re: #351 MandyManners

More people are affected by the laws to ban certain foods/food substances.

Banning of transfats is silly. The government’s role should be limited to collecting and disseminating knowledge, and the citizenry ought to be left to decide what’s best for them.

That’s what happened with lard. A couple decades ago, lard was an extremely common ingredient, in everything from deep-fried foods to pastries; there was hardly a pie crust made that didn’t incorporate lard.

Then the government began issuing reports on the dangers of excess saturated fats in the diet. Without so much as a regulation or even a punitive tax, lard practically disappeared from general consumption, and is often difficult to locate even at well-stocked grocery stores today. Demand sank.

It’s still available, of course; on Monday, I’ll be picking up paczkis for the office, from a traditional Polish bakery that deep-fries them in lard. But what was once common is now rare.

Interestingly, without lard a great many foodstuffs suffered in quality. Unsaturated fats, like vegetable oils, simply don’t behave the same way in cooking as saturated fats do. After much tinkering, food scientists came up with a solution. You could add the hydrogen back into unsaturated fats that saturated fats were loaded with. Through the miracle of hydrogenation, vegetable oils could be transformed into a more perfect substitute for vilified lard.

And those hydrogenated vegetable oils? They’re called transfats. And the unpleasant side effects they generate? Exactly the same as those caused by lard, except even more so, thanks to the uber-saturation possible through processing.

Transfats, however, are candidates for outright regulation and bans, while lard was shoved off marketplace shelves simply through education.

Maybe we’re just more stupid than we were in the past?