The FDA to ban trans fats

Good.

Trans fats are a largely artificial fat.

 Margarine advertisement. This advertisement refers to it as Oleomargarine, and my father always referred to it as Oleo.

This blog, as we all know, theoretically focuses on historical matters.  In that context, we've occasionally touched on food. 

There isn't a shortage of fat in the food of the Western world, and there never really has been, save for periods of wartime.  That's not actually true of the entire globe, as there were some fat starved regions of the globe even relatively recently.  I doubt that's the case now.

Artificial fats have come about relatively recently.  Margarine was the big early one, and was an alternative to butter.  For some reason, and I don't really know what it was, my parents had switched to margarine when I was a kid and I grew up with it.  I didn't switch to butter until I was married, as my wife liked butter and it really is much better.   Anyhow, I understand margarine gained ground in the Great Depression, probably due to cheaper cost, and World War Two, when there were fat shortages.  I dimly recall butter being really expensive during the 1970s as well, which might be the reason that we went to margarine.

Now, we're such aficionados of butter that we buy Irish butter, which his super.

Anyhow, good riddance on industrial fat.  And perhaps that should lead us to ponder the nature of industrialized food to a greater extent.