Who Killed Lard?
February 4th, 2012Via: NPR:
At the Lard Exoneration Dinner, Bubby’s owner Ron Silver says its time to bring it back. Lard is showing up at high end restaurants, drizzled on potatoes and layered onto coal-fired pizzas. Silver says it’s intimidating after 100 years of bad press to put the word back on the menu, but he’s embracing it.
“I’m proud of it. I’m waving my lard flag,” he says.
Just try the pie crusts, he says. Then decide.
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Upton Sinclair made up all that stuff in The Jungle:
“He did not even pretend to have actually witnessed the horrendous conditions he ascribed to Chicago packinghouses, nor to have verified them, nor to have derived them from any official records.”
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/ideas-and-consequences-of-meat-and-myth/
we make our own lard from fatback we get at a local butcher shop – the stuff is _amazing_.
this coming from an ex-long-term vegan.
i’ve often wondered, in my time since losing the label, why lard was always so repulsive to me before. it’s like that with almost everyone i know; use of the word itself is scandalous…
thanks for the link.
by the way, it’s not just amazing for cooking. it’s the best intensive moisturizer for dish-hands, dry elbows/feet, etc… it’s like magic when you put it on your skin or use it as a carrier for essential oils and herbs.
we also used it daily on our jersey’s udders when she was in milk… much better than any petroleum balm on the market.
A couple weeks ago we finally got around to rendering the lard that’s been in the freezer for a couple years. I’m still amazed at how great it is for cooking. Americans in particular have really been fooled about fats (and anything meat related).
The demonization of both butter fat and rendered animal fats that continues to this very day began in earnest during the rise of the industrial food conglomerates between the first and second world war, by way of improving the market share of their newfangled Crisco and margarine.
Decades later, “better living through science” and all the pseudo-religious scientism used to entrain the “civilized” mind against generations worth of cultural foodways — and the embedded wisdom therein — remains an egregious insult to both mind and body.
Industrial disease, anyone?
Oh yes, by way of walking the talk, I neglected to mention that we render lard from our very own hand-raised pigs & tallow from animals pasture-raised by the same farmer where we source our raw milk right here in the village.
No hormones. No drugs. No processed feeds. Just grass, sunshine and all those old school methods supposedly replaced by the illogical barbarism of modern science that has invaded the western mind.