6 ms·

> This story doesn't really explain what killed lard in Europe. It's NPR. It's an American news channel. It's not trying to detail the history of Europe. I do

> This story doesn't really explain what killed lard in Europe. It's NPR. It's an American news channel. It's not trying to detail the history of Europe. I don't mean to take this out on you because your comment is informative and interesting, but I'm really getting frustrated with this so often being the top comment's criticism on HN, or being the top responding criticism to the top comment on HN. Simply put, it's a Eurocentric criticism. It always reads like, "Why didn't this journalist consider Europe when they wrote this piece?" Perhaps it's different on European sites, but American sites don't bother contextualizing which nation they're talking about because the context is already self-evident to the primary Anglo American audience. News stories don't appear in English as a lingua franca; it's just the primary language. It's not that we don't care about Europe. It's just too far away. Europe just isn't the default American context. We don't qualify our journalism if it's only about America.

ska 8y ago
I think there is another way to read that comment. That lard is also unusual in Denmark, but the mechanisms being presented here don't really fit. In other words, there are other mechanisms at work, and perhaps that calls into question the narrative... Of course it could just be that they are different places.
- chrisdhoover 8y ago
  Thats how I read it. If they reason that lard went away in the US is not the same reason it went away in the EU, then what is the EU reason and does the EU reason cast doubt on the US reason.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    The original comment makes it sound like lard was never really there to begin with in Europe, or at least Scandinavia. There was no "going away" in Europe, so nothing to really inform the hypothesis on it's fall in the US.
    - Nursie 8y ago
      This is definitely not true in the UK - cooking with Lard was a huge thing in my grandparents generation, but almost unheard of amongst my peers. I'm 40. What has changed is people's views of what's healthy, and Lard is considered hilariously unhealthy, to the point of it being a joke. But people used to deep or shallow fry with it, use it in pastry, cook with it in all sorts of ways. It was also a poverty food during and after WWII - bread and lard is cheap enough and calorie dense enough to keep workers going through the day.
      - abrugsch 8y ago
        ugh... and hence why fried bread is often an option for cooked breakfast at the greasiest of greasy spoon caf's
      - Ntrails 8y ago
        I still use Lard for roast potatoes, it is excellent at the job. But it is definitely unusual to use it at all at this point
        Nursie 8y ago
        I bet that is good. I occasionally use duck or goose fat and they come out fantastic that way too. But that's quite conventional at this point!
- moate 8y ago
  Here's a quick and easy take for you: Denmark is an entirely different culture with an entirely different consumption history. Their recipes call for butter, and their replacement was a veg-oil product. Looking at some fast consumption stats (current, and I'm lazy here but I'll assume this probably link to historic consumer trends) Denmark is top 8 in milk consumption per capita but don't even show up in the top 40 for pork consumption. My guess for why they don't use lard: They never really did. If you have a dairy/beef based food culture and minimal pork you probably aren't going to use pork lard because it's just not around. It wasn't "killed" in Denmark (anecdotal old Danes, please feel free to prove me wrong here) because it was never the de facto fat for these applications. Edited to add: "Approx. 90 percent of the production is exported and is thereby essential to the Danish economy and the balance of trade." They currently produce a decent volume of pork and then ship it out of country.
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    Input from a Dane, albeit not an anecdotal old one: We did use more lard in the old days, as well as beef tallow and horse fat, for specialty recipes. Duck and goose fat were also highly prized, as they are to this day. I have a couple of pre-1900 recipe collections, with the oldest recipes being from a 1616 cookbook. The old recipes do tend to use significantly more rendered fats than we do today, I think mostly because it's an inevitable byproduct of butchering and preparing meat, and you wouldn't want anything to go to waste. Butter took time and effort to produce, but rendered fat just had to be collected while you were cooking. However we've always been heavy dairy consumers, so it makes sense that it would be our primary culinary fat. It's such an ingrained part of our cuisine that in the mid-20th century, our TV chefs made "plenty of butter!" their catchphrase. We also had the great margarine replacement during/after WWII, and the eventual realization that trans fats were even worse than saturated fats. Even though margarine is now free from trans fats, I think most people are still skeptical of it, and prefer butter.
    - rags2riches 8y ago
      This is interesting. My impression from across the sound is that the Danes love their pigs and everything that comes from them. I must confess I've pointed out the svinefedt in a Danish store to a fellow countryman and we had a good chuckle about you guys...
minikites 8y ago
>It's not that we don't care about Europe. You then follow up with three sentences proving this exact point. The reason it's not our "default context" is because we don't care.
- da_chicken 8y ago
  I don't agree. Humans are just naturally more concerned with what's close to them or what directly interacts with them. It's just part of the normal signal to noise filtering. In the US, unless you live in certain coastal cities, the overwhelming majority of people you meet are from the US and living within 100 miles of where you're at. So, the context of almost all the important information that you need on a daily basis to survive is going to be about the US and about your state. If there's a massive flood of the Mississippi and you live in Missouri, you might know someone affected, or at least be impacted due to the economic damages. If a German lives near the French border, isn't he naturally going to be more concerned about news of what's going on in France? He's going to meet French nationals much more often than others and French culture is going to have a pretty direct impact on his daily life. If there's a major fire in Strasbourg, he's going to be interested in what happened. He might know some of the casualties, directly or indirectly. Maybe he dated a girl from the University. If there are riots due to poor management of the crisis, or a sewage leak into the Rhine, all these things can affect him directly. Just because he lives nearby. Do either us Americans or the German need to know about what's going on in Vietnam? Only in the broadest sense. If there's a tsunami that hits Da Nang, it's unlikely to affect anybody we know personally, unlikely to affect our daily life, unlikely to affect our larger economic lives (even if our countries send aid). It's tragic. We certainly care that people died and that they need help. It just isn't a tragedy that touches us personally. Vietnam is not part of our default context.
  - oska 8y ago
    Your entire argument is bogus in the context of this story. It has nothing to do with "caring more about people close to them". The manufacturing and consumption of lard in the U.S. is a technology/tradition inherited from the parts of the world Americans emigrated from. And the development of the hydrogenation process and its implementation as a consumable product (replacing lard) was shared between Europe and the US. (Reference is made to this in the article). Thus the experience in Europe (and elsewhere) is directly relevant to the topic under discussion and comments from non-Americans on the situation in their countries are also directly relevant.
simongr3dal 8y ago
It might take a lot of time to research even more material to get a wider context, but that half of a paragraph that contextualizes and compares situations to other parts of the world are often the most interesting parts of such stories, at least to me.
ThJ 8y ago
As other commenters have guessed: I was calling the narrative into question. Lard was once common in Europe (if not necessarily in the Nordic region) and now it isn't. Could it be that something other than this domestic narrative killed lard? The same is true of other trends both in America and elsewhere. For example, in Norway, we perceive rural areas being abandoned in favour of urban areas as a problem to be solved. We pretend that this problem is domestic, and that we can solve it domestically, but we are actually looking at a global trend, yet no one points this out when it is discussed. I think that 99% of the time when Europeans make what you perceive as annoying "Eurocentric" observations, they are actually calling cause and effect into question. If an effect occurs on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Americans are attributing it to domestic causes, that would seem to be the wrong conclusion, because what, then, caused it to simultaneously happen in Europe?

ska 8y ago

I think there is another way to read that comment. That lard is also unusual in Denmark, but the mechanisms being presented here don't really fit. In other words, there are other mechanisms at work, and perhaps that calls into question the narrative... Of course it could just be that they are different places.

chrisdhoover 8y ago
Thats how I read it. If they reason that lard went away in the US is not the same reason it went away in the EU, then what is the EU reason and does the EU reason cast doubt on the US reason.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  The original comment makes it sound like lard was never really there to begin with in Europe, or at least Scandinavia. There was no "going away" in Europe, so nothing to really inform the hypothesis on it's fall in the US.
  - Nursie 8y ago
    This is definitely not true in the UK - cooking with Lard was a huge thing in my grandparents generation, but almost unheard of amongst my peers. I'm 40. What has changed is people's views of what's healthy, and Lard is considered hilariously unhealthy, to the point of it being a joke. But people used to deep or shallow fry with it, use it in pastry, cook with it in all sorts of ways. It was also a poverty food during and after WWII - bread and lard is cheap enough and calorie dense enough to keep workers going through the day.
    - abrugsch 8y ago
      ugh... and hence why fried bread is often an option for cooked breakfast at the greasiest of greasy spoon caf's
    - Ntrails 8y ago
      I still use Lard for roast potatoes, it is excellent at the job. But it is definitely unusual to use it at all at this point
      - Nursie 8y ago
        I bet that is good. I occasionally use duck or goose fat and they come out fantastic that way too. But that's quite conventional at this point!
moate 8y ago
Here's a quick and easy take for you: Denmark is an entirely different culture with an entirely different consumption history. Their recipes call for butter, and their replacement was a veg-oil product. Looking at some fast consumption stats (current, and I'm lazy here but I'll assume this probably link to historic consumer trends) Denmark is top 8 in milk consumption per capita but don't even show up in the top 40 for pork consumption. My guess for why they don't use lard: They never really did. If you have a dairy/beef based food culture and minimal pork you probably aren't going to use pork lard because it's just not around. It wasn't "killed" in Denmark (anecdotal old Danes, please feel free to prove me wrong here) because it was never the de facto fat for these applications. Edited to add: "Approx. 90 percent of the production is exported and is thereby essential to the Danish economy and the balance of trade." They currently produce a decent volume of pork and then ship it out of country.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  Input from a Dane, albeit not an anecdotal old one: We did use more lard in the old days, as well as beef tallow and horse fat, for specialty recipes. Duck and goose fat were also highly prized, as they are to this day. I have a couple of pre-1900 recipe collections, with the oldest recipes being from a 1616 cookbook. The old recipes do tend to use significantly more rendered fats than we do today, I think mostly because it's an inevitable byproduct of butchering and preparing meat, and you wouldn't want anything to go to waste. Butter took time and effort to produce, but rendered fat just had to be collected while you were cooking. However we've always been heavy dairy consumers, so it makes sense that it would be our primary culinary fat. It's such an ingrained part of our cuisine that in the mid-20th century, our TV chefs made "plenty of butter!" their catchphrase. We also had the great margarine replacement during/after WWII, and the eventual realization that trans fats were even worse than saturated fats. Even though margarine is now free from trans fats, I think most people are still skeptical of it, and prefer butter.
  - rags2riches 8y ago
    This is interesting. My impression from across the sound is that the Danes love their pigs and everything that comes from them. I must confess I've pointed out the svinefedt in a Danish store to a fellow countryman and we had a good chuckle about you guys...

minikites 8y ago

>It's not that we don't care about Europe. You then follow up with three sentences proving this exact point. The reason it's not our "default context" is because we don't care.

da_chicken 8y ago
I don't agree. Humans are just naturally more concerned with what's close to them or what directly interacts with them. It's just part of the normal signal to noise filtering. In the US, unless you live in certain coastal cities, the overwhelming majority of people you meet are from the US and living within 100 miles of where you're at. So, the context of almost all the important information that you need on a daily basis to survive is going to be about the US and about your state. If there's a massive flood of the Mississippi and you live in Missouri, you might know someone affected, or at least be impacted due to the economic damages. If a German lives near the French border, isn't he naturally going to be more concerned about news of what's going on in France? He's going to meet French nationals much more often than others and French culture is going to have a pretty direct impact on his daily life. If there's a major fire in Strasbourg, he's going to be interested in what happened. He might know some of the casualties, directly or indirectly. Maybe he dated a girl from the University. If there are riots due to poor management of the crisis, or a sewage leak into the Rhine, all these things can affect him directly. Just because he lives nearby. Do either us Americans or the German need to know about what's going on in Vietnam? Only in the broadest sense. If there's a tsunami that hits Da Nang, it's unlikely to affect anybody we know personally, unlikely to affect our daily life, unlikely to affect our larger economic lives (even if our countries send aid). It's tragic. We certainly care that people died and that they need help. It just isn't a tragedy that touches us personally. Vietnam is not part of our default context.
- oska 8y ago
  Your entire argument is bogus in the context of this story. It has nothing to do with "caring more about people close to them". The manufacturing and consumption of lard in the U.S. is a technology/tradition inherited from the parts of the world Americans emigrated from. And the development of the hydrogenation process and its implementation as a consumable product (replacing lard) was shared between Europe and the US. (Reference is made to this in the article). Thus the experience in Europe (and elsewhere) is directly relevant to the topic under discussion and comments from non-Americans on the situation in their countries are also directly relevant.

simongr3dal 8y ago

It might take a lot of time to research even more material to get a wider context, but that half of a paragraph that contextualizes and compares situations to other parts of the world are often the most interesting parts of such stories, at least to me.

ThJ 8y ago

As other commenters have guessed: I was calling the narrative into question. Lard was once common in Europe (if not necessarily in the Nordic region) and now it isn't. Could it be that something other than this domestic narrative killed lard? The same is true of other trends both in America and elsewhere. For example, in Norway, we perceive rural areas being abandoned in favour of urban areas as a problem to be solved. We pretend that this problem is domestic, and that we can solve it domestically, but we are actually looking at a global trend, yet no one points this out when it is discussed. I think that 99% of the time when Europeans make what you perceive as annoying "Eurocentric" observations, they are actually calling cause and effect into question. If an effect occurs on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Americans are attributing it to domestic causes, that would seem to be the wrong conclusion, because what, then, caused it to simultaneously happen in Europe?