Fat has made a comeback in the kitchen. Not long ago we were told to avoid it.
“It will clog your arteries!”
Now people are looking again at traditional cooking fats — tallow, lard, butter — and asking how we got the story wrong somewhere along the way.
From a conscientious consumer turned farmer’s perspective, the logic is simple: humans have cooked with animal fats for thousands of years. Beef tallow, lamb tallow and pork lard are about as close to “single ingredient food” as you can get — rendered fat, nothing more. Compare that to many modern seed oils, which often require heavy industrial processing, solvents, deodorising, bleaching and refining before they ever reach a bottle.
That doesn’t automatically make one good and the other bad, but it’s worth acknowledging that they come from two very different worlds.
In Wolki World we use heuristics to help us make decisions.
Some examples of these heuristics are;
“Would grandma recognise/eat this?”
“Simple ingredients are better”
“Natural is better”
When choosing a cooking fat, the first practical question is heat stability. Different fats behave differently once the pan gets hot.
Beef tallow — solid at room temperature, high smoke point (around 200–220°C depending on refinement), very stable for frying and roasting.
Lamb tallow — similar behaviour to beef, slightly firmer and robust flavour, excellent for high-heat cooking.
Pork lard — softer fat, melts earlier - often going runny at room temperature, still handles high heat well but tends to suit roasting, baking and everyday cooking where you want a little more neutrality.
The reason these fats perform well is their fatty-acid structure. They contain a mix of saturated and monounsaturated fats, which are generally more stable under heat than highly polyunsaturated oils. Some seed oils have respectable smoke points on paper — but stability isn’t just about smoke. It’s also about how easily the fat oxidises when exposed to repeated heat and oxygen.
Animal fats naturally carry fat-soluble vitamins like A, D, E and K, along with the lipids that help absorb them. These vitamins require fat to be utilised by the body — which is why traditional cooking often paired vegetables or lean meats with animal fat in the first place. Modern dietary guidelines in the US have shifted away from the old “low fat everything” messaging and now focus more on diet quality and dietary patterns rather than blanket fat avoidance.
Did anyone else LOVE seeing the food pyramid literally flipped on its head? I did!
I’ll let you be the judge. Here is a birds eye view of the processes.
Tallow and lard:
rendered slowly
minimal processing (just melting, essentially)
one ingredient
used nose-to-tail as part of the whole animal
Many seed oils:
extracted at industrial scale with huge chemical inputs
refined, bleached and deodorised
often heavily processed before becoming neutral-tasting cooking oils
Animal fats are surprisingly practical once you understand them:
Keep them sealed and away from sunlight.
Cool pantry storage works for the short term; refrigeration can extend life.
Clean utensils matter — moisture is the enemy.
One of the reasons these fats were historical staples is that they store well without needing complicated handling.
There’s something people don’t often consider when talking about fat quality — fat carries what the animal experiences. Certain medications or chemicals used in agriculture can be fat-soluble. If you’re making food or skincare from fat, that matters. On our farm we choose not to use those products, because we want the fat itself to be as clean and natural as possible. Good fat starts long before it hits a pan or a jar.
If you’re looking for convenience, inexpensive and neutral flavour, seed oils dominate supermarkets for a reason.
Or maybe you want nourishing food with provenance that you can consume with confidence?
The real question isn’t fat versus seed oils. It’s whether we understand where our food comes from, how it’s processed, and what happens when we cook with it.
We cook the way we farm — simple ingredients, minimal processing, and respect for the basics that have successfully fed humans for a long time.
