Sama Hoole X-berichten

[fatsnotbad]

Cottonseed was a disposal problem.

Gins dumped it in rivers, until Procter & Gamble hardened the oil, called it Crisco and sold it as the modern answer to lard.

Whey was a disposal problem.

Cheesemakers poured it down drains and fed it to pigs, until somebody dried it, put it in a tub and sold it to gym members.

Skimmed milk was a disposal problem.

It was what remained when the cream went for butter.

It went to the pigs too, until it got a red top and a health claim.

Bran was a disposal problem.

Millers bagged it as animal feed, until Kellogg's boxed it in 1916 and sold it as regularity.

Rapeseed oil was a disposal problem.

Its market was lubricating ships' engines, and that died in 1945.

Canada bred out the worst of it, renamed it canola and called it heart-healthy.

Defatted soya was a disposal problem.

It was what the oil mills had left over, until it was textured, flavoured and sold as a burger.

Beet pulp, citrus peel and oat hulls were disposal problems.

They are now listed on the pack as added fibre.

Every item on that list has been sold to you as a health food.

Every item on that list began as something a factory was paying to get rid of.

Your great-grandmother knew exactly what to do with all of it.

She fed it to the pig and ate the pig.

It made the pig fat, incidentally. Nobody thought that needed a study.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Fred Kummerow told America in 1957 that the fat in margarine was turning up in the arteries of the dead. The government acted on it in 2015. He was 100.

He was a biochemist at the University of Illinois, and what he had done was simple and slightly grim. He got hold of tissue from people who had died of heart disease and looked at what their arteries were made of. They were full of trans fats, a kind of fat that barely exists in nature and came, in 1957, from one place: the hydrogenated vegetable shortening and margarine the country had just been told to eat in place of butter.

He published it in Science. He was 43.

What followed was a career spent being ignored by experts. The oil industry had friends on every committee. His funding grew thin. In 1968 he talked a panel of the American Heart Association into warning about trans fats, and the warning was pulped and reprinted without it after the shortening makers saw a draft.

Kummerow kept working. He kept his laboratory into his nineties. And he kept eating, quite deliberately and in front of journalists, the diet he had been told would kill him. Eggs cooked in butter. Whole milk. Red meat. He had looked inside the arteries himself and he had not found breakfast in there.

In 2009, aged 94, he filed a formal petition asking the Food and Drug Administration to ban artificial trans fats. The law gave the agency 180 days to answer. Four years later it had not, so in 2013, at 98, he sued the United States government.

Three months after that the FDA announced it agreed with him. The ban was confirmed in 2015. The gap between his paper and the decision was 58 years, which is longer than most of the people who ate the margarine got.

He died in 2017, at 102.

And he spent those last years on a second warning, which has been received exactly as the first one was. The problem, he said, was never the cholesterol in the egg. It is the vegetable oil in the fryer, heated and reheated until it oxidises, and then eaten.

On the record so far, that one is due to be acted upon in about 2070.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

In January 1806 the Lewis and Clark expedition climbed a mountain in the rain to buy 300 pounds of fat, and the people who had it did not want to sell.

They were wintering at Fort Clatsop on the Oregon coast, 33 of them, and it had rained on all but 12 days. The woods were full of elk. That was the problem. Winter elk is lean as a fence post, it spoiled in the wet, and the men were living on it boiled, with roots and dried fish, getting thinner and more miserable on full stomachs. Lewis noted that the best food they had was dog and the marrow out of the elk bones, and that the party had been healthier on dog than at any time since they left the buffalo country. Dog is fatty. Marrow is fat. Winter elk is neither.

Then word came up the coast. A whale had washed ashore near a Tillamook village.

On the 5th two men came back from the salt works with a sample of the blubber. Lewis had it cooked and wrote that it was "very pallitable and tender", white like pork fat. By nightfall Clark had a dozen men and two canoes ready.

One more person wanted to go. Sacagawea had carried a baby across a continent for these people, and she told the captains, in Clark's spelling, that "She had traveled a long way with us to See the great waters, and that now that monstrous fish was also to be Seen, She thought it very hard that She Should not be permitted to See either." She went, with the boy, who was not yet one.

It took three days, over a headland so steep they hauled themselves up by roots. On the beach they found a skeleton Clark paced out at 105 feet, and nothing else. The Tillamook had stripped every ounce in under a fortnight and were rendering it in wooden troughs with hot stones, storing the oil in the whale's own bladders and guts. Clark laid out everything he had to trade. They parted with 300 pounds of blubber and a few gallons of oil, grudgingly, like people being asked to sell their savings.

Lewis was overjoyed. He thanked providence for being "much more kind to us than he was to jonah, having sent this monster to be swallowed by us in stead of swallowing of us."

Thirty-three people standing in a forest of lean meat crossed a mountain for fat. A whole village, offered good trade goods, would barely let it go. Nobody on that beach, on either side of the deal, was under any illusion about which part of an animal is the food.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Until about 1970 every kitchen in Britain and America made its own cooking fat, and the skill was so ordinary that nobody noticed it being taken off them.

In Britain the butcher swept the white trimmings off the block and wrapped them in with your joint for nothing. They went into a heavy pan on the lowest gas, and an hour later the whole street knew. The crackling scraps were salted and handed to whichever child was nearest. The fat went through a sieve into a basin, set white by morning, and ran the week: fried bread, chips, roast potatoes, pastry.

In America it was a can by the stove with a strainer in the lid. Every morning the bacon grease went in, and tomorrow's eggs came out of it. On the farm, hog killing filled the cellar with lard until the next November.

In 1942 Washington asked housewives to carry their kitchen grease to the butcher to be made into explosives, and paid them by the pound. No government could run that campaign now. There is nothing in the kitchen to collect.

What those women were making is what you are made of.

Your brain is about 60% fat. The wall of every cell is built from it. Your hormones are built from cholesterol. Vitamins A, D, E and K dissolve in fat and in nothing else. A mother's milk gets half its energy from fat, and nature is not in the habit of poisoning infants.

You carry an organ, the gallbladder, with no job except handling fat. Nobody has one for bran.

And when your body makes fat from scratch, it makes the same two kinds that fill a dripping basin. It has never once made a drop of soybean oil.

Two things ended it. Washington in 1977 and London in 1984 told the public to cut the fat. Then supermarkets began selling meat ready trimmed, so the raw material was removed at a plant before it reached a kitchen. You cannot render what you are not sold.

That fat now goes to a rendering plant, and a good part of it becomes diesel. Rapeseed oil, which spent a century as engine lubricant, is in the frying pan.

We put the dripping in the truck and the engine oil in the children.

Getting it back takes one afternoon.

- Ask a butcher for beef or pork fat trimmings
- Cut small, heavy pan, splash of water, lowest heat
- 2 hours. It should murmur and never smoke
- Strain it hot into a jar
- Salt the scraps and eat them standing up

Fry an egg in it tomorrow and try to remember why anybody stopped.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

Americans of the 1800s ate meat three times a day in quantities that would get a modern dietitian struck off, and their doctors described heart attacks as a rarity.

The folk memory says otherwise. Pioneers lived on cornbread, beans and hardtack, meat was a Sunday luxury, and it is only fat modern America that gorges on red meat and pays for it in the cardiac ward. That is the story underneath every guideline: go back to eating like your ancestors, meaning less meat.

Their ancestors kept diaries.

When Lewis and Clark crossed the continent between 1804 and 1806, the Corps of Discovery ran on game. Clark, 13 July 1805: "We eat an emensity of meat." He gave the daily requirement for the party as 4 deer, or an elk and a deer, or 1 buffalo. When the hunting was good it came to as much as 9lb a man a day, for men hauling boats upstream. The tally for the whole journey runs to 1,001 deer, 375 elk, 227 bison, 43 grizzly bears and 190 dogs, which they bought from the tribes and, Clark excepted, came to prefer.

The expedition carried an emergency food, 193lb of dried portable soup, and the men loathed it. The one time the whole party went down sick was in September 1805, on the far side of the Rockies, when the game ran out and the Nez Perce kindly fed them dried salmon and camas root. The captains' journals spend days on the consequences. Sacagawea, about 17 and carrying a baby on her back, ate what the soldiers ate the whole way there and the whole way home.

The men who supplied the fur trade lived the same way on wages: the Hudson's Bay Company's standard daily ration for a working man on the plains was 8lb of fresh buffalo meat.

Settled America ate the same way with cutlery. Pork was the national staple, salted down by the barrel. By the 1840s Cincinnati was packing so many hundreds of thousands of hogs a year that the country called it Porkopolis, and after 1865 the Union Stock Yards in Chicago did the same for beef on a scale the world had not seen. Frances Trollope, who spent two years living in Cincinnati and never forgave it for the pigs in the streets, reported in 1832 that ham and beefsteaks appeared "morning, noon and night", alongside an extraordinary amount of bacon.

When Wilbur Atwater, the founding father of American nutrition science, ran the first proper dietary surveys in the 1890s, he found the average American eating 147lb of meat a year. The average Italian ate 24. Atwater found labourers having beefsteak for breakfast and put the vigour of the American workman down to it. All of it was cooked in lard, butter and tallow, because there was nothing else to cook in.

And William Osler, the most celebrated physician in the country, writing the standard medical textbook in 1892, described angina as a rare disease.

The 20th century is where the lines cross. Beef eaten per head peaked in 1976 and has since fallen by about 40%. Butter and lard collapsed. Vegetable oil went from nothing to the biggest single item in the nation's fat supply, and chicken breast replaced the steak. Americans, in other words, did what they were asked. They followed the advice for more than 40 years, more faithfully than any population has ever followed a diet.

Frances Trollope would not recognise a single thing on the modern plate. She would not recognise the people sitting in front of it either.



Mike

 

[fatsnotbad]

School lunch, as designed by the US government:

- 1946: Meat, potatoes, 2 teaspoons of butter, half a pint of whole milk. Written into federal law.
- Obese children, first national count: 4%

- 1981: Budgets cut. The USDA tries to class ketchup as a vegetable.
- Obese children: 5%

- 1995: Fat capped at 30% of calories. Pizza Hut and Taco Bell open inside the cafeteria.
- Obese children: 11%

- 2011: Congress rules the tomato paste on a pizza a vegetable. The following year whole milk is banned and fat-free chocolate milk approved.
- Obese children: 17%

- 2026: Whole milk allowed back after 14 years. Breakfast is still cereal, juice and a muffin.
- Obese children: 20%. 1 in 9 diagnosed with ADHD. 1 in 3 teenagers prediabetic.

Every one of those changes was announced as an improvement.

The 1946 lunch was written because too many boys had failed their army medicals for malnutrition. It fixed that.

Today 77% of young Americans are unfit to serve, and the leading reason is their weight.



Mike