Crisco vs. tallow debate
A social thread is resurfacing the history of cooking oils — noting that Procter & Gamble’s Crisco (made from cottonseed oil) was promoted by the American Heart Association and that this displaced traditional animal fats like tallow in U.S. kitchens. (x.com)
The fight people are having now over tallow and “seed oils” starts with a product launch from June 1911, when Procter & Gamble introduced Crisco as the first shortening made entirely from vegetable oil instead of animal fat. (crisco.com) Before that, American kitchens mostly used lard from pork, tallow from beef or mutton, and butter, while cottonseed oil was better known as a byproduct of the cotton industry than as a home cooking staple. (smithsonianmag.com) Crisco worked because hydrogenation turned liquid cottonseed oil into a solid fat that looked and behaved more like lard on a pantry shelf. (smithsonianmag.com) Procter & Gamble did not sell Crisco as “industrial chemistry.” It sold Crisco as clean, modern, and economical, and its own brand history says the product was pitched as a more “pure” alternative to animal fat and butter. (crisco.com) The company also flooded homes with recipes. By 1912 and 1914, “The Story of Crisco” cookbook was circulating with hundreds of tested recipes built around the new fat, which gave home cooks a manual for swapping out lard. (loc.gov) That is the part the viral posts usually get right: Crisco was not just another ingredient on the shelf. It was a heavily marketed replacement for older animal fats at a moment when mass advertising and branded packaged food were remaking the American kitchen. (smithsonianmag.com) The American Heart Association came later. In 1961, it published a landmark statement on dietary fat and heart disease, and by 1968 its guidance included reducing animal fat, decreasing saturated fat, and increasing polyunsaturated fat. (ahajournals.org, jn.nutrition.org) That history matters because the American Heart Association was not endorsing 1911 Crisco as a brand launch. It was part of a later shift in nutrition advice that favored replacing saturated fats with unsaturated vegetable oils to lower heart disease risk. (heart.org, professional.heart.org) The catch is that “vegetable oil” and “partially hydrogenated oil” are not the same thing. Crisco’s original formula used partially hydrogenated oil, and the United States Food and Drug Administration ruled in 2015 that partially hydrogenated oils, the main source of industrial trans fat, are no longer generally recognized as safe. (fda.gov, federalregister.gov) So the cleanest version of the story is narrower than the internet version. Crisco helped move Americans away from lard and tallow, the American Heart Association later pushed diets lower in saturated fat, and modern health agencies now warn against trans fat while still favoring unsaturated oils over saturated fats for heart health. (heart.org, heart.org) The current argument online collapses 115 years of food history into one villain. The actual timeline runs from cottonseed marketing in the 1910s, to heart disease guidance in the 1960s, to the trans fat crackdown in 2015, and each step was about a different problem. (smithsonianmag.com, ahajournals.org, fda.gov)
