Phil Leininger retweetledi
Dry dripping on bread, with a pinch of salt, was, for approximately four hundred years, one of the most common things a British child ate when he came in from school.
The dripping was what was left in the pan after the Sunday roast. Beef fat, mostly, sometimes with a dark jelly at the bottom where the juices had settled. Your mother spooned it into a white enamel bowl, covered it with a plate, and kept it on the cold shelf in the pantry. It lasted a week. Sometimes two. It fried the Monday bubble and squeak, the Tuesday eggs, the Wednesday onions. On Thursday afternoon, before it ran out, you got a slice of bread spread with the stuff, a pinch of salt cracked on top, and that was tea.
It was a treat. It was also just food. A child in 1930 would have looked at you blankly if you had suggested that beef dripping on bread was in any way remarkable. It was what was in the bowl. It was free. It tasted of Sunday lunch three days later.
Beef dripping is approximately 50% monounsaturated fat, 40% saturated fat, and carries the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K from the pasture the cow grazed on. The cow ate grass. The grass had been growing on British soil since the end of the last Ice Age. The fat was the end product of ten thousand years of continuous ruminant grazing. A slice of bread and dripping delivered, for roughly the price of the bread, a dose of fat-soluble vitamins and usable calories that the rest of the British afternoon was going to need.
Nobody got heart disease from bread and dripping. The British cardiovascular mortality rate of 1930, when almost every family ate dripping several times a week, was a fraction of what it is now. The British obesity rate of 1930 was essentially zero. The British type 2 diabetes rate was so low that the Royal College of Physicians considered the condition a medical curiosity.
Then the dripping was quietly removed.
First by margarine, invented in 1869 by a French chemist trying to feed the army, mass-marketed in Britain after the First World War as a modern, clean, scientific alternative to animal fat. Then by Crisco-style vegetable shortenings in the 1930s. Then, decisively, from the 1960s onwards, by the dietary advice that saturated animal fat caused heart disease. The advice was wrong. The research behind it was flawed, selectively published, and in some cases deliberately manipulated. The corrections have been appearing in the peer-reviewed literature for thirty years. The public-health guidelines have not been updated.
Bread and dripping was replaced, in the British kitchen, by margarine on bread. Then by low-fat spread on bread. Then by skimmed-milk spread on industrially processed bread from the Chorleywood process. Then by a plastic tub of something labelled "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter," made from a blend of palm oil, rapeseed oil, emulsifiers, and flavouring, spread on a slice of Kingsmill so pale and so soft it could be balled up in one hand.
The cardiovascular disease rates climbed through the same decades.
The obesity rates climbed through the same decades.
The type 2 diabetes rates went from medical curiosity to national crisis through the same decades.
The fat your great-grandmother scraped out of the Sunday roast pan and spread on her child's tea was never the problem. The problem was what replaced it. Industrial seed oil, chemically extracted from seeds using hexane solvent, deodorised, bleached, and sold in a plastic bottle as a health food. A substance no human population had consumed in meaningful quantities before 1910, and which now makes up roughly 20% of the total calories in the average British diet.
The dripping bowl on the cold shelf was a complete piece of nutritional engineering, evolved over centuries, running on the natural waste stream of the Sunday roast, costing nothing, delivering real nutrients, and causing none of the conditions it was eventually blamed for.
It was thrown out of the British kitchen on the basis of a mistake.
The mistake has never been corrected.
The bowl is still at your grandmother's house, probably, at the back of a cupboard, unused since about 1985.
The cow that built Britain is still in the field.
English
