But it is an IMO superior (health and taste) fat for cooking and its absolutely crazy that people don't gobble it up, instead opting for canola, palm, safflower, etc.
Tallow making: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1191748243429957632
(Note that this here is scrap cuttings and the leaf fat, around the kidneys, is more ideal for making large quantities, but is also often thrown away!)
Tallow slow-fried fries: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1215090611264610304
That seemed to happen rather quickly, at least once the evidence became overwhelming. The FDA was only a few years behind major cities like San Francisco, though some European countries were way ahead of the curve.
Red meat and dairy have significant amounts of trans fats. You're still probably better off with vegetable fats if you can help it, at least where partially hydrogenated oils are banned.
Then again, trans fats isn't the addictive high-margin industrial product... :(
Making a big show of banning one while letting the other run wild is very bad optics.
(Then again, I'm not sure how we might even go about curtailing sugars, they're just way too embedded in our culture.)
I get that, but I don't think the empirical science supports a claim that sugar is more costly than trans fats from a public health perspective; and certainly not that it's 1000x worse. In any event, the effects of sugar are indirect and complex. For example, AFAIU a high sugar but low calorie diet isn't particularly bad for you. By contrast, trans fats have a simple, clear, and substantial causal relation to arteriosclerosis.
50 years of prescribing partially hydrogenated oils and low-fat foods was based on poor, incomplete, and sloppy science. Going forward maybe we should instead base public policy on sound, concrete, reproducible science and straight-forward regulations. Not everything needs to be fixed with government mandates, and usually shouldn't without clear reasons.
Natural trans fats [1] are made by bacteria in the rumen, and are rather different than manufactured trans fats created from seed oils with hydrogen gas and catalysts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_linoleic_acid - "The biological activity of CLA was noted by researchers in 1979 who found it to inhibit chemically induced cancer in mice [...] In 2008, the United States Food and Drug Administration categorized CLA as generally recognized as safe (GRAS)."
> You're still probably better off with vegetable fats if you can help it, at least where partially hydrogenated oils are banned.
Most polyunsaturated oils are deodorized ("refined"), so customers don't realize they're eating rancid oil.
I bought unrefined grape seed oil years ago. Didn't know what to do with the obviously-rancid oil. Now I would give it to my father, so he could use it to help start his barbecue's charcoal.
Electricity and the lightbulb depleted demand for candles (and tallow).
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.096205135&view=1u...
My citation for hogs... my father was a breeder of fine, pedigreed Duroc-Jersey swine. He literally lived through (and helped lead) the switch from selecting for maximum lard production to selecting for minimum back-fat.
By the time I was cleaning barns after school, we were well into the "minimize fat" era. Which in my opinion has been taken too far, as pork now is often very dry. A little marbling would go a long way.
(Aside: I vividly recall one night, near the end of the second cup of coffee, a nasty differential equations pset that was kicking my ass. I remember to this day saying to myself: You have two options here: a) wrap your mind around diffeq, and get that engineering degree, or b) go home and clean hog barns for the rest of your life. I chose option 'a'. Powerful motivation.)
Same for pork. In the 1940's, lard was highly valuable, and pigs were bred to maximize lard production.