Fat, Fats, Fat

My last blog about my Revere Ware pots and pans made me think a lot about cooking. About my grandmother’s cooking, my mother’s cooking, my cooking, my daughters’ cooking. A few months ago Daughter #1 called to ask me about an ingredient in a recipe I sent her. She had requested her grandmother’s, my mother’s recipe for cornbread. I sent it and that was the recipe she was questioning. The recipe called for vegetable oil. My daughter asked if she could use olive oil instead. I told her probably not, then it dawned on me that she probably only had olive oil in her apartment. She had probably never owned a bottle of vegetable oil. I equate this to my experience with my grandmother’s recipes that called for Crisco or worse, lard. I did have a bottle of vegetable oil in my first kitchen, but I did not routinely keep Crisco on hand, and I never, ever had lard in my house (I will refrain from making a “lard-ass” joke here). Believe it or not, there were some recipes from my grandmother that called for lard. How the times, and recipes, have changed over the years – and for the better. I am not an expert on nutrition, but I will venture a guess that my daughter’s kitchen is healthier than mine, and I know that my kitchen was healthier than my mother’s or my grandmother’s. But this begs the question: Why are we fatter today than we were in my mother’s and my grandmother’s day? I have a theory – (not the theory that lard and Crisco are more filling and therefore we eat less) I blame it all on power steering in automobiles.

“What? Power steering,” you ask?

“Yes, power steering.”

Since my grandmother’s and mother’s generation we have eaten healthier foods, but we have gotten less exercise. We have power steering, electric mixers, washing machines, clothes dryers and maids – we don’t get the exercise our mothers and grandmothers did. They were able to “work off” all of that lard and Crisco. What it did to their arteries is another story.