The Story of Crisco (a sad story of an experiment performed on the American public for profit)

Credit for this post goes to @primatekitchen on instagram.  Interesting, this a book you can find online at bookstores. Over the years I had heard some of this story detailing how a bi-product of manufacturing made its way into the standard American diet. Its not bad enough they needed a way to sell this goo... the real magic was in demonizing the natural competitors we had used for thousands of years and which were primarily animal fats like butter and in its day healthy versions of animal fats like lard.  As with most things its a story of "follow the money" as the toxic transfat product made its way into our diet as a staple while the healthy natural fats were taken away by corrupt research and funding so called healthy non profit groups like the American Heart Assoc which would take 40 years to reverse and the incalculable damage done to our health. 

@Primatekitchen posted some good excerpts from the book I will copy below but check the posts out on their instagram for more info...

primatekitchen
Cottonseed oil had a long road to value, beginning as a nuisance waste of cotton ginning. A history of the industry reports that “many an antebellum cotton gin was setup on the bank of a stream so that the seed could be washed away,” spurring states to introduce measures such as Mississippi’s fine for dumping cottonseed “in any stream used for drinking or fishing purposes,” or for allowing it to accumulate within half a mile of a city or town (Nixon 1930, 73).

One way to dispose of cottonseed waste was to extract oil from it, initially a product in search of a use. After an idiosyncratic itinerary as an illegal adulterant to hog lard and cheap alternative to animal fats in soap-making in the nineteenth century, it came into its own as a household culinary item with the development of deodorized Wesson cooking oil in 1899 and Proctor & Gamble’s Crisco shortening in 1911 (Pendleton 1999). In making oil from cottonseed, cottonseed meal is left as a waste product. The meal was discarded or shipped to Europe to be used as animal fodder.