photo #9169713

Until 1911, every American baked good was made with animal fat. Pie crust: lard. Biscuits: lard. Cookies: butter. Cake: butter. Doughnuts: fried in lard. Cornbread: bacon grease in a hot cast iron skillet. Apple pie crust, the most American baked object on earth, made with lard, every time, in every kitchen, for two hundred and fifty years. Every farm had a hog. Every hog made thirty to fifty pounds of lard. The lard went into a stoneware crock under the kitchen counter. It baked the country. Lard from a pasture-raised hog has the second-highest concentration of vitamin D of any food on earth, after cod liver oil. Americans in 1900 ate roughly 30 pounds of it a year. The obesity rate was 3%. Heart disease did not yet have its own category in the federal mortality statistics. The lard was not the problem. In June 1911, Procter and Gamble launched Crisco. Crisco was hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Cottonseed had been a waste product, left to rot in mountains behind every cotton gin in the South. Procter and Gamble had been using it for soap. Their chemists figured out that bubbling hydrogen through it under pressure would turn it into a white solid that resembled, at room temperature, lard. It resembled lard. It was not lard. It was a substance with no nutritional history, no traditional use, and a substantial trans fat load that the FDA would, ninety-six years later, ban from the food supply on the grounds that there is no safe level of dietary intake. In 1911 the FDA did not exist. Procter and Gamble could put anything on the shelf. They put Crisco on the shelf with the claim that it was cleaner, healthier, and more modern than lard. They published a free cookbook with 615 recipes, every one calling for Crisco, and gave it away by the millions. They paid the railway dining cars to use it. They got rabbis to endorse it as kosher. They got doctors to endorse it as easier on digestion, on no clinical evidence whatsoever. Within five years, Americans were buying sixty million cans a year. Within forty, lard was off the supermarket shelf. Margarine repeated the same trick with butter. By 1990 it outsold butter three to one. The federal advice from 1977 onward instructed Americans to make the switch on heart-health grounds. The advice was based on Ancel Keys's Seven Countries Study, which has since been re-analysed and found to have been cherry-picked, methodologically flawed, and in places deliberately manipulated. In the same period, American obesity went from 13% to 42%. Heart disease became the leading cause of death. Type 2 diabetes went from a medical curiosity to a national epidemic. The dietary intervention designed to reduce these conditions correlated, exactly, with their explosion. The pie crust your great-grandmother made was a complete piece of food technology. It ran on the natural waste stream of the family hog. It cost essentially nothing. It produced a pastry no industrial product has bettered. It was thrown out of the American kitchen on the basis of a marketing campaign by a soap company that needed a profitable use for cotton waste. The campaign worked. It is still working, in slightly different form, in the supermarket baking aisle. The lard is still rendered. Leaf lard from a pasture-raised hog is ten dollars a pound online. A pound makes four pie crusts. The American pie was the American pie because of what was in the crust. The crust has been replaced with a chemistry experiment. The pie remembers. You can put it back.