Sep 30, 2008
As long as I can remember, I have always loved animal fat. Whether
it's the perfect, silken round of beef fat in a rib eye steak, the
crunchy, greasy cracklings on the back of a pork shoulder roast or
the glistening molten fat coating a whole lamb on a spit, I can't
get enough of it.
Every morning these days I make two pieces of toast and smear each
of them with a big dollop of Oyama
pork and duck rillettes, which must be about 60
percent fat. I never skim the fat from a roasting pan before I make
gravy (What's the point of that?). I always cook and eat chicken
with the skin on. And I must be the only guy on the planet that
likes to make burgers from regular ground beef mixed with ground
pork.
So imagine my surprise and delight last week when I met with my
doctor to discuss the results of my latest physical. All indicators
from the blood work were positive, including an extremely low bad
cholesterol level and a high good cholesterol count.
I am a perfectly healthy 50 year old whose diet consists mainly of
fatty meat. Woo hoo!
With this in mind, I was further delighted to see an interview on
salon.com with Jennifer Mclagan, author of
Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With
Recipes. Animal fat, it turns out, is good for us and has
nothing to do with the health crisis facing North America these
days. Thank you, Jennifer, for lifting the guilt that's been
eating me for quite a few years. I can now tuck into that rib eye
with impunity, and continue to ask my favorite question at the
family dinner table whenever I see some fat that's been trimmed off
a steak: "Are you going to finish that?"