Making Fat

I’ve been thinking about fat.

Not in the “I’ve got too much of it and need to lose some” kind of way, but in the nutritional way.

One of the offerings in this month’s package from the meat CSA is a side of pork. I have to confess, I didn’t even know what a side of pork was. Adventure is part of the charm of belonging to a CSA. Ah, but Google knows. A side of pork is the part that bacon comes from. More specifically, I think it’s the part that’s left after the bacon and ribs have been removed.

It’s fat. And I have a big slab of it. You can see why I’m thinking about it.

I’m supposed to render it and get lard. The powers-that-be in the CSA gave us some general instructions and pointed us to someone’s blog where it’s discussed. But I couldn’t find the blog and anyway, I had something just as good.

In an honored place on my bookshelf is Jessica Prentice’s Full Moon Feast and I knew perfectly well that she talked about rendering fat. In fact, she has a whole chapter devoted to it. I’ve read it before, of course, and it’s thought-provoking. Enough so, that I generally try to avoid non-fat, low-fat, skim… whatever, and try instead, to eat the Real Thing.

Jessica makes no bones about the idea that fat from free-range, grass-fed animals is not the enemy of our health. Sugar, refined grains, processed food, animals raised in cages or feedlots… these are the enemies. This is the kind of idea that makes so much sense to me, that I have to be careful I don’t just accept it without investigation. After all, everyone will tell you that fat is bad. Every person in the health industry. Nutritionists. Dieticians. Lawyers, even. It’s one of the accepted doctrines of western civilization.

Why do we think that? Why don’t we agree that the other list is far more dangerous? Why doesn’t the government’s food pyramid put those items in the “use sparingly” category?

We all know that heart disease, high cholesterol, stroke, diabetes, etc. are at epidemic levels. We all know that this epidemic has been growing the last 80 years or so and we’ve let the “authorities” tell us it’s because we eat too much red meat, too much bacon, too many eggs, too much fat.

The “authorities” never tell you that the last 80 years have also seen the growth of the processed food industry. That in that time, we’ve become completely dependent on Big Agriculture and food created in laboratories. That even our fat has become adulterated by chemically grown plants and animals stacked up in feedlots and fed food they were never intended to eat.

And of course, we eat way too much of this stuff, because, as Jessica says, it’s not satisfying. Especially if we eat the ‘skim’ varieties. Fat used to be healthy. It used to be nutritious. It used to be satisfying. And most of us didn’t get “fat” from it.

Challenge yourself. Eliminate all the sugar and processed food from your diet. Buy local, organic produce and meat. Eat artisan whole-milk cheese and dairy products and don’t worry if your meat has yellow gobs of fat in it. Try it for a while and see if you’re not in better shape.

I’ve been eating this way for several years. It’s been a gradual process and I’m not completely there, yet. But my cholesterol is about 30 points lower than it was when I was doing the low-fat diet thing and eating processed foods and fake sugar. My weight is about the same. I still don’t have diabetes or high blood pressure.

And I can really enjoy my food.