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The Forgotten, Fascinating Saga Of Crisco; It has been a long strange trip.

 
 
Reply Tue 10 Jan, 2012 12:26 pm
The Forgotten, Fascinating Saga Of Crisco
January 9, 2012
by Dan Charles - NPR

It has been a long strange trip.

Our friends over at Planet Money produced a delightful podcast last Friday called "Who Killed Lard?" They finger a corporate perp: Proctor and Gamble's brilliant marketing campaign for the original Crisco, an alternative to lard that went on sale in 1911. "It's all vegetable! It's digestible!," it proclaimed.

The Planet Money podcast doesn't pursue the Crisco story beyond those early years, but it's actually full of surprising twists, right up to the present day.

Crisco, you may recall, was made from partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, a process that turned cottonseed oil (and later, soybean oil) from a liquid into a solid, like lard, that was perfect for baking and frying. Unfortunately, these wonderful qualities depended on "trans fats" that have since been implicated in heart disease. As a result, partially hydrogenated oils have fallen out of favor in the food industry. (They aren't even found in any Crisco products anymore.)

But did you know that in the 1980s, health activists actually promoted oils containing trans fats? They considered such oils a healthy alternative to the saturated fats found in palm oil, coconut oil, or beef fat. In 1986, for instance, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), described Burger King's switch to partially hydrogenated oils as "a great boon to Americans' arteries."

David Schleifer, a scholar at Columbia University's Center on Medicine as a Profession, lays out the story in the January issue of the journal Technology and Culture (and, more briefly, here). According to Schleifer, pressure from these activists was crucial in persuading fast-food chains to drop palm oil or beef fat in favor of partially hydrogenated soybean oil.

In the mid-1990s, CSPI and other health activists changed their tune as scientific studies turned up evidence that trans fats increased artery-clogging forms of cholesterol.

This led to yet another odd twist, which Schleifer explores in a separate article. Big food companies mobilized to debunk this claim, funding a study of their own. They expected it to demonstrate that trans fats had no such harmful effect.

To their dismay, the study confirmed the earlier results. The companies felt compelled to look, once again, for different, healthier, oils. The potato chip industry, for instance, went for a version of sunflower oil with higher levels of oleic acid. As Schleifer puts it: "Industry meddles with science, but science meddles with industry."
 
Joe Nation
 
  1  
Reply Tue 10 Jan, 2012 01:31 pm
It's only meddling when business dosen't get the answer they want from Science.

Joe(We withdraw the question!)Nation
0 Replies
 
ossobuco
 
  1  
Reply Tue 10 Jan, 2012 01:35 pm
Actually, that's "lard" from the hydrogenated stuff in the grocery store. Lard rendered by you from pork fat with no added hydrogenating is said (somewhere, I don't have the link now but may have posted it before) is said to be less saturated and therefore better for you than butter.
Joe Nation
 
  4  
Reply Tue 10 Jan, 2012 01:37 pm
@ossobuco,
ossobuco wrote:

Actually, that's "lard" from the hydrogenated stuff in the grocery store. Lard rendered by you from pork fat with no added hydrogenating is said (somewhere, I don't have the link now but may have posted it before) is said to be less saturated and therefore better for you than butter.

Hence the reason my grandmother poured off the bacon, pork roast and pork chop drippings into a large container which was always hanging on the side of her wood stove and later gently heated and then strained them to get rid of any crunchy cracklings, leaving behind, when re-cooled, a creamy white mass of easily meltable, wonderful to fry with, pork lard.

She used to make these incredible fried doughballs, we called them donut holes but they were the size of a tennis ball, which, crunchy and meaty as they were, always got smeared with some butter and jam on cold days in Coventry, Connecticut.

She only cooked on that wood burning stove.
Didn't have inside water for the kitchen until the mid-1960's when she had already reached 85 years old.
Used an outhouse until a year before she passed on.
Ate everything ever made on godsgreenearth.
Joe(only lived to be 101)Nation
ossobuco
 
  1  
Reply Tue 10 Jan, 2012 02:14 pm
@Joe Nation,
Well, here's a thread on it, not that it'll make anyone much wiser re what the health people say, but some interesting posts -
http://able2know.org/topic/144628-1
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Tue 10 Jan, 2012 02:45 pm
@ossobuco,
Laffs with lard. Sorry about the sound quality. The lard laffs start at 11.50, but the rest is pretty good too.


edgarblythe
 
  2  
Reply Tue 10 Jan, 2012 02:52 pm
As early as the 1950s, Johanna Budwig, of Germany, fought against hydrogenated oil. In recent times, that poisonous stuff went out of favor. But, if you read labels you will see that hydrogenated oil is still present in many of the most popular processed foods. I personally eat butter, red meat without trimming off all the fat and I fry my eggs in bacon grease, quite often. But I also eat flax seeds, walnuts, berries and a wide variety of other kinds of foods to balance it out.
0 Replies
 
farmerman
 
  2  
Reply Tue 10 Jan, 2012 02:57 pm
@Joe Nation,
Quote:
She used to make these incredible fried doughballs, we called them donut holes but they were the size of a tennis ball, which, crunchy and meaty as they were, always got smeared with some butter and jam on cold days in Coventry, Connecticut

These are the ever popular PUNCHKY, familiar to Eastern European cooks. A punchky is a confection with many varied uses. They can be eaten, used as carp bait, can be frozen and used as a sub-lethal missile, and, in a pinch, Partially macerated PUNCHKIES can seal large airholes in your cabin better than oakum.

0 Replies
 
ossobuco
 
  1  
Reply Tue 10 Jan, 2012 03:18 pm
@Joe Nation,
Wonderful..
0 Replies
 
ossobuco
 
  1  
Reply Tue 10 Jan, 2012 03:34 pm
@izzythepush,
A challenge for me to get, my hearing, his mannerisms, the dialect.. skipped along to 11:00. Ooof. You Brits...
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Tue 10 Jan, 2012 04:05 pm
@ossobuco,
There's a terrible hum on it, and the Middlesbrough accent can be a bit tricky at first.
0 Replies
 
 

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