A few years ago I read a cookbook called Fat, a celebration of flavor by Jennifer McLagan. Luckily for me, there was plenty of sage growing in the garden behind my kitchen, so I decided to try the sage butter sauce recipe with pasta. Fry 30 fresh, whole sage leaves in two sticks of butter on medium heat for about 10 minutes, just until the butter begins to brown and the sage leaves turn crispy. Meanwhile, boil 3/4 pound of pasta in salted water and drain when done. Pour the sauce over the hot, cooked pasta and serve with a simple green salad. I added steamed beet greens to the pasta as well. I’m not sure what I was expecting but the results were startling in every way. The texture and flavor were beyond heavenly.
The sage had lost its tangy, sharp, fuzziness and been transformed into something much softer around the edges. The gentle, flavorful crunch paired with the smooth, chewy pasta was unbelievably satisfying. We ate nothing more that evening — no popcorn, no chocolate, no chocolate chip cookies, and certainly no ice cream.
Two sticks of butter?! It sounds like a lot, though each serving ended up with significantly less, of course. A small portion is extraordinarily satisfying; a large portion is overdoing it. Your body needs fat, and it will get it where it can if it is not provided with nourishing sources. The “French paradox,” the observation that the French remain slender despite the quantity of butter and cream in their diet, is a paradox only if you believe that fat is the enemy. There is no paradox. Fat nourishes.
Fat also satisfies. Fat is absorbed by a pathway that uses virtually no insulin. That’s why, one hundred years ago, before there were any medications for diabetes, the ONLY treatment for diabetes was a high-fat diet. Fat is dense with nutrients, vitamins and, most of all, flavor.
The low-fat, no-fat message is a major contributor to America’s diabetes and obesity problem.
You may already know about the variety of nourishing fats in olive oil, avocados, dark chocolate, nuts (and nut butters), seeds (like pumpkin or sunflower), and deep sea fatty fish. If not, I hope you’ll think about including more of them in your diet.
The butterfat in dairy products is unique in part because it contains an unusually diverse collection of fatty acids. Of note, butterfat contains a particular group of “short-chain” fatty acids that have been shown to play an important role in gut health. The fatty acids in dairy fat serve as building blocks for the ceaseless repair and remodeling that goes on all our lives; and it should not surprise you to learn that they are especially important for the youngest mammals, who are particularly busy building their bones, muscles, nerves, capillaries, brain tissue, skin, and other organs in the months and years after birth.
Certain other fats are not food. These are the fats that were invented in the 20th century. Like soybean oil, corn oil, “vegetable” oil, and cottonseed oil. Ask yourself when cotton entered the food supply. And canola stands for CANadian Oil Association. That’s not the name of a food.
Where are these fats found? In ultra processed synthetic products such as margarine, Crisco, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, coffee whiteners. These products are not food. They are food-like, but they do not nourish you. You may put them into your mouth and swallow, but they do not sustain you. Let’s talk about margarine. Any way you slice it, margarine is not butter. Most margarines are made from hydrogenated soybean oil. Sometimes with a little bit of butter. But don’t be fooled.
The word margarine is derived from the word margalit, a Biblical Hebrew word for pearl. Margarine exits the machine a pearly gray color. My mother, born in 1936, remembered when “oleo,” the original name for margarine, was sold with a tiny bead of red food coloring. Kneading the red bead into the gray, waxy material, as she did with her thoroughly modern Aunt Helen, slowly converted the gray wax into a yellowish product that more closed resembled butter. Why the red bead? In those days, the dairy lobby (Big Butter) was more powerful than the soybean lobby. Today it’s the reverse (Big Margarine), so the red bead has gone the way of the icebox.
One way to identify products that are not really foods is by their names. Instead of being called by names our great-ancestors would have recognized (like butter and yogurt), they have fanciful names with healthful, pseudo-scientific, old-fashioned, or playful connotations that are meant to evoke all kinds of warm, cozy feelings.
Product categories like margarine, with its endlessly creative, industry-generated names, are not food. Think Smart Balance (seesaw), Blue Bonnet (hi granny!), Promise (not really), Country Crock (old-fashioned, homemade), Benecol (bene means good, col evokes cholesterol), or I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (why not—we just told you). These are not foods, and your own granny would likely have told you the same.
One last point. When I choose animal-based fats, such as dairy from cows or eggs from poultry, I always do my best to choose products that come from the most well-nourished animals to which I have access. I know these products cost more, but if that means I eat better quality animal-based food less often, and eat more vegetables and beans at other times, that’s a win for all of us. Remember this: You are what you eat, but you are also what what-you-eat eats. Any time you eat anything that ate a substandard diet, you concentrate it up the food chain. Into you.