Perhaps helped by the Viz satirical advertising campaign "They're happy because they eat lard" http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wzLK7wZor1g/TnFE3vg4JrI/AAAAAAAAAE...

For those of us who don't buy into the £5 jars of duck/goose fat, lard makes for exceptional roast potatoes :)

I've never bought a jar of goose or duck fat. We will just cook a goose or duck and collect the fat afterwards. The product isn't as pure, but you're getting a whole, tasty meal out of it, so it's much more economical that way.

I have been cooking with lard for about 20 years. It's just something that my family never stopped using. I learned to cook from my father and his grandmother, and she always asserted the superiority of lard over Crisco, even going so far as to setup blind taste tests (that 85 year old woman was more of a scientist than most of the scientists I know today). Growing up in a rural area, it was readily available in all of the grocery stores. Even though most of the stores here in Alexandria carry it, they usually only have it in small tubs, about the size of a large tub of sour cream. The stores back home had it in bulk-sized canisters of all the same sizes that Crisco came in.

I'm also quite a fan of collecting bacon fat. Filter it through a paper towel first and it makes a wonderful oil for cooking eggs and sauteing vegetables. I've been known to cook an entire pack of bacon in the morning just to have the oil available for making dinner. Having cold, cooked bacon available in the fridge for the next week is a nice bonus.

It's a prominent side dish in Ukrainian cuisine (smoked, with herbs and garlic).

I think the side dish (сало) is similar but not identical to lard. Lard is processed by melting and separating the fat from the original tissue, while сало is not processed this way.

Sounds similar to lardo [1], which is a false friend of lard. Lard in Italian would be called strutto. Funnily enough lard in French is just bacon, and lard is called saindoux.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lardo

You can still get lard.

Tripe, however, appears to have almost entirely dissappeared, replaced by kebabs.

Local butcher sells tripe. But yes buying offal in regular supermarkets is pretty hard.