Lard

You can find canola and olive oil in most American kitchens today. But when I was growing up you could find lard as the primary cooking oil ingredient in most kitchens. I watched both of my grandmothers and my mother dip their hands in the lard bucket and mix it with biscuits and cake batters or throw a glob into an iron skillet to fry some chicken or pork chops. Lard was rendered from pork and other animal fats, and we never considered that it was unhealthy for us.

A century ago, Procter and Gamble came out with a product called Crisco shortening that used chemical processes to change vegetable oils to solids. They advertises that this product was a better choice than traditional animal fats, so households began to use the new product over their traditional lard. Then in the 1990s, when the medical establishment joined the Crisco marketers to hammer on saturated fats as the culprits in heart disease, lard’s banishment was complete.

The truth is that Crisco and other early hydrogenated oils were made from cottonseed—a waste product of the cotton ginning process that was fed to cattle. However, it was goodbye to lard because it was not healthy for you—or so the mass marketers told us.  

Today American households use many different kinds of cooking oils, but they shun palm oil. However, palm oil is consumed worldwide more than any other oil. The next largest consumed oil is soybean followed by rapeseed while cottonseed is number seven followed closely by coconut and olive oil (Vegetable oils consumption worldwide 2022/23 | Statista).

I watched the preparation of palm oil many times while living in Cote d’Ivoire. Palm kernels are cracked to remove the shells and cooked over an open fire. Then women make a mush with a wooden hand carved mortar and pestle and extract the oil. Palm oil is the most widely used oil on the continent of Africa. However, villagers in the Sahel, where we lived in Burkina Faso, did not have enough rainfall for palm trees to grow. Their main source of oil was extracted from the kernels of the shea tree nut.

In the past 50 years as the Sahara has marched southward each year, villagers have razed the countryside in the Sahel in search of firewood for cooking. The landscape is practically bare of all trees except the shea tree because of its cooking and medicinal values. The shea tree is very hardy and does not require any special nourishment or attention. Every part of this tree that is indigenous to Burkina Faso and surrounding areas is useful.

The production of shea butter provides economic sustenance to rural women who do not have many ways to make money for their families. In most recent years, shea butter exported from Burkina Faso has increased as it has been used in the cosmetic industry in Europe and North America.

Over the years, saturated fat found in lard has garnered a bad reputation as an artery-clogging fat. However, recent research has shown that saturated fat is not the artery-clogging danger as we once thought.

The main constituents of lard are monounsaturated fatty acids, particularly oleic acid. These are the same fats that are found in olives and avocados!!

I don’t know how many times I have read how avocados are full of “good fat” and healthy for you. Our family regularly eats loads of olives and avocados. So, why not lard? I think my grandmothers and my mother were much smarter than we gave them credit. Way to go Mama Downs, Grandmama and Mimi!

Wonder how many more of our southern comfort foods that we shunned over the years are actually healthy for our bodies?

Fried green tomatoes. Country ham. Cheese straws. Hush puppies. Whole hog barbecue. Fried okra. Giblet gravy. Deviled eggs. Biscuits and gravy. Am I making you hungry?!