The use of lard in cooking is slowly being rehabilitated but the cultural shock of the stuff hasn’t diminished in the slightest.
There I was at the store buying just two products: lard and salt. They sat on the black conveyor belt awaiting checkout at the store. The guy behind me — something like this happens every time I buy lard — asked incredulously: “what are you going to make with that?”
So my routine lecture began. I use lard for making biscuits. Sometimes I fry those lard biscuits in lard, and these I call “hot puffs” and eat them with honey. Lard is essential for pie crusts. It makes great chocolate chip cookies. I can’t imagine frying potatoes in anything else. It is excellent for chicken. Pancakes and waffles are never better than when made with lard. Popcorn not fried in lard (air pop? please!) is noticeably inferior. Cakes are wonderful with lard. The refried beans you eat are not authentic if they do not include lard. All that amounts to nearly a bucket per week of lard use. I admit it.
All the while as I’m giving this list, the interrogator is looking me up and down and check whether I look fat and unhealthy, with a slight upturned lip of disgust. Look, I really don’t know if lard is unhealthy as compared with vegetable oil or butter or peanut oil or some other poor substitute. I do know that when I fry with lard as opposed to vegetable oil, there is more lard remaining in the fryer, from which I conclude that less is in the food. And don’t even talk to me about that fake lard product called “shortening.”
I also know that lard has a very high smoke point, so it is cleaner and makes less of a mess. Also, lard, which is nothing but rendered pig fat, has been a staple of the Western diet for many centuries. I see no reason why I must automatically adopt the widespread prejudice against it and regard it as a poor-person food. Nor do I trust what some government expert says. As regards dieticians, you can find one around who will endorse or condemn anything you want. And do I need to point out that Crisco has recently come under fire for its trans fat content – a problem that lard does not have?
What I do find interesting is that the campaign against lard began during and after World War II, when lard was put on the list of rationed items in the United States and England. Every government intervention is an opportunity for some private company to come along with some substitute. Sure enough, this was when margarine and shortening began to be pushed on the American diet. Somehow, butter made a solid comeback many decades later. But lard somehow never did. I can only credit a very effective marketing campaign by the shortening producers.
Are we going to let government’s wartime central planners control our lives 70 years after the fact? I don’t think so. Not in my case anyway, regardless of what my fellow shoppers say. Sometimes embracing a life of freedom involves taking risks and paying the price. You can have my lard when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.
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I really like the spirit of this post. I’ve recently been adding alot of animal fat to my diet for health reasons, contrary to the nutritional Powers That Be.
However, lard that is “hydrogenated,” as the jar in the picture indicates, does very likely contain trans fats, which are unnatural and unhealthy substances and worthy of being avoided. You’d do better to use unprocessed lard. That jar also contains BHA, a preservative whose safety is controversial.
Hydrogenated is bad when it is only carried partially to completion. Vegetable oil is called “trans-fat” because unsaturated vegetable oils are only partially rendered into saturated fats. It has to do with the level of bonding concerning the particular molecule.
Anyway, a fully hydrogenated oil is essentially an oil that has been rendered into a solid state; it has been fully saturated. If you look at the wiki for Lard, it comes out to be something like 5% trans fat per unit of mass for what is sold commerically.
A quick search seems to confirm this – I had always been taught just to scan for “hydrogenated” in the ingredients, but (perhaps counterintuitively) full hydrogenation produces less trans fats than partial hydrogenation. Good news, then, although I still have concerns about BHA. Thanks for clarifying.
https://www.prairiepridepork.com/leaflard.php
Much better for pastries and crusts and no trans fats… Nothing beats leaf lard
Agree with Pamela. Nothing wrong with lard, but try to avoid hydrogenated…
I surely do appreciate the spirit of your post, too, Mr Tucker. Raw milk is in the same category of a decent, healthy food that has been outlawed by central planners. I finally found a way to enjoy it and benefit from it, but I had to buy a cow! Or a least a cow share.
Since fat is where an animal stores its toxins, and there are TONS of toxins in hog production these days (I’m from Iowa, and I’ve seen these places), please do find a source of lard from pastured / organically fed hogs. It’s out there, but it’s not easy to find.
Jeff, you are one of my heroes. HOWEVER, I think you meant to say that lard is a “staple” and not a “stable” of the Western diet. Kudos for the article (otherwise), which is right up my alley both economically and dietarily speaking.
I agree with Pamela as well. Today’s version of what was perfectly fine yesterday simply MUST be free-range, organic, unprocessed. GMO and depleted soil has made this so. Spend a little more; lard is still cheap, baby!
Christy, tell me about it! I buy raw milk and make my own kefir. I found the shop and even met the farmers there. They use A2 cows and everything, just like it should be. And of course lately they’ve been getting harassed by the FDA. The same goons who said “AOK” to Vioxx are telling us that store-bought milk, which is truly disgusting, is fine while A2 raw milk, which is a nearly perfect food, is suitable for consumption only by pets. Of course our best interests are all they care about! Sure!
One of my dad’s favorite “when I was a kid” anecdotes:
“Did you know that Oreos used to be made with lard and not vegetable shortening.”
I swoon every time I think of this.
To the folks commenting about trans fat, that comes from partial hydrogenation; full hydrogenation doesn’t produce it.
Some home made stuff:
http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B91XZHh8ZBsfMjFkMGNkY2ItZWM4My00NWQ2LWFkYTYtZGM4YTZmYjIxMjBk&hl=en
I grew up on lard, and I weigh 145 lb, which is pretty skinny for a height of about 6 feet.
Nice, very nice. Hog-sticking (pig-sticking – not sure which term stands better, both from a dictionary) had a long tradition in the former Czechoslovakia and was a means of quality food supply for the whole family in the era of socialism before ’89, due to uncertainty and shortage of common meat products. Lard was used almost for everything instead of vegetable oil. This changed dramatically since then and only few use it for cooking today, even if it is cheap ($ 2 for 2.2 lbs). The Western diet had a very strong impact.
Somehow, butter made a solid comeback many decades later.
I’m sure that America’s long history of milk socialism can explain how butter kept its reputation whereas lard did not.
A surprisingly large number of the really bad Supreme Court cases in which the US government generously granted itself plenary authority to control the economy (and thus everyone’s lives) arose in the context of milk socialism.
“You know why restaurant food, my food tastes better than the stuff you make at home? BUTTER, lots and lots of butter.”
~ Anthony Bourdain (roughly paraphrasing from “Kitchen Confidential”)
Choice, my friend, choice; people do things because they choose to because they like it. Simple.
Not too mention Julia Child’s promotion of butter…
Good job, Jeff… you’re absolutely right… beans just aren’t frijoles fritas without manteca!
check out the movie “Fat Head” (www.fathead-movie.com).
it does a good job of showing that saturated fats aren’t the enemy and how various government interventions have influenced food.
I’ve been told that Popeyes red beans and rice are about 50% lard.
Conclusion: lard is awesome.
Saturated fats are totally fine – lipid hypothesis was wrong. And yes, lard is okay.
This article has made me so happy, nearly to the point of tears! I’m a Southern boy and all I can say is:
PIG FAT! YEAH BABY YEAH!
It is so funny how libertarian minded people come to the same conclusions on stuff like this even though topics like whether saturated fat is unhealthy at their surface don’t seem to involve any issues of statism or freedom.
I just turned 30 and have always eaten whatever I wanted. I never once gave a thought about my diet other than a subconscious belief that “meat/fat/sugar = bad, grains = good” (stupid food pyramid!). Well about 10 days ago I decided I need to lose 20 pounds and I knew the high protein/low carb diets were probably the fastest way to do it (several friends have had remarkable success). So I did some research and ended up reading the book Protein Power by the Eades. I read it in one sitting and had a total epiphany. I now consider the mainstream consensus that a high-carb/low-fat diet is healthy just about as ridiculous as the mainstream consensus that human CO2 emissions will lead to catastrophic global warming, or the mainstream consensus that Keynesianism is the path to prosperity.
This group has an extraordinarily rare ability to see through the onslaught of corporatist/statist propaganda.
Don’t forget that you can use lard as a hair dressing, and with that and your Mises Store Rothbard-style bowtie, you can do a mean impersonation of Alfalfa from the Little Rascals. Stylish, and how!
I love lard! I practically drink the stuff. It accounts for over half of my caloric intake. Lard is among the healthiest fats, while vegetable oils are poisons. For all things nutrition, see Kurt Harris’s site, I can’t recommend it enough (bonus: he’s a principled Austro-libertarian). If you reject the government’s nutritional wisdom, you might want to join the Paleo-libertarian group.
I agree with the others that you should find pastured, organic lard. Try eatwild.com to find a local provider.
Lard is great for deep frying – makes the best English style fish and chips.
The Reverend Jeffrey Tucker of the “Praise the Lard Ministries” ……
I heard that one great and greatly under-appreciated maxim in health is that “everyone is different”. That being admitted I can’t help but believe that lard is not universally good and what really counts is the individual body -not what goes into it. For some people, fat can come primarily from nuts and milk in general (raw or processed) can be poison to people. Supposedly it is due to some inherent predisposition of the human body to nuts (easy to harvest, easy to prepare) and the human (adult) inability to process the proteins of cow milk (casein -an allergen).
Yes. Praise lard and the freedom to eat copious amounts of it.
Good cornbread is impossible to make without at least 2 tablespoons per pan. Triple or Quadruple the number of eggs your recipe calls for also.
This theme goes hand-in-hand with the paleo-nutrition camp (which someone linked to Kurt Harris’ site earlier). And you will find a large contingent of libertarian-minded people in that camp. I think it has something to do with the fact that the government has been telling us our nutrition facts for about half a century now – and we’ve been getting rapidly unhealthier for a similar amount of time.
Jeff, also note that lard is one of the very best sources of Vitamin D, which provides myriad health benefits. The caveat is that this is only the case if the pig has had access to sunshine, so this is another good reason to opt for the pastured stuff.
For further reading on this topic, I’d also recommend Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. He also points out the the lipid hypothesis (i.e., that fats are intrinsically unhealthy) is in fact not well supported, and has been coming under much fire lately.
(Pollan is certainly no libertarian, but I’ve found that the topic of food tends to make strange bedfellows.)
I just started dinking with lard. Damn does it make some good biscuits.
Another great lard recipe from “My Cousin Vinny”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYoYPJ5uwFg
Hey – if you like pork fat, all the power to you! Other than duck fat, it’s may be one of the greatest things about being a meatitarian. But any oil that is “hydrogenated” (partially or otherwise) is a trans fat – you can thank the FDA for that obscure nomenclature that hides what you’re really eating (in the case of the photo attached to this story anyways).
Of course you should be free to fry your potatoes in anything you choose. But if you want good fried potatoes, put them into olive oil, and squeeze a lemon over them first.
On fully hydrogenated oil products:
“The resulting product may be trans-free, but it will still contain chemical residues, hexanes and many dangerous breakdown products full of free radicals.”
http://www.westonaprice.org/Interesterification.html
I’m a big fan of natural lard and animal fat in general, though.
lardo di colonnata a lard-sandwich would last a marble-worker in italy the whole day of manual labour. delicious.
http://bit.ly/d6vH5F
Set outside tubs of lard, butter, and margerine and observe to which ones the flies come. They know what’s natural or not.
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