Recent History
January 1, 1909
Putting Meat on the American Table
The poorest among them ate 136 pounds a year, and the wealthiest more than 200 pounds of meat.
In the book Putting Meat on the American Table, researcher Roger Horowitz scours the literature for data on how much meat Americans actually ate. A survey of eight thousand urban Americans in 1909 showed that the poorest among them ate 136 pounds a year, and the wealthiest more than 200 pounds.
January 1, 1910
The only fats that could be found in any American kitchen up until about 1910 were those that came exclusively from animals.
As the accompanying graph shows, the only fats that could be found in any American kitchen up until about 1910 were those that came exclusively from animals: lard (the fat from pigs), suet (the fat from around an animal’s kidneys), tallow (a harder fat from sheep and cattle), butter, and cream. Some cottonseed and sesame oils were produced locally on farms in the South (the slaves brought sesame seeds from Africa), but none was produced nationally or in large quantities; and efforts to make olive oil foundered upon an inability to successfully cultivate olive trees (although no less a man than Thomas Jefferson tried). The fats used by housewives in the United States and also in most of Northern Europe were therefore those from animals. Cooking with oil was a largely unfamiliar idea.
Oils weren’t even considered edible. They didn’t belong in the kitchen. They were used to make soaps, candles, waxes, cosmetics, varnishes, linoleum, resins, lubricants, and fuels—all of which were increasingly needed for burgeoning urban populations as well as the machinery of industrialization in the nineteenth century. Whale oil was the primary material for all these purposes starting in 1820; a boom in that oil’s production enriched two generations of New Englanders living on the coast, but the industry had collapsed by 1860.
January 1, 1913
Anitschkow reported that he could induce atherosclerotic-type lesions in rabbits by feeding them huge amounts of cholesterol.
"Early evidence suggestively linking cholesterol to heart disease also came from animals. In 1913, the Russian pathologist Nikolaj Anitschkow reported that he could induce atherosclerotic-type lesions in rabbits by feeding them huge amounts of cholesterol. This experiment became quite famous and was widely replicated on all sorts of animals, including cats, sheep, cattle, and horses, leading to the widespread view that cholesterol in the diet--such as one finds in eggs, red meat, and shellfish--must cause atherosclerosis. Contemporaries noted that rabbits, along with most of the animals used in follow-up experiments, are all herbivores. They therefore do not normally eat animal foods and are not biologically designed to metabolize them. By contrast, when the experiment was replicated on dogs (which eat meat as humans do), the animals demonstrated an ability to regulate and excrete extra cholesterol."
Nina Teicholz - The Big Fat Surprise - Page 22
January 1, 1913
A history of Crisco
Of course, American housewives didn’t jump into a whole new way of cooking overnight. P&G ran a massive advertising campaign to draw them into using this new kind of shortening. In The Story of Crisco (1913), the first of several cookbooks that P&G published entirely on this new product, much of the language is devoted to portraying Crisco as a “new” and “better” fat that would appeal to a housewife’s longing to be up to date. While Crisco may be “a shock to the older generation born in an age less progressive than our own,” it says, a modern woman is “glad” to give up butter and lard just as her “Grandmother” was happy to forgo the “fatiguing spinning wheel.” The cookbook also claimed that Crisco was easier to digest than butter or lard, and that it was produced in “sparkling bright rooms” where “white enamel covers metal surfaces.” (This last point was meant to set Crisco apart from pig lard and recent scandals over its squalid production conditions.) And unlike lard, Crisco didn’t smoke up the house when used in frying: “Kitchen odors are out of place in the parlor,” it advised.
Crisco’s sales multiplied forty times in merely four years following its introduction, luring other brands into the market with names such as Polar White, White Ribbon, and Flakewhite. During World War I, the government required that bakers use all-vegetable shortening so that lard could be exported to European allies, and this provided an enormous boost to the industry. Once commercial bakers discovered how to use vegetable shortening, they stayed with it.
By the early 1940s, one and a half billion pounds of this shortening were being produced in sixty-five plants around the country, and vegetable shortening became the eighth-ranking food item by sales, with the Crisco brand always in the lead. “And so the nation’s cookbook has been hauled out and revised. Upon thousands of pages the words ‘lard’ and ‘butter’ have been crossed out and the word ‘Crisco’ written in their place,” celebrated The Story of Crisco.
