"/etc) versions of products and simply being aware of portion sizes than substituting or diluting things just because there's some health fad going on against something in it like cholesterol or fat or sugar. Have a breakfast of eggs with real butter and a glass of whole milk, use full real mayonnaise instead of some sickly-tasting light version, have a burger, just watch out for daily calories. An exception of course if if you have a particular medical condition that requires a special diet.
"All you have to do is eat less. Two words: Eat. Less. That's all you need to know about weight loss. Eat less, I guarantee you'll lose weight. It worked in Changi. It worked for Ghandi - no love handles on that man! But remember, eating less will not work unless you actually eat less." - Dr Rudi
"All you have to do is breath. Two words: Just breath. That's all you need to know about not dying from asphyxiation. Just breath, I'll guarantee you'll not die from asphyxiation. It worked for me. It worked for James LeBron - no asphyxiation signs on that man! But remember, just breathing will not work unless you actually just breath." - Dr Rudi (probably) to an Asthma patient
I know there is some small proportion of the population who physically cannot refrain from overeating. That doesn't change the fact that for the vast majority, eating less IS an option, which is good because it's literally the only way to lose weight apart from surgically removing things from your body.
All that aside, yeah, Dr Rudi probably would say that because he's a satirical caricature.
Health conscious people prefer margarine to butter on a hiking trip? Must be some pretty relaxed trips: Food is fuel, the more calories the better!
I carry peanut butter and Crisco on my backpacking and canoeing trips...they're heavy, but nutritionally dense! A peanut butter jar might last you two months at home, but you can likely expect to be packing the empty jar out with you after a week in the woods.
Most people doing weekend trips don't suddenly abandon their day to day eating habits and start eating jars of peanut butter and mayonnaise.
ADDED: That wasn't intended as snark but my observation is that most people on weekend dayhike trips or even multi-day backpacks maintain fairly conventional eating habits even if they're not energy/weight optimal. I certainly do.
The calories aren't the issue; as far as I know butter and margarine have about the same amount per serving. Margarine was preferred because it was thought that the saturated fat in butter was going to clog your arteries and kill you.
Saturated fat is bad for health. This is established science and your comment is science denial.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
It's not nearly that simple.
And the person you're responding to didn't even actually deny that saturated fat is unhealthy, why jump on them like that? Needlessly inflammatory.
You're being disingenuous. Please stop.
> Margarine was preferred because it was thought that the saturated fat in butter was going to clog your arteries and kill you.
You do seem unreasonable and unnecessarily combative in this subthread. I've had to read over it several times to figure out how your comments are appropriate replies, and I’m not seeing it.
That commenter wasn't mounting an argument for a position on whether or not "saturated fat in butter was going to clog your arteries and kill you" - just explaining the thinking behind those who preferred margarine.
But it's also not "established science" that "saturated fat is bad for health". If it were that simple, any food containing saturated fat would never appear in the "healthy in low-moderate quantities" section of a mainstream recommended diet chart.
Clearly that's not the case, and clearly many experts have different things to say about this topic.
So, please stop throwing around accusations of "science denial", when any person who engages seriously with this topic knows that it is still a matter of ongoing research and discussion.
You are incorrect and denying science as well. Trump uses the same logic to deny climate change. He says many experts disagree.
Your opinion is not equal to fact. I'm sorry.
Please stop being a science denier.
Trump uses the same logic to deny climate change.
This is an appallingly bad-faith style of discussion. You must know full well this terminology is used for its evocative link to holocaust denial.
Not that it should make a difference to how you conduct yourself, but I’ve had cause to research this topic in order to get myself through serious health issues. So I know what it looks like when people are or aren’t engaging with this topic with honesty.
It’s a deeply important topic that deserves better than crap like this, particularly from a longtime user of this site.
Not only saturated fat isn’t bad but at worst neutral, but also LDL is not “bad” when measured as concentration, which is the main argument against sat fats on the page you linked. There is plenty of research on this topic.
You should be careful about making blanket statements like "established science" and "science denial".
It makes you come off as an extremist, and in fact, the page you linked makes no such claims and is far more moderate. It talks only about potentially harmful dietary fats.
> Research about the possible harms and benefits of dietary fat is always evolving. Current evidence suggests that the smart play is to focus on choosing healthier fats and avoiding the less healthy ones.
Researchers (particularly those in the field of nutrition) have got things completely wrong before. An important part of being a good scientist is knowing the limits of the current body of research.
Yeah, it's only what 99% of doctors in the US would recommend but I'm the extremist...
That is not true even on difficult hikes. You need more calories then normal, but it is not like you would suddenly had to eat tripple portion of everything else you die.
Also, it is not like extreme cardio or weight lifting. You can go on for hours without eating. It won't feel great, but won't be big issue either.
Besides, for long hikes and climbs, people minimize weight. Bin of peanut butter to go through in two days sound excesive.
Bringing butter, peanut butter or mayonnaise on a hike is not about eating more but about carrying less.
300g of butter for example is about 2150 calories, enough food for a day for a small person. Compare that to pasta and you would need to carry more than 1.6 kg for the same amount of calories. If you're going on a five day hike you're carrying 8 kg of pasta vs only 1.5 kg of butter.
That said I only bring butter and mayonnaise on week long hikes, for weekends or day trips I don't bother.
Pasta sounds like highly theoretical food for a hike. I have yet to see anyone who would carry pasta or similar food for a hike as main source of calories. Sounds impractical and waste of space. Or raw butter which would melt in the heat. Also, eating 300g of butter as energy source for whole day sounds like one of those things that makes your stomach go real bad.
Quick energy in sugary food weights a little and comes in gazimilion sources. Proteins bars or dry meant are easy to get, weight a little and have enough calories. Both are slow calories.
But besides, already traditional bread and ham or sausage or bacon or whatever are good enough for day hike. Or any kind of already cooked meat that can survive a day. You do not need more for one day. For more days, you need to consider more then just calories in the thing. Which where pasta like food or canned food comes into play - people carry it because they want real food to actually fills stomach and comfort of it, not because they would worry about being unable to fill calories. Besides, you can hike on caloric deficit.
Carrying 1.5kg of butter as primary source of food for 5 days hike sounds like one of those things that gets hikes cancelled second day and someone needing help to get back.
Makes as much sense as zero-calorie sports drinks. Food shaming has trained people to want things that are of no use to them.
Crisco was pretty popular at one point in the US but AFAIK it's receded quite a bit. I don't do a lot of baking but I don't really see it in recipes these days. And lard is still not in mainstream use at all.
I bought some lard at Safeway just last week. It can be had, but it's usually in the dustiest, lowest, most-hidden shelf in the baking aisle.
It's excellent for deep frying, and economical because it can be used over and over and the flavor only improves. (Unless you burn something.)
Find a Mexican grocery or butcher. They often have fresh lard as a result of making carnitas. It’s so much better. For cooking you can also save bacon grease or render chicken fat and skin (which also gives you tasty chicken cracklings). Natural animal fats as well as making stock are great ways to level up your cooking game.
Lately I've been boiling up cheap bones and offcuts. You get a few L of stock and a few hundred mL of fat – enough to last the week unless you're deep frying.
Has the flavor and usefulness of Crisco suffered since they removed trans fats and partially hydrogenated oils?
Crisco still has trans fats/partially hydrogenated oils, just less than .5g per serving, letting them round down to 0g.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/01/09/144918710/th...
We don't use it much, but it seems to work about the same.
Ah yes. If you set the serving size low enough, you can sell trans fat while claiming it has 0g of trans fat.
Somebody should do this. Make little packets like the ones for butter.
That's how tictacs, which are almost 100% sugar, are sold as 0 sugar - servimg size is 1 tictac.
I'm younger...I view manufactured products like Crisco and margarine with suspicion, and consider butter to be much healthier.
As a little kid in the 1960's I asked my dad where margarine came from and after the explanation I was yeah not eating that stuff.
> Among health conscious people, butter was looked on with suspicion as recently as 20 years or so ago
Sense must be prevailing in the US much faster than in the UK then - many people here still think butter is bad for them.
There is absolutely zero issue buying lard in Poland. Literally any store will have some in fridges next to meat.
In a Polish restaurant, i had a starter of lard on bread - you get some slices of bread, and a pot of lard with little flecks of gherkin or something in it. I wasn't all that taken with it, i have to confess.
But in Britain we do have, or once had, something distantly related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dripping
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/feat...
Toast and dripping (with plenty of salt sprinkled on it) - a fantastic tasty memory from my childhood in the North of England.
I'm going to have to get/make some. (I suspect my wife won't be happy).
> In a Polish restaurant, i had a starter of lard on bread
This sounds like something they could do in Ukraine. Was the large a solid piece, or a spread? Eating solid pieces of pork fat is very normal in Ukraine.
Pork lard is eaten in the same way across Eastern Europe, not just in Poland or Ukraine, i.e. also in Hungary, Romania, the former Yugoslavia, and Russia and among Russians in Central Asia.
The Ukrainian version seems to be a particular thing, at least for the Ukrainians:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/06/salo-ukraine-n...
No. Ukrainians might be more passionate about salo as a "national food", but you will find the same thing in neighbouring countries.
It was like a spread - i could scoop it up with a spoon, rather than having to slice it.
I haven't had a chance to try to Ukrainian style solid fat!
Oh, it's a major thing. And it's delicious. You can pick it up in any Russian grocery on the east coast.
They still serve it in Germany sometimes. It's called Schmalz.
When I was a child - northern England, mid-1980s - my grandmother would give me dripping on toast to eat as a special treat.
This is also true in the UK. Any supermarket will stock lard, beef dripping, duck and goose fat.
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/300346570
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/288354065
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/290068361
You can find lard in Spain pretty easily some stores even have lard from ibérico style pigs with a much deeper flavor. I imagine most Southern Europe and Eastern Europe has easy access.
used to cook a lot with lard in the last 5 years in austria, after discovering that many supermarkets stock it. right now i prefer clarified butter. the only vegetable oil in my pantry is pumpkin seed oil for salads. margarine is banned in my household; my mother used to use it but switched back to butter and lard in recent years.
It sounds as if lard was never a very big thing in Norway whereas it was at one point in the United States. It seems as if it could just be a coincidence what happened in the States and in Europe.
"The only thing I know of that was traditionally cooked in lard is donuts"
Makes a huge difference with cake donuts. They are crispy on the outside, and moist, and hold cinnamon/sugar on the outside. Haven't had one in quite a while though...all the US donut stores use vegetable oil.
So did margarine continue displacing butter after WWII?
If TFA were generalized some, it would help explain what killed lard and butter in the US. The lard-to-Crisco and butter-to-margarine narratives have much in common. Different companies were involved, but it was all enabled by hydrogenation. And there were the same (now known to be bogus) health claims vs saturated fats. Health claims that were undoubtedly sourced, at least in part, by sellers of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.
One of the biggest high-profile product launches of the 90's was for the margarine brand "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!", which launched with a huge ad campaign featuring the then-faddishly-popular male model Fabio.
Sorry, I meant in Norway.
Ah. My apologies.
I always thought Dairy was more prominent in the Nordic countries, not much pig farming goes on there, I thought.
Lard is still sold in the UK - its what I use when I cook chips (fries) from scratch.
Interestingly enough what seems to have killed lard, at least the most common domestic use of it (making fries), in France and Belgium really is hydrogenated vegetal oil. Fries simply taste better. And it's also much worse for your health.
Since it was commercialized just after WW2 and lard had been used as a butter substitute during the war there was a favourable context for it to happen.
Lard is still used extensively in butcher shops as part of pork preparations (rillettes, grattons etc.). Mostly traditional/regional stuff.
Hydrogenated vegetal oil comes nowhere near lard when it comes to taste for fries.
I’m a Belgian talking so maybe I’m biased.
I think the argument is that animal fat is harder to maintain and more expensive than super-cheap "never" spoiling industrial fat ?
BTW isn't beef fat used to make Belgian fries ? I agree with you though, traditional fries made with animal fat is in a league of its own.
In the UK, you can find lard pretty much everywhere. The little Tesco express down the road will have some.
The lard you find in supermarkets is tasteless, hydrogenated dross, fit only for making soap.
If you want actual lard, and you don't want to pay through the nose to get it from a specialty provider, you can visit your local butcher and ask for fat trimmings (tell him you're going to feed them to your dog if he has any misgivings) and render it yourself. It'll cost you next to nothing and it's extremely good for you.
While you're there, pick up a few marrow bones too. And some offal.
I get about 40% of my calories from lard/tallow, and I've never felt better.
Living in London right now.
Finding bone marrow, fat trimmings, or most of the cheap by-product of whole animal butchering is not as easily available even from a good local butcher.
Some butcher still do, I manage to find some stuff in halal butcher and random butchers around town, but 40 min travel to find a bag of bone is not something you do past the exitement of the first time.
Context for those not in the know: the Belgians excel at fries (pomme-frites/frites) in a way that other nations can't even imagine. If you find yourself in Belgium, you should get some frites. If you're there in mussel season, get a moules-frites.
My favorite joke about Belgium is that the world's largest friterie/frituur is on the border between Holland and France.
My nearby Belgian styled restaurant pushes made with real beef tallow as a selling point. Their fries do taste great.
Do you mean sunflower oil? That's the only oil I've seen in homes in France to cook fries.
I mean Végétaline, hydrogenated coco oil.
Lard is in all major supermarkets in the UK.
>The closest thing you can find to shortening in a Norwegian supermarket is coco fat
You can get regular lard frozen at Meny.
> I often see Americans attempting to explain why things happen in their country by pointing to domestic events, with said events failing to account for an identical thing happening all over the world.
I often see American colonies who labor under the delusion they have agency. Lard going away in Norway is much like Lysenkoism being popular in communist Poland.
The main reason lard wasn't sold was because the health industrial complex blamed fat for heart disease and a whole host of other health conditions. This started the low-fat food trend which brought way more carbs into our diet which eventually led to the low-carb diets which spurred a renewed interest in animal fat like lard.
In other words, there was a lot of argument from authority that precipitated this, not just corporate profit seeking (which was also significant).
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in... would disagree with you. The argument from authority was paid for by the sugar industry. The health industrial complex, whatever that is, was also profit-seeking.
And those authorities often worked as scientists funded by and regulators captured by their respective industries, no?
In fact most people ignored the dietary guidelines, as people generally do, and kept right on eating fat. In the decades since those guidelines were released people have increased calorie intake of all kinds across the board.
Which is why even though sugar consumption peaked years ago, and is now in decline, obesity and all its related diseases are at an all time high.
I am surprised to hear that sugar consumption peaked years ago. I was under the impression that when accounting for sugar added to products, it has continued to increase. As for obesity, I blame the weaponization of the sugar/salt/fat balance towards making processed foods more addictive.
This is the problem with the whole "carbs are making us fat" narrative. Sugar consumption peaked in 1999. But consumption of chicken and cheese has gone through the roof since then. As you can see from the charts, the decades where people were supposedly loading up on carbs were also decades where meat consumption exploded.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
Americans are eating too much of everything, basically. A lot of the health benefits attributed to various diets are just the intrinsic benefits of losing weight.
Now we are doing the same to meat, in order to valorize "plant-based" foods.
That's patently false on two charges:
- Vegan dishes enjoy nowhere near the popularity of low-fat foods in the anti-fat wave of the 80s and 90s. Not even close. It's still a minority of restaurants that offer any vegan options.
- The main argument for plant-based diets isn't that they're healthier (though a minority of folks do argue such), but that they're less cruel to animals and are more environmentally friendly. In contrast to arguing that low-fat diets are healthier, both of those assertions are uncontroversial.
Personally, I still eat meat, but have moved (aside from eating out, which I do rarely) to buying all of my animal products from farms that are certified for specific animal welfare conditions. And, well, I also always have some lard in the fridge. Where I'm from, people tended to save rendered pork fat in their fridges.
> Vegan dishes enjoy nowhere near the popularity of low-fat foods in the anti-fat wave of the 80s and 90s. Not even close. It's still a minority of restaurants that offer any vegan options.
Mr. Paul Graham is predicing otherwise: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1099648817601921024?lang=en
I sincerely hope there will not be a grand "social pressure against eating meat" as I do much better on the carnivore diet.
> to buying all of my animal products from farms that are certified for specific animal welfare conditions.
That's what I do as well. And the meat tastes much better too.
I have IBD, carnivore works much better for me. I would not be happy with all the fiber of a vegan diet.
> Personally, I still eat meat, but have moved (aside from eating out, which I do rarely) to buying all of my animal products from farms that are certified for specific animal welfare conditions.
Whenever I hear people say this, I'm really sceptical. Does this mean never buying any products with animal ingredients? Nothing that has butter or milk, no ice cream, never a turkey sandwich or anything with egg or gelatine in it, like candy? Because if you do, they most probably don't come from farms certified for their animal welfare.
I'm not trying to attack you personally, it's just that I suspect that you either exclude the majority of animal products you consume, or you're one of the rare people that never buys anything with a list of ingredients.
If you're the latter, that's great, because I think that's a very good way of knowing exactly what you eat. I want to get better at eating from basic ingredients myself, where I snack on things like an apple or nuts and not something with 5-10 ingredients.
> Whenever I hear people say this, I'm really sceptical. Does this mean never buying any products with animal ingredients? Nothing that has butter or milk, no ice cream, never a turkey sandwich or anything with egg or gelatine in it, like candy?
Yes, that's what I mean by that. Anything with animal products I buy from organic shops (which in Germany are required to meet animal welfare standards) or from farms with one of two other animal welfare standards (without the organic requirements attached). The only real exception that I regularly make is buying chocolates that my wife particularly likes. But we're talking about a couple hundred grams of chocolate per year.
It helps significantly that I enjoy cooking and buy next to nothing pre-packaged. I make just about everything myself from fresh ingredients, and the thing I don't come from the above mentioned shops. Things like ice cream, mayonnaise, etc. I make myself.
Do I end up eating some stuff that doesn't meet my standards? Of course. But far, far more of that comes from eating out, or eating at friends' places, etc. than stuff that slips through in my own grocery shopping.
We're still at the beginnings of veganism as a diet craze (though the motivations for it go beyond health). Give it time.
That's funny, just the other day I needed some lard for a paté. I called around without luck and eventually bought suet from a specialty butcher and left it in the crock pot on low overnight.
Then I needed another half-pound and tried calling up the butcher at our local grocery store. He said he could set aside some suet for me, and I picked it up later that day. It was less than a dollar a pound. He said as long as I called in the morning he should have some for me, but otherwise they just tossed it.
When I was Googling for how to render lard, the recipe I landed on had a long story about how it was Canadian canola farmers who killed lard. I guess it's always nice having someone to blame. :-)
Anyway I'm saving the paté for Sunday, so I can't yet tell you how it turned out. :-)
Whenever I cook bacon, I always cook it in the oven. In addition to keeping things relatively clean (as opposed to cooking on the stove top), it also makes collecting the rendered pork fat much easier – you just tip the baking sheet and trickle into whatever container you use.
In this way I accumulate lard with a mild smoke flavour and I use it for a variety of other things. It's not enough to deep fry of course, but it's enough to use a few spoonfuls here and there to add some flavoured fats that I would not be able to otherwise.
I usually have a jar of bacon lard in the fridge mainly because i love to fry hot dogs in it. For other things (mainly pastry crusts), I've never had trouble finding lard in 1-lb blocks at the supermarket.
I do the same and I cook anything that requires grease or oil with my saved up bacon fat - eggs, pancakes, etc. It's wonderful. I've even used my bacon fat in chocolate chip cookies - amazing.
I make bacon the same way, in a glass casserole. I'll pass the fat through a coffee filter or a round of cheesecloth before refrigerating it. Use it for everything: it's a near-total replacement for butter/shortening/cooking oil. Olive oil we keep around for dressing salads.
Take some fresh brussel sprouts, chop in half, toss in salt and pepper and throw in a frying pan with a heaping tablespoon of lard.
Also works well with the sous vide.
Agreed. Also s/brussels sprouts/broccoli & crushed garlic/
And add some crushed nuts like almonds
I do the same with the copious fat rendered from duck breasts!
Put some in the frying pan until lightly coated - then add eggs for scrambled eggs. Throw in some shredded cheese, pepper, and seasoned salt. Top with either salsa or a mixture of 50% ketchup, 50% tapatio.
The best lard is Armor brand. You can usually find it in the Mexican isle at walmart. Sure it is hydrogenated but pie isn't exactly health food to begin with. And strangely, lard crusts are better than butter.
The only problem is I make pie a couple times a year when the tub is big enough to have a pie making factory. Then again it is so cheap its not a big deal.
That's the brand I tried this Easter for a tart. It was very soft, too soft for a pie. Do you use all lard?
I use the Armor brand lard for pie crusts or anything that requires lard. There is another brand of lard that is sold in one pound containers shaped like butter containers. I have found that brand (snow.. something or other) has had a rancid taste about every time I've bought it.
The directions for making pie crusts using butter usually instruct the freezing of the butter cubes before working it into the dough so that it doesn't blend too much upon working with it.You might try spooning the lard into a bowl and putting it in the freezer for a few minutes to harden it a little. The trick with pie crusts and biscuits seems to be not over working the dough. Just work the ingredients enough to be the right stickiness and your good to go.
Hmm, I always take the fat straight out of the fridge and cut it with a knife so my fingers don't warm it too much. I'm certain I didn't over-work it. If anything, maybe I should have worked it a bit longer to give it some structure.
I usually keep it refrigerated so it's the right consistency and blends well with flour. Remember to keep everything cool when making pastry crusts and make sure your hands don't warm the fat too much.
Now I know why those Vietnamese Banh Mi Paté is so tasty. I find fat give great flavors to most food I've cooked. Tried 1% fat lean ground beef for burger once... it was such a big mistake on my part.
Is that from beef then? I wonder how the flavor is different from pork fat, which is probably milder tasting.
Most likely from beef, yes: suet is to beef as lard is to pork, according to my understanding. (Could also be from mutton, though.)
I haven't tried a direct comparison; my local butcher saves me a big hunk of suet (at no charge) from time to time when he's been processing a beef animal, and it's lovely once rendered. Maybe I should ask him about lard next time I'm in there.
Suet is raw fat. Lard (pork) and tallow (beef) have been rendered — cooked to liquid, strained, and then cooled back to solid.
Specifically, I believe that Suet is raw fat from around the kidneys of a cow
Suet is more like back fat (unrendered fat). Tallow is the rendered-fat beef equivalent to lard.
(not op here) I have found that if lard has a flavor it is usually rancid.
https://www.southerncastiron.com/5-things-you-didnt-know-abo...
lard has no flavor
Rancid fats are oxidised.
Look for fresh, and well-packaged lard.
>> but otherwise they just tossed it.
Is there any way it can be processed for biodiesel?
I remember going to my great-grandmothers house in Indiana. They had a farm, and they had lots of pigs. My mother brought one home as a kid, it was a runt and they kept it in the house and named it peanut butter.
Back to the topic at hand. There were pots full of lard in the basement, and they stored pork chops and sausages in the lard! You'd just go down an pull some out like it was a refridgerator.
Sliced potatoes, fried in lard, with pork sausages. One of my favorite meals to this day. And I have the cast iron pan my great grandmother used to make the exact same meal.
The lard went in the pie crusts as well. And I imagine in countless other things I never knew about.
I remember hiking in the mountains when I was like 14 yo when I saw a jar of lard in my friends backpack. I was confused at the time as to how he was going to eat it since most food we carried was canned and had little or no bread with as to cut down on volume. When we reached our destination at night my friend put the jar by the fire, the lard melted and all I could see was a jar filled with sausages in liquid lard. They were absolutely delicious I remember
Thank you for that story.
I want to eat that now!
Wonder how long the pork lasted in the lard, seeing as even salt pork like ships used to stock for long voyages only lasted a couple months
It sounds basically the same as the French technique of confit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confit).
I think it is different, lard seals food from air and bacteria. I'v seen similar technique in some movie about Chinese way of preserving food.
Confit is actually the same, it is about sealing and preserving cooked meat with fat.
I guess this was widespread. In the US it was maybe more prevalent before refrigeration. I remember it being in a documentary about colonial times.
My favorite lard story comes from my business partner. Every Sunday night the boarding school he attended in grade school would have an ice cream social. They always got the cheap ice cream from the local ice cream shop cause it tasted 'better'. One Sunday, they forgot to put the leftover ice cream away and by Monday morning, it still hadn't melted. When they asked the shop why, they were told is was mostly made of lard. They got the more expensive ice cream from then on.
Something sounds off about that. Never mind enough lard to keep it solid at room temp, there's usually no added fat in ice cream. Just what's in the cream/milk. I'd expect it to taste/feel wrong and don't see how it could be cheaper.
I think you would be surprised how soft and fluffy whipped lard can be.
If you’re anywhere near a Mexican meat market/grocery store with a carniceria attached, make sure to try the in house rendered lard (and the chicharrones/crackling!). The white, tubbed, Armour brand lard simply doesn’t compare.
Should be caramel colored with some bits in it, sold in a bag, and very, very cheap!
Often labeled as "manteca de puerco" or "manteca de cerdo".
In-house is the key. The Mexican markets around here sell lard in containers on the shelf, but it's all hydrogenated. And there's just no comparison.
I used to be able to get pork fat for next to nothing at local grocery store butcher sections, and would render it myself. Now no one has it. Not sure why.
Chicharrones are awesome. They call it "pork rinds" elsewhere (eg: in Canada).
Pork Scratchings in the UK
With the rise in popularity of the ketogenic diet I would imagine producers/sellers of lard should be seeing a significant increase in demand for their product. Make it fair-trade, free-range, and organic and you sell for 3x... everyone wins!
>> "It seems funny," Silver says, "but for thousands of years this was the thing that people cooked with.
Some people, but not all by any means. In the Mediterrannean, for example, olive oil was the shortening of choice since around 6000 BC.
A good pie crust has both butter and lard, as separate bits that are not mixed. They melt at different temperatures.
The best lard comes from near the kidneys. Good luck finding some, or even just lard that isn't adulterated in some way. The lard I can find has been hydrogenated or has added TBHQ or BHT.
I was obsessed with "leaf lard", the stuff near the kidneys for a while. I was told that it makes a superior pie crust so finally my wife gave me a jar for my birthday. It's very expensive and, in my opinion, totally not worth it. I can make a better tasting crust that's just as flaky with plain old butter.
Which isn't to say lard isn't great, I render it out when making slow-cooker pork and use it for tamales or as a frying oil. I just don't like it in pastry.
Hydrogenating lard is such a depressing concept-- the entire point would be as a more healthful alternative to hydrogenated and highly processed oils, but I guess processing is a hammer to which everything is a nail...
Perhaps surprisingly, natural lard is mostly unsaturated fat. It's only about 40% saturated, which means it has poor shelf life without hydrogenation to increase the saturated fat percent.
If you really care about pie crusts, finding a good source of leaf lard is the #1 requirement. I tried a few pre-rendered brands, and it was all expensive, not particularly fresh, and tastes weird... Eventually I found a farmer who sells unrendered leaf lard, and after a few false starts at rendering it (too hot, and it'll taste too meaty), I've started making essentially perfect pie crusts.
In Australia it never went away. Copha is a natural part of truly awful family recipies like rice-crispie choc cakes, or christmas treats made with dried fruit and suger.
We also have a huge immigrant diaspora (40% of the population either are from overseas or within 1 or 2 generations) and a huge amount of traditional cookery is preserved in aspic here, whilst the homeland has gone full burger, you can still get echt-lard recipe cooking from nonna or her cousins.
The CSIRO diet and nutritionists tried very hard to make lard punishable. They basically failed. Now keto is fashionable its going to be even harder (like my arteries)
Copha is hydrogenated coconut oil.
Whoops! Having said which. The shelf where copha is sold in Coles and Woolies has beef dripping including organic beef dripping. Three choices.
Virtually every link matching a search on "substitute" and "copha" is of course arguing for using vegetable shortening in place of lard but the reverse clearly works: if you know how to use copha, you can substitute lard for a more intense flavour.
Soy beans are a top 5 food allergen. In the US, soy beans get into almost everything because most "vegetable oil" and margarine is made from it.
We had to remove soy beans from our diet and we are much healthier as a result. A lot of people who have digestive issues could probably trace the problem back to an intolerance of soy beans. It took us a lot of trial and error to figure this out in our case.
We found we could only get decent lard off of etsy.com, or from an rural butcher. The best lard is from grass fed animals, which has better taste/nutrition.
While soy oil is quite common, soy allergies seem to be to the protein, not the oil (or lecithin for the chocolate lovers out there). According to wikipedia,
> Some food contains soy-based ingredients that are not considered allergens under national regulations, and thus not labeled, for example, foods cooked in highly refined soy oil, which is considered safe due to absence of soy protein.
I only have one food allergy that I'm aware of - soy protein. AFAIK, it was caused by my mom following a fad in the 70s and giving me soy milk or soy-based formula. I was sick all the time until my dad got fed up and gave me cows milk. It's too bad, I like tofu.
I don't eat lard, but I do render the fat from chickens I cook and keep it. I'll cook with chicken fat. And when you render it with onions, you can fry the skin as "gribenes" or spread the onion/fat mixture on toast as you would butter.
For people who don't eat dairy and meat in the same meal, chicken fat is widely used. I'd imagine it has some similar qualities to pork fat.
Lard is still key ingredient in Chinese cuisine, through it's rare to find dishes made with lard outside of China.
Here's instructions on how to render your own lard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9KXFgXQG70
Lard is also key to Mexican cuisine. Everything is cooked with a little lard.
It's still commonly used in Southern and Soul food in the US too. I'm staying in Virginia right now and all the local grocery stores have lard and fatback.
I was inspired to try baking from The Great British Baking Show and was really surprised to find how difficult it was to find lard for my pastry dough. Bring it back!
Are you in the USA? Try Mexican markets. I always see it there and my grandma used it extensively.
I've seen lard in the 'ethnic foods' section of normal groceries.
Yeah, pretty easy to find in US stores but it's the cheap kind that can have pretty strong flavors, not something you can use to replace oil or butter.
When I lived in Texas, lard was stocked by every HEB.
You can get (organic, not hydrogenated) lard from Whole Foods (or Amazon Prime Now, if you don't want to go to a store and you’re in one of their service areas.)
re: great British baking show - caster sugar is also hard to find in the US. (you can buy superfine but it only comes in very small bottles and is very expensive)
C&H has superfine sugar in 4 lb packages, but they're the old cardboard milk carton style rather than the paper bag bricks used for granulated. They also have "Bakers Sugar" in fairly large print. Domino also sells it, but the grocery store site I checked only shows it in 12oz plastic bottles.
https://www.meijer.com/shop/en/pantry/baking/sugar/ch-superf...
I've heard that you can make it in your food processor, takes a couple minutes. I've never tried it but Bob's Red Mill thinks it can be done.
Or give it a bit longer and you've got icing sugar (or powdered sugar, as I think it's called in the States).
In virtually everything I've baked, though, it works fine to just use granulated. You may have to work a little harder to make sure it's truly all dissolved, that's all.
The other thing you use caster/superfine sugar for is for some cocktails. Basically, it's a lot easier to dissolve in cold (or at least room temperature) liquids than regular granulated sugar is.
Very true, I make homemade lemonade by just stirring it into lemon juice and cold water. No need to go through the simple syrup route.
Icing sugar (at least as I know it in Commonwealth countries) also contains cornstarch/cornflour.
As does US powdered/confectioners sugar.
I ordered one from Amazon...It is surprisingly serviceable
Is that the US name for Bake Off?
Besides P&G, sugar industry also killed lard
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...
Just the other day I saw a pack of gummy "fruit" candy which is basically gelatin and sugar in the store. It was advertised with pictures of fruit with a large label that said how it is fat free.
"Look how healthy this is for you kid, it's just like real fruit and it doesn't have any fat, perfect!".
Lard is pretty easy to make, and homemade lard is _much_ better than the hydrogenated stuff you get in the grocery store. It's as simple as dicing up pork fat, covering with water, and simmering until what was left of the diced chunks starts to sizzle and brown a little (those chunks, btw, are incipient pork cracklins, which are their own reason to make lard).
A good reason to end up with a whole bunch of pork fat is to buy a whole skin-on pork shoulder, which also gives you the skin to cook with the fat and then fry.
How porky is homemade lard? One challenge I heard of for lard crusts for pie is that sweet pies don’t do well with a strong savory pork flavor. (They recommended leaf lard, which is made from specific pork fat and pretty tricky to find).
My mum used to make her own. She said her mum used to cook with lard and food just didn’t taste as good with alternatives. She also felt it was healthier to use animal fat than chemicals.
Now I see signs for “no pork, no lard, no msg” and it makes me sad. All the best things and I can’t have any of it :(
Every time I see yet another article claiming lard and saturated fats aren't bad for your cardiovascular system, I feel like I have the ethical obligation to remind everyone how this is false. Please don't fall for fads, ask your doctor or take professional advice on this issue. Everyone would like to eat more fatty meat and lard-fried potatoes, but they will clog your arteries. It's an annoyance but it's a fact. Don't die following a dumb trend.
I appreciate your concern, and your moral obligation to try and tell people. I do not mean to be rude to you, but your understanding is outdated and wrong.
Saturated fats are actually good for you as these fats are required for a healthy metabolism and endocrine system. They also comprise a good portion of your cell membrane.
Saturated fats and cholesterol do not clog your arteries. We initially thought that because it was present in atherosclerosis, but it turns out we were blaming the responders to the crime scene, and not the actual cause: inflammation brought on by high carbohydrate diets. Note: if you read further into this, big food companies were also involved in influencing the negative stance on fats by our politicians back in the 50s, helping create our current obesity epidemic.
I'm on mobile, but will link to current research when I remember. Also, source: I do research at a medical research university in the div of cardiology/endocrinology.
This advice is a trend from the 80s.
My main experience with lard as a younger person is as the white cubes of deliciousness in mortadella, my favorite sandwich meat.
I have never seen lard that I know of aside from that.
I can walk into either of the two major grocery chains here in St. Louis and buy lard off the shelf. So I find this interesting when comparing my other experience of going to Chicago's big grocery chain, one day a few summers ago, looking to buy a whole turkey and told they only carry those at Thanksgiving. That was shocking to me as that, too, can be bought locally at any time.
And, yes, I have a tub of lard in my pantry.
I'm further west than you, but almost all supermarkets in my area carry lard. I know because I use it in my own cooking.
We make our own lard, rendered from pig fat (usually from around the kidneys), which is readily available for cheap (I buy 5 lbs for a few dollars from a pasture-based farm, so likely cheaper if you get it from a more industrial farm). We also render our own suet. Haven't needed to use vegetable oil for a while now. Love lard, makes all vegetables taste 10000 times better.
Well, lard is still used heavily for frybread[1]. Not the healthiest food, but it has an interesting evolution.
1) http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9022063/ns/us_news-life/t/icon-or-...
As a French, I was really confused by the conversation here, until I realized, unlike other words common to English and French, the English word for lard does not have the same meaning as the French word for lard, where it means bacon.
Here in France lard is used a lot, most replaced by butter (and olive oil in the South) in recipes.
I guess "saindoux" is the closest translation for lard. I've more often seen people cook with animal fat (goose and beef, mainly) as opposed to "saindoux". That was only for specialty recipes, though. As you've indicated, in the south where I grew up, olive oil was by far the fatty substance of choice. In ratios of 10-20 to 1, I would estimate.
farmer here. We grew pigs last year an saved their fat. Just started rendering it wit plans for lard bisquest and gravy this weekend.
Think for your self. Its as critical the information you put in your head as the food you put in your belly.
Consider an information diet and stop eating man made transfats.
For me frying anything on lard smells just horrible and I still remember, from my late childhood, meat and onions fried on lard that gave me huge stomach ache every time I ate them.
When it comes to frying I prefer anything other than lard. It's only slightly above used motor oil.
That Upton Sinclair's novel bit on people falling into vats reminded me of Ambrose Bierce's macabre short story 'Oil of Dog'. [1]
There is even a beautiful animated adaption of this tale titled "My name is Boffer Bings" on Vimeo that was released few years back [2]
[1] - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3715/3715-h/3715-h.htm#oil [2] - https://vimeo.com/41718840
Lard is still good to cook with. Cook bacon and store the grease in jars in the fridge, and it can last for ages. Wonderful for scrambling eggs, and pies crusts made with anything but lard just don't compare.
My family always had a jar of bacon grease in the fridge when I was growing up. It was great for eggs.
Interestingly, it's still going strong in Japan. It's one of the factors that make it so difficult to be vegetarian/vegan in Japan - even Bread may contain 'shortening' (generally made of lard).
It's a bit strange; you'd think the land of 'harmony' would be having a large vegan population, but nearly everything in the country, from chips to bread have some form of animal product in them.
Northern Italy too. In Emilia everything contains lard, including bread. Town fairs still feature prominently a special kind of bread fried in lard, and it is considered a delicacy. I cannot imagine how vegetarians or Muslims can actually survive here.
Welcome to Ukraine! Lard and Salo [1] are pretty much the main national dishes here. A healthy delicacy that's welcome on any table and is sold on every meat market.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salo_(food)
Interesting, very similar to the Italian Lardo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lardo
Salo is not lard. Salo is cured bacon without the thin strips of meat.
Lard is closer to margarine.
Lard is still very popular here in Romania. It's used extensively for cooking and frying. It's also consumed as a bread spread (salted and topped with onions, paprika etc).
Meat and sausages stored in lard are also a delicacy. The lard preserves and tenderises the meat.
Another relevant podcast on the same topic, this one from Malcolm Gladwell: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/19-mcdonalds-broke-my...
Things have changed a lot since 2012. The Keto/Paleo/LCHF movement has definitely increased demand for new cooking oils, including animal fats. At Whole Foods, I regularly see beef and duck tallow + pork (lard) prominently displayed now.
What do slaughter houses with the left over pig fat these days instead?
As I understand it, the desire of US meatpackers for leaner "healthier" other-white-meat pork led to breeders selecting for leaner pigs. There may actually be less pig fat left over these days.
Of course, this means that your porkchops, pork loin, pork ribs, bacon joints etc. will be leaner and drier and tougher than the ones your grandmother or great-grandmother got from her butcher. I've heard old people remark on this numerous times.
This was not universal around the world, though. This place: http://www.ginzabairin.com/ seemed to indicate that in Japan, flavor and mouth feel were more important than ever-increasing leanness in porkchops...mmmmmmmmmmm
I used to know the answer to that from relatives who had a meat packing plant in town. Tallow, according to the internet. If memory serves, any fat that is mishandled also goes off to make tallow.
One answer is soap. Maybe a decade or two ago, it was possible to buy bars of "soap" that were made from detergent rather than actual soap. A useful advantage was that it didn't produce soap scum in areas with hard water. Zest advertised this: "You're not really clean, till you're Zest-fully clean."
Today, the same brands all list lard and tallow in their ingredients, and the detergent is gone. I'm betting that lard and tallow are cheaper. I use detergent based liquid body wash for this reason, since we have hard water.
Animal fats and soaps are still used in some industrial processes as lubricants, because they're non toxic and cheap. An example is some kinds of sheet metal forming and drawing.
But I doubt those uses can consume the entire production of lard and tallow, which must be quite a lot.
They sell it as lard. I live in the Midwest and I'm really surprised to hear all these people saying lard is hard to find. It's in all the grocery stores here.
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317359
> “[Sinclair definitely wanted people to be grossed out by the entire meat-packing industry," Shurtleff says.
I thought his intention was to show the improve labor conditions?
Lard pie crusts > butter pie crusts. My mom still uses lard (in the Midwest). When I’ve gotten it here in DC, it’s sometimes been a tinge rancid.
Lard is common in the preparation of many dishes of Mexican food (it is known as manteca de cerdo), but it is not as common as it used to be.
We're slaughtering more pigs than ever so what's happening with all the lard? Or are we just raising leaner pigs?
it's also more inclusive to cook fries and pastries and such in a way that jews and muslims can eat them too.
Its their choice to avoid pork. Its not somehow noble to deny yourself something healthy and delicious just because others do.
I used to order from US Wellness Meats a lot and would frequently purchase both their pork lard and beef tallow.
Quality stuff.
Duck fat is also really good for some things like frying potatoes. Relatively hard to find and expensive though.
Duck fat is sublime for frying potatoes and things like Yorkshire puddings. It's also quite easy to procure - all you need to do is get a whole duck, score the skin with a knife, and roast it in the oven (flipping it and draining the fat every hour or so) until you've rendered as much as you can out. Not only do you get a pint of delicious fat that will keep for ages in the freezer, you also get roasted duck meat that you can do whatever you please with (personally, I like to shred them up and eat them with a bit of slaw and hoisin as street tacos).
Do you pass the rendered out duck fat through a filter of some sort? To separate the solids?
I normally buy duck fat from stores, but maybe I should try it.
You can if you want, but I don't usually bother. All of the solids will settle out to the bottom anyway if you let it cool down to room temperature before freezing. If you want to go the filter route, a cheesecloth would likely be good enough.
I can find a farmers market that sells pieces of the skin. A few pieces of dark will be give you a decent amount and a tasty snack.
Pass it through a coffee filter for best results. Do it while the fat is very warm if not somewhat hot.
I use duck fat every day to fry up (locally-raised organic) ground beef. Always get the same level of satisfaction as that of eating a chocolate.
After skimming the comments i was upset it was not about the band Lard.
Lard is pretty much alive and kicking in eastern Europe.
Animal agriculture is one of the top causes of climate change ( https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank ). As we face a ~10 year deadline to avert climate catastrophe, now is not the time to bring back lard.
Is there a Godwin's Law kinda thing for climate change? I mean, you settle down to read a nice discussion about lard and then whammo... climate change.
Climate change affects and is affected by almost every industry on Earth and is the biggest problem facing humanity. It makes sense for it to be discussed on nearly every topic because it is relevant to every topic.
Lurquer’s Law
I'll wager a buck in 10 years you (assuming you don't die from something unrelated) will be here and the world will still be here pretty much as it is today except with a few more whizbang gadgets. And people will still be screaming on the internet about how we're all doomed in 10 years unless we make some annoying irrelevant change like stop eating bacon but something sensible and proven like nuclear power?, nah why bother it won't make a difference.
You cannot use that page alone to make this determination. You need to click through the links, where they show how they derived those numbers. In general, they aren't breaking down sources of emissions, they're breaking down potential solutions with reasonable adoption rates.
E.g. look at this for electric vehicles. https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/transport/electric-vehicl...
The 10 gigatons of reduced CO2 is assuming 16% adoption if EV's. Therefore its not claiming 10 gigatons of CO2 comes from ICE engines.
This is probably a better link for greenhouse gas sources, at least for the USA: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Edit: this view also ignores that lard is mostly thrown away currently. Using it would actually reduce waste. It won't realistically be a problem until the demand for lard outstrips demand for other animal products such as meat and their hides.
It's a tough subject. Most saturated fats either come from animals, tropical plants or are produced synthetically via hydrogenation. The trajectory seems to have been animal to partially hydrogenated plant oil to tropical oils. I don't think palm or coconut oil is going to compare favorably to lard from a purely environmental perspective. The world is burning down the last of the rainforest to make room for palm oil plantations.
The most rational solution is to go back to hydrogenated oil. The partially hydrogenated oils in Crisco and margarine contain trans fats, which are clearly unhealthy and should be avoided. However fully hydrogenated oil does not have this problem. Unfortunately I doubt the consumer is going to be able to appreciate this difference. I lump this solution with nuclear power: clearly the best solution but too scary to be adopted by the public.
>> The most rational solution is to go back to hydrogenated oil.
Or just use olive oil that is high in monounsaturated fats and depends on olive trees that are not amenable to industrial production.
As a bonus, you won't find any research, old or new, be it the purorted result of "lobbying", conspiracies, etc, or not, claiming that olive oil is bad for you.
Olive oil works ok for most purposes but it is fairly expensive and much fussier to work with given the lower sat. fat content. Though it is very stable when pure, olive oil can go rancid fairly quickly when incorporated into processed foods or baked goods. Lard, margarine and tropical oils have the benefit of being shelf stable even when part of some other baked good (e.g. Oreos).
Can we lay off the environmentalist cum vegan morality for a brief period, especially on meat-focused submissions?
And in 10 years when the scam runs out it will again be '10 years until global disaster!'.
There is an overwhelming amount of evidence for human-cause climate change. It is one of the most well-studied effects in the history of science.
If you have enough evidence against it to disprove all of that, I would love to see that, and so would the Nobel prize committee. You'll be rich and famous, so please, post your work.
The whole history of lard is a microcosm of how media sensationalism can mislead the public.
It starts with Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." As the article notes, the book describes how meat-packing workers in turn-of-the-century America would sometimes fall into vats of rendering lard and be incorporated into the final product.
Such stories are, of course, complete fabrication. But more broadly, contemporary sources suggest that The Jungle was largely sensationalism: https://journals.ku.edu/amerstud/article/view/2885/2844
> Journalist Mark Sullivan warned readers of Our Times to avoid "the error, practically universal, of classifying Sinclair and his 'Jungle' with the 'Muckrackers.'" They are "utterly different... in their methods." The best of the muckrakers "confirmed everything," while Sinclair was a "propagandist" whose account of "conditions in the stockyards did not purport to have any more than the loose standard of accuracy that fiction demands for local color and background." Even that was rejected by Ralph Chaplin, a socialist who grew up in the vicinity of the yards and packinghouses and was living there when the novel appeared. In his autobiography Wobbly, Chaplin said of The Jungle, "I thought it a very inaccurate picture of the stockyards district which I knew so well."
Decades later, journalists did another hit job on lard, sensationalizing thin research on nutrition until it turned into a national panic.
With any luck, animal-based meat (as opposed to lab-designed meat or plant-based imitations) in general will suffer a similar fate.