A brief history of the fat we forgot
For millennia, animal fats were the foundation of human cooking. Then, in a single century, an industrial product replaced them. Here's how it happened.
Before we argue about which fat is healthiest, it's worth asking a simpler question: what did humans actually eat?
The long view
For the vast majority of human history, animal fats — tallow, lard, butter, and schmaltz — were the primary cooking fats in virtually every culture that kept livestock. Romans were rendering tallow by 500 BCE. Medieval European kitchens ran on lard and dripping. Indian cooking used ghee. Chinese cooking used lard.
Olive oil was an exception in Mediterranean regions, and sesame oil had limited use in parts of Asia. But the dominant cooking fats, worldwide, were animal-derived. This wasn't ideology — it was practicality. Animal fats were abundant, stable, and available wherever people raised animals.
The 20th-century shift
The change happened fast. In 1911, Procter & Gamble introduced Crisco — hydrogenated cottonseed oil — marketed as a cleaner, more modern alternative to lard and tallow. It came with free cookbooks and aggressive advertising. Within a generation, it had displaced animal fats in millions of American kitchens.
Then came soybean oil. Soybean cultivation exploded in the US during World War II, and the oil industry needed a market for the surplus. Soybean oil consumption in the US increased over 1,000-fold between 1909 and 1999 (Blasbalg et al., 2011, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition).
By the late 20th century, the average American was consuming 11.64 kg of soybean oil per year — a product that had been essentially absent from the human diet a century earlier.
The dietary guidelines
In 1977, the US government's Dietary Goals for the United States formally recommended replacing saturated animal fats with polyunsaturated vegetable oils. Similar guidelines followed in the UK and across Europe.
This recommendation was based largely on the lipid hypothesis — the theory that saturated fat raises cholesterol, which causes heart disease. At the time, the evidence for this chain of causation was incomplete (as subsequent meta-analyses have shown), but the policy was adopted with conviction.
The food industry was ready. Seed oils were cheap to produce, had long shelf lives, and could be marketed as "heart-healthy." Animal fats were repositioned as dangerous relics of an unenlightened past.
What actually changed
Between 1909 and 1999:
- Linoleic acid (the primary omega-6 fatty acid in seed oils) went from 2.79% to 7.21% of total calorie intake
- Animal fat consumption dropped by roughly half
- Seed oil consumption increased by a factor of ten or more
Over the same period, rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease continued to climb. Correlation is not causation — but the timing is difficult to ignore.
The rendering tradition
Tallow rendering is one of the oldest food-preparation techniques. It requires no machinery, no solvents, no chemical processing. You heat the fat, strain it, and jar it. The same process our great-grandparents used is the same process we use on the farm today.
Compare this to the manufacturing of a modern seed oil: solvent extraction with hexane, degumming, alkali refining, bleaching with adsorbent clay, and deodorising at temperatures above 200°C. The end product is colourless, odourless, and flavourless — a product that has been refined out of any resemblance to the seed it came from.
The return
Something is shifting. Tallow, lard, and other traditional fats are reappearing in kitchens, restaurants, and food culture — not as a nostalgic fad, but because people are asking a reasonable question: if humans thrived on animal fats for millennia, why did we stop?
The answer, increasingly, looks more like marketing than medicine.
References: Blasbalg TL et al. (2011) Am J Clin Nutr; Dupont J et al. (1991) J Am Oil Chem Soc.