Issue #041, June 15, 2012

How Lard Got a Bad Rap

Marketing impacts our lives far more than we suspect, and usually not for the better. The people in my generation grew up thinking that relief was spelled R-O-L-A-I-D-S and that Coke was the real thing. It's frightening how powerfully advertising has swayed our basic beliefs, especially when it comes to the foods we eat.

According to Tyler Graham and Drew Ramsey, MD, authors of the book, The Happiness Diet: A Nutritional Prescription for a Sharp Brain, Balanced Mood, and Lean, Energized Body, lard was used as a cooking fat for centuries and worked extremely well. Many families kept a hog or two that they butchered in the fall for ham, sausage and lard for both soap making and cooking. But lard fell out of favor in the 1870s when Proctor & Gamble began experimenting with cottonseed oil, a waste product of cotton farming.

Before it is processed, cottonseed oil is cloudy red and has a bitter taste because it contains gossypol, a phytochemical that is toxic and can cause infertility, organ damage and paralysis, among other things. But Proctor & Gamble scientists discovered a chemical process to convert cottonseed oil into a new creamy white substance that resembled lard.

They pursued a marketing campaign unprecedented at the time, hiring the first full-time marketing agency and sending samples of their converted cottonseed oil – called Crisco – to grocers, restaurants, nutritionists and home economists. They passed out doughnuts fried in Crisco on the streets and also offered a free cookbook to women who purchased Crisco.

Because copywriters back then could make all kinds of claims in advertising, even if it wasn't true, Crisco was touted as healthier than animal fats for digestion and marketed it as “pure vegetable oil,” which made it sound like it ranked right up there with carrots for good eating. Nothing could have been further from the truth. By 1948, heart disease was officially recognized as a disease for the first time by the International Classification of Diseases, and infertility and other health problems were on the rise.

Considering the state of health of many people today, maybe it's time to forgo the modern “healthy” ways of cooking and return to the simpler foods our bodies were meant to handle, including the much-maligned and misunderstood lard.

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You Can Build a Chicken Tractor