Published: June 11, 2009 12:11 am      

Mark Maynard: Even lard can make a comeback: 6/11/09

It was bound to happen. Some of the foodies who tell us what’s good for us and what’s not have decided that lard, the mostly reviled fat from a pig, is being embraced again.

OK, well, at least it’s a little more accepted.

Paula Deen lovers should rejoice.

Maybe she is on the right track after all.

Some of the culinary thinkers are saying lard apparently wasn’t as unhealthy as we were first led to believe. The four-letter pork product is ready for a comeback after being bashed for most of the last century.

Your mother probably didn’t use it, but your great-grandmother surely did. It has been on the shelf for awhile.

Lard received some harsh treatment in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel “The Jungle,” which talked about the industry and claimed that workers sometimes tumbled into big vats of the stuff.

“Sometimes they would be overlooked for days, until all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard,” Sinclair wrote.

Those chilling words didn’t do much for lard’s future, as you can imagine.

That opened the door for a new product — Crisco, introduced by soap-maker Procter & Gamble to supermarket shelves in 1911. Crisco was entered to the world through a massive marketing campaign that denigrated animal fats as unsophisticated and unsafe, and proclaimed its own offering as modern and healthy. It would soon be the go-to cooking fat for housewives everywhere.

Lard became a buzzword for bad, like calling someone “a tub of lard” or nicknaming a heavy friend “Lardo.”

Uncle Sam drafted animal fats during World War II, rationing it for the glycerin used in shells and bullets. Vegetable shortening consumption really took off in the 1960s and beyond, as fat was demonized as the chief cause of skyrocketing heart attack rates.

The public wanted new low-fat alternatives. The pork producers, for their part, used selective breeding to make over the familiar, potbellied pig frame into something that looks more like a bulldog and whose meat resembles, according to the National Pork Producers Council itself, chicken.

The “other white meat” left little room for the well-marbled, pink variety — and little remaining lard. The annual availability of rendered pork fat dropped from 14.4 pounds per person in 1940 to 3 pounds per person in 1975, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. By 2005, it stood at 1.5 pounds.

But books from foodies like Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” (2008) and Gary Taubes’ “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (2007) make the case that much of the science behind the anti-fat crusades was, at best, inconclusive. In 2001, nutritionists at the Harvard School of Public Health reviewed the body of research and found that the type of fat matters more than the total amount.

In simple terms, the study lumped trans and saturated fats into the bad category, and monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats into the good. That’s meaningful for lard, because rendered pork fat contains nearly a quarter less saturated fat than butter, more than double the monounsaturated and nearly four times the polyunsaturated fat, according to the USDA.

And lard contains no trans fats, now universally considered dangerous.

Cooks have been talking about the virtues of lard for about 15 years and how superior this totally natural fat is for frying and pastries. But that lard name still carries negative connotations.

It seems like if you wait long enough though, everything that is bad for you eventually becomes good again — maybe even lard.

Go figure.

MARK MAYNARD can be reached at mmaynard@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2648.