Who Killed Lard? (2012)
npr.org
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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.
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.
Of course it could just be that they are different places.
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.
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.
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.
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
Lard, aged cheese and mustard on a slice of rugbrød is still a favorite of mine.
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)
I retract my hypothesis.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All that aside, yeah, Dr Rudi probably would say that because he's a satirical caricature.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Somebody should do this. Make little packets like the ones for butter.
Sense must be prevailing in the US much faster than in the UK then - many people here still think butter is bad for them.
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...
I'm going to have to get/make some. (I suspect my wife won't be happy).
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/06/salo-ukraine-n...
I haven't had a chance to try to Ukrainian style solid fat!
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/300346570
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.
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.
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.
I’m a Belgian talking so maybe I’m biased.
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.
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.
My favorite joke about Belgium is that the world's largest friterie/frituur is on the border between Holland and France.
You can get regular lard frozen at Meny.
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.
In other words, there was a lot of argument from authority that precipitated this, not just corporate profit seeking (which was also significant).
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :-)
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.
Also works well with the sous vide.
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.
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.
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.
lard has no flavor
Look for fresh, and well-packaged lard.
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 guess this was widespread. In the US it was maybe more prevalent before refrigeration. I remember it being in a documentary about colonial times.
Should be caramel colored with some bits in it, sold in a bag, and very, very cheap!
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.
Some people, but not all by any means. In the Mediterrannean, for example, olive oil was the shortening of choice since around 6000 BC.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Here's instructions on how to render your own lard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9KXFgXQG70
https://www.meijer.com/shop/en/pantry/baking/sugar/ch-superf...
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.
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!".
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.
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 :(
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 have never seen lard that I know of aside from that.
And, yes, I have a tub of lard in my pantry.
1) http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9022063/ns/us_news-life/t/icon-or-...
Here in France lard is used a lot, most replaced by butter (and olive oil in the South) in recipes.
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.
When it comes to frying I prefer anything other than lard. It's only slightly above used motor oil.
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
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.
Lard is closer to margarine.
Meat and sausages stored in lard are also a delicacy. The lard preserves and tenderises the meat.
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
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.
I thought his intention was to show the improve labor conditions?
Quality stuff.
I normally buy duck fat from stores, but maybe I should try it.
Pass it through a coffee filter for best results. Do it while the fat is very warm if not somewhat hot.
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.