Pig fat in a Michelin-starred kitchen. Sounds almost scandalous, doesn’t it? For decades, the very word “lard” was enough to make a health-conscious diner push back their chair. Yet right now, in some of the most sophisticated kitchens in the world, something deeply old-fashioned is making a quiet, confident return. Chefs who once reached instinctively for vegetable oil or butter are pausing, reconsidering, and reaching instead for a tub of rendered pork fat.
The story of lard’s fall and rise again is part culinary history, part food science, and honestly, a little bit of corporate mischief. There is more going on here than mere nostalgia. Let’s dive in.
An Ancient Ingredient with a Surprisingly Messy History
Up until the 20th century, Americans commonly used lard as a cooking fat, shortening, or just a spread to be enjoyed with a slice of bread. It was everywhere. Nobody questioned it. Then things got complicated.
This was partially due to Upton Sinclair’s fictional depiction of its production in his 1906 novel “The Jungle.” However, a marketing campaign for Crisco brand vegetable shortening also spread the impression that lard was a less wholesome option. That one-two punch was devastating for lard’s reputation and took nearly a century to undo.
In just five years after Crisco launched, Americans were annually buying more than 60 million cans of Crisco, the equivalent of three cans for every family in the country. Within a generation, lard went from being a major part of American diets to an old-fashioned ingredient. That is how fast public opinion can shift when corporate marketing gets involved.
The Crisco Campaign That Changed Everything
Proctor and Gamble launched Crisco in one of the brilliant marketing campaigns of the 20th century. P&G positioned Crisco as a new type of food, clean and pure, a product of science, healthier and safer than lard. They were selling a narrative as much as a product.
Crisco was a pioneer of print media during WWI, radio in the 1920s, and television in the 1930s. The dual marketing strategy was to promote the purity of Crisco while subtly undermining lard. It was genius, honestly, even if the long-term consequences were deeply problematic.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that further studies revealed trans fats were directly linked with increased bad cholesterol and heightened risk of heart attacks. This stigmatized Crisco and other hydrogenated oils in much the same way as lard had been villainized nearly a hundred years prior, causing consumers to seek out other forms of shortening once again. Full circle. Nature has a dark sense of humor.
What Lard Actually Is – and Why Chefs Care So Much
Lard is a pure cooking fat made from rendered pig fat, valued for its mild flavor, stability, and high smoke point. Simple. No lab required, no hydrogenation process, no chemical manipulation. Just fat, rendered slowly and carefully.
Many chefs and bakers prize lard over other types of shortening because of its flavor and range of applications. Because of the relatively large fat crystals in lard, it is extremely effective as a shortening in baking. Pie crusts made with lard tend to be flakier than those made with butter. That textural advantage alone is enough to win over any serious pastry chef.
The culinary qualities of lard vary somewhat depending on the origin and processing method; if properly rendered, it may be nearly odorless and tasteless. It has a high saturated fatty acid content and no trans fat. The “no trans fat” part is something vegetable shortenings still struggle with in various formulations.
The Smoke Point Advantage That Professionals Swear By
Lard is one of the few edible oils with a relatively high smoke point, attributable to its high saturated fatty acids content. Pure lard is especially useful for cooking since it produces little smoke when heated and has a distinct flavor when combined with other foods. In a professional kitchen, that stability matters enormously.
In contrast, lard is much more stable than vegetable oils, produces less oxidation, and has a higher smoke point, making it a superior choice for cooking, baking, and frying. Think of it like a cast iron pan versus a thin aluminium one. Both cook food, but one handles punishment with far more grace.
Oils derived from corn, canola, soy, and cottonseed are highly unstable, especially when heated, which causes oxidation and the formation of free radicals. These oxidized compounds can contribute to inflammation and cellular damage and have been linked to an increased risk of heart disease. That is a conversation the food industry is only just beginning to have openly.
What the Emerging Science Is Actually Saying
Here is the thing. The health narrative around lard is getting genuinely complicated, and the science is shifting in ways that are hard to ignore. Lard is composed of roughly 90% fat, with a fatty acid composition ratio of saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fats, and it contains a minor proportion of cholesterol as well as fat-soluble vitamins.
Emerging evidence suggests that lard may not significantly contribute to diabetes and that moderate lard intake could even benefit lipid metabolism. This commentary suggests a reevaluation of lard’s classification as a “bad actor” in the context of diabetes, urging colleagues to give greater consideration to this intriguing hypothesis. Published in npj Science of Food in December 2024, that is about as current as it gets.
Research suggested that lard could reduce the risk of obesity compared with corn oil and canola oil, which may be associated with more balanced gut microbiota and bile acid composition. A 2025 study published in Food Science and Human Wellness reached that conclusion after examining dietary fat sources in mice, and it sent more than a few nutritionists back to their textbooks.
It is worth noting, however, that mainstream health bodies remain cautious. Very consistently, all the data say butter and lard are bad for our hearts. Studies show swapping out saturated fats and replacing them with unsaturated fats lowers the risk for heart disease, according to researchers cited by the American Heart Association in 2024. This is a real debate, not a settled one.
The “Lardcore” Movement in Southern and Regional Cooking
Something interesting happened in American Southern kitchens. Chefs began reclaiming their culinary heritage, and lard was a central part of that identity. Food writer Josh Ozersky coined the term “lardcore” to describe this school of Southern chefs who update soul food and other regional cuisines with a tinge of the gourmet. It became a badge of culinary pride.
A number of prominent restaurateurs currently use lard in their cooking. This is partially because the chefs wish to adhere to those Southern traditions, even as they find new ways to approach ingredients and dishes. Tradition and innovation, shaking hands in the kitchen.
Lard is showing up at high end restaurants, drizzled on potatoes and layered onto coal-fired pizzas. That is not your grandmother’s kitchen. That is fine dining, fully embracing an ingredient once considered too humble or too controversial for a tasting menu.
How Restaurants Are Actually Using It Today
Yes, many restaurants still use lard, though its use is now selective and concentrated where its culinary properties matter. Nobody is pouring it into everything indiscriminately. The approach is thoughtful, precise, deliberate.
Flavor and texture: lard adds a clean pork fat aroma and creates exceptionally flaky pie crusts, tender tamales, and crisp, non-greasy fried coatings. Functional performance: lard offers high smoking point for certain preparations, superior shortening power in laminated doughs, and excellent mouthfeel in sauces and baked goods. That’s a pretty impressive résumé for an ingredient that was nearly written off entirely.
Traditional Mexican and Latin American kitchens use lard for tamales, refried beans, carnitas, and certain salsas for authentic flavor. Southern U.S. and soul food restaurants use it in biscuits, pie crusts, fried chicken in some places, and cornbread recipes. These are not trends. These are traditions being honoured with a new level of culinary consciousness.
Leaf Lard: The Premium Grade That Changed the Conversation
The highest grade of lard, known as leaf lard, is obtained from the “flare” visceral fat deposit surrounding the kidneys and inside the loin. Think of leaf lard as the reserve wine of pig fat. Most people will never even know it exists, but the people who know, really know.
Leaf lard is the most neutral-flavored fat around a pig’s kidneys and is traditionally used for making flaky pie and pastry crust. This is what high-end pastry chefs are sourcing now. Not the supermarket block wrapped in wax paper, but carefully sourced, properly rendered leaf lard from heritage breed pigs.
Many chefs buy leaf lard or artisanal rendered lard for milder flavor, or rendered fat from their own butchery by-products. The nose-to-tail philosophy, which has deeply influenced modern professional cooking, makes this a natural fit. Wasting nothing is a mark of a serious kitchen.
Lard’s Global Role: It Never Really Left
Let’s be real. While American and British kitchens were busy replacing lard with Crisco, much of the world never stopped using it. Lard was once widely used in the cuisines of Europe, China and the New World and still plays a significant role in British, Central European, Mexican and Chinese cuisines.
Lard is produced mainly in China, followed by Germany, Brazil, United States, and Russia. That production ranking is telling. Countries with deep culinary traditions never abandoned it. They just kept cooking while others got caught up in a decades-long marketing-driven hysteria about saturated fat.
In this era of “newstalgia,” everything old is new again, according to Datassential’s 2024 Food Trends report. And in many ways, lard’s comeback fits perfectly into that broader cultural moment, where chefs and diners are looking backwards to find something authentic, something real, something that hasn’t been engineered in a lab.
The Nose-to-Tail Philosophy and the Sustainability Angle
There is a dimension to lard’s comeback that goes beyond taste and tradition. In the 1990s and early 2000s, chefs and bakers rediscovered lard’s unique culinary values, leading to a partial rehabilitation of this fat among “foodies.” Negative publicity about the trans-fat content of the partially hydrogenated vegetable oils in vegetable shortening partially drove this trend.
Beyond the trans fat revelations, there is a growing movement in professional kitchens around whole-animal butchery and zero-waste cooking. If you are already breaking down an entire pig, rendering the fat into lard is simply the responsible, intelligent thing to do. More chefs are choosing lard over other traditional cooking oils or shortening. Pure lard has a neutral taste, contains no pork flavor, contains no trans fats, has less saturated fat and cholesterol than butter, contains healthy monounsaturated fats just like olive oil, and has a high smoke point, making it ideal for frying foods.
Sustainability in professional kitchens is no longer just a talking point on a press release. It is a genuine operational philosophy. Using every part of the animal, including its fat, is increasingly seen as a mark of integrity and respect for the ingredient, not something to be embarrassed about.
Conclusion: Pig Fat, Reimagined for the Modern Table
Lard’s comeback is not a fad. It is a correction. For nearly a century, an ingredient with genuine culinary value was displaced not by a better product, but by a more aggressively marketed one. Lard was demonized to the extent that even today the word lard itself invites disgust. Eventually, Crisco completely replaced lard in the kitchens of America. That replacement, as we now know, came with its own health trade-offs.
Today’s professional chefs are operating with more information, more curiosity, and far less deference to mid-century marketing mythology. They are asking the right questions: What performs best? What tastes best? What is honest? Over recent years lard has made a comeback in many restaurant and home kitchens. That trend is accelerating, not slowing.
I think the most interesting thing about all of this is what it says about how we form food beliefs in the first place. We banned a centuries-old cooking fat based largely on a fictional novel and a soap company’s marketing budget. It took the better part of a hundred years to start questioning that story. Makes you wonder what other “unhealthy” ingredients we have wrongly abandoned along the way. What do you think – is lard back for good, or are we just going through a nostalgic phase? Tell us in the comments.
