Allow Yourself the Pleasure of Eating Fat

Fast food french fries used to taste better. That's not just me looking at the past through a grease-smeared lens of nostalgia; in 1992, a heart attack survivor named Phil Sokolof sold the construction materials business that had made him a millionaire many times over in order to spend his time and resources railing against fat. Under the aegis of the self-funded National Heart Savers Association he founded in the '80s, Sokolof took out full-page ads in major newspapers and appeared on national talk shows to warn Americans of the perils of the cholesterol-spiking properties of 2% milk, Goldfish crackers, and Hydrox cookies, but he saved his most alkaline bile for a particular offender: McDonald's french fries.

Those fries, to my callow adolescent palate, were the pinnacle of America's culinary achievements — salt-kissed and unfailingly crisp to the teeth, giving way to pillowy starch. The secret was beef tallow which to Sokolof's reckoning was public health enemy number one, a belief that he expressed via billboards, all-caps ads (“THE POISONING OF AMERICA!”), and other paid media spots to the tune of $8 million over the course of his crusade. (He also targeted coconut and palm oils, which are key to the cuisines of various cultures around the world.)

Though McDonald's was loath to credit Sokolof's campaign with the company's reformulations, it introduced the short-lived 91% fat-free McLean Deluxe (developed in partnership with Auburn University) in 1991 and phased out beef tallow in favor of lower-fat cooking oil, as did other major fast food chains.

At least for me, it worked — but maybe not for the reason Sokolof intended. I definitely stopped eating as many McD's fries, which had been a semi-staple of my broke and youthful diet, mostly because they just fell flat in my mouth. Beef tallow doesn't actually impart a flavor redolent of steak or even ground chuck, but because of its level of saturation (basically its carbon chain is filled with hydrogen atoms and unlike an unsaturated or polyunsaturated fat, it has no double bonds) it remains more solid than canola, soybean, or corn oil. It lends luscious texture and heft, and an ineffable pleasure. As my dad, a retired chemist with a specialty in dibasic and fatty acids said in a recent text exchange, “Fat tastes good. Steaks with marbling do taste better than super lean cuts.”

And he's right, as he was in his next assertion that, “Unfortunately a lot of fat consumption is not really a good idea for your health.” But to my mind — as a food lover who opted for a fine arts degree rather than any of the sciences — a little of a very good thing is infinitely more pleasing than an abundance of something mediocre.

It is legend in my family that I had an epiphany over butter. My dad's mother, Grandma Kinsman, would make the trek to Northern Kentucky from Toledo, Ohio, from time to time, and the food just tasted better when she was around. I eventually sussed out that it was because when she'd visit, my parents would make a temporary upgrade to real butter from the oil-based Parkay and Country Crock we generally deployed. As I understood it, she'd suffered the indignities of wartime and Depression-era oleo (a.k.a. margarine, nut margarine, Nucoa, Butterine, and other brands) made from vegetable oil — especially torturous, considering that Grandpa Kinsman was a milkman. 

Per my dad (we text about fat a lot): “Father delivered butter and that is all they would use except in the war years and a bit after. During the war, butter was in limited supply for domestic use and people used margarine. The butter producers were worried about getting the domestic market back post-war and got several legislations passed to curb margarine sales. One was that margarine couldn't be colored at the production facility. I remember Mother plunking a colorless lump of margarine into a bowl, emptying a packet of yellow colorant on top and kneading it together.”

I may not have been aware of this on an intellectual level, but the pleasure centers of my brain were well aware, and often at odds with the extreme lipid phobia of American culture I grew up in during the '80s, '90s, and beyond. This very publication deployed the words “fattening” and “slimming” with alarming regularity from the early '80s through the early '00s. It touted low-fat recipes on the cover along with — in the case of the July 1988 issue — a headless, leotard-clad torso of a woman eating a clear glass bowl of “hearty, healthy chili 342 calories” decked with an entire raw and intact scallion. 

But even in that particular issue (which featured a “humorous” diet diary illustrated with cartoon images of the author depicted as a female pig, advised the trimming of all visible fat and skin from meat, draining of all drippings, and a mere brush of olive oil as sufficient for frying), the then-editor in chief Ila Stanger offered an aside in her editor's letter extolling the virtues of microwave baked potatoes to refer to “the melted plastic that goes by the name of low-cal margarine.”

She knew. We all know on a lizard-brain level that real fat is magic, and not just for flavor. 

Fat is so often about where we are from — a sentiment reiterated in the 1997 edition of The Joy of Cooking that I've been hauling around with me throughout the bulk of my adult life. “Nothing reveals the quality of a cuisine so unmistakably as the fat on which it is based,” Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer-Becker wrote. “Bacon arouses memories of our South, olive oil evokes Mediterranean cooking, and sweet butter will bring forth memories of fine meals in many places. Not only flavors but food textures change with the use of different fats, whose characteristics are as individual as their tastes.”

Margarine comes from a lab, courtesy of a French chemist named Michel Eugène Chevreul. The fat substitute Olestra comes from the bowels of hell and was relegated there after much initial fanfare over its non-absorption properties that allowed eaters to consume as many snack chips as they cared to — if they didn't mind its unfortunate tendency to end up on the eater's underwear after an unimpeded joy ride through their digestive system. Butter, lard, suet, tallow, schmaltz, and lamb fat would never; they're staying put, for better or for worse, depending upon your objectives.

And here's mine: pleasure. As is often the case in pandemic, war, and trauma times (some global and some quite personal), cultural tastes often turn to the comfort of nostalgia and defiant excess to establish some sense of normalcy. In the 21st century, in the wake of the economic recession of the late '00s, Americans turned to the comforts of lard, which turned out to potentially be less hazardous to the human body than the hydrogenated oils that had usurped animal fat's place in the fast food chain. A politically anxious 2018 saw a mini-flurry of books on the bliss and benefits of lard, tallow, and poultry fats. During last third of 2022, when so many of us were just beginning to contemplate a return to hard clothes and daily commutes, people slathered butter onto cutting boards and served it as a party snack as if that were a perfectly normal thing to do. At the tail end of 2024, tallow seeped back into the nation's psyche, experiencing a boom as both a flavoring agent (including in fast-food fries) and a skin care product.

I asked my dad what he thought of that last data point and he texted back, “Where are these people getting tallow anyway? Are they using fat cut from steaks? If you ever encountered raw, unrefined commercial tallow you would run away. For me a good commercial skin cream would be better, although I wouldn’t cook with it.” 

After asking me finally to stop texting him about tallow as skin care, he finished, “Personal opinion: bull shit. But people are free to believe and do what they want. Off to bed.”

And the next morning, I awoke to a message from him on the nostalgic bliss of his mother's bacon grease crock. I have one too. I guess it runs in the family. 

A few great books about fat

Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother's Secret Ingredient — Editors of Grit Magazine
The Book of Schmaltz: Love Song to a Forgotten Fat — Michael Ruhlman
Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes — Jennifer McLagan
The Fat Kitchen: How to Render, Cure & Cook with Lard, Tallow & Poultry Fat — Andrea Chesman