I am trying to think of that myself and I can't come up with a good reason. It will be interesting to read what some of the other comments will be.

Lard used to be a very common staple in Western cooking. Even in Spain, where you would think that olive oil is the fat of choice, lard was widespread used by all families until the 20th Century. The switch here (as far as I know, but take this with a pinch of salt) is that industrialization made oil a more simple product to sell and distribute. Then, all the health claims have reinforced this belief.

It's healthier than butter (though I LOVE butter) and less disgusting than Crisco, so why not?

I don't understand it either. Lard from a well raised animal is way healthier for you than canola oil, which is grown with all sorts of nasty chemicals and put through terrible processing. And it tastes so much better! I get un-rendered lard from a local pork farmer who uses super sustainable and animal friendly farming practices. It's super cheap, even if rendering and processing the lard myself is kind of a pain.

I admit I had the same reaction before I knew 1. that pie crust is often made with shortening and 2. that lard is better for you than shortening. But I still think there is a negative connotation, I think many people would be surprised to know that lard is lower in saturated fat than butter is.

It shouldn't be a big deal, but I think the low fat movement totally villified lard over the years. I suspect the vegetarian movement played a role in our disgust for the product as well. So much so that many people would rather eat hydrogenated fats than lard.

Lard is probably a very low margin product (by-product even), and the manufacturers of oils and hydrogenated fats were probably all too happy to sell us the "benefits" of their added value PUFAs instead.

It's interesting that it's through the popularity of paleo and low-carb eating that we are beginning to understand that lard is not the cardiovascular enemy that 30 years of indoctrination have brainwashed so many people to believe.

In addition to vegetarians, it would be very tricky for people who keep kosher. The fats around kidneys aren't kosher. The majority of fats from large livestock are not kosher. Hence the use of rendered fat from fowl in Ashkenazi cooking. Even then, you have to swap butter for margarine and once the margarine comes out its all down hill from there.

There is also an ick factor of the term. Yes, I realize that many other things we use regularly are also fats of some kind but the distance through naming is useful.

"You want to use a high-quality leaf lard which is garnered from around the kidneys and is a higher quality than the lard you'd just walk into a corner market and pick up."

If I can't find high-quality leaf lard at the market, where can I find it? Butcher shop? Whole Foods? Online?

My main objection is that it's an animal product, and I'm a vegetarian. I used to have an objection to even vegetable shortening, but I've started using Earth Balance vegan shortening in frosting and pie recipes.

I think the lard distaste comes 100% from the ick factor. Animal fat in your food.

Lard and beef tallow are both absolutely delicious, but most of the lard on the market is hydrogenated without obvious marking (transfat!). I cook veggies in lard, add it to eggs, and use it in high heat applications when olive oil would smoke and break down.

Lard was targetted by the public when people used poorly constructed observational studies (not clinical trials) to "prove" that saturated animal fats cause heart disease, cancer, obesity, budget deficit, and awful romantic comedies. Now the stigma against animal fat is strong enough that we call fat people lard-a**!

If you can't find a good source of lard, try storing rendered pork fat from chops, bacon, shoulder, etc. and using that.

Isn't Crisco made from vegetables?

i agree - lard is so much better than crisco. i could make lard (though yeah, kind of a pain), but vegetable shortening is something that requires a whole load of chemicals and industrial processing. and it has no taste.

for anyone near columbus, OH, Just Pies makes amazing pies here - flaky, tender crusts made with lard. old school and awesome.

This is interesting. I grew up vegetarian, and use Crisco-type shortening when called for. I don't like finding out that there is lard in things I wasn't expecting, but I thought most people were ok with some amount of lard or Crisco in things like baked goods.

"Vegetable" shortening as well as "vegetable" oil are both actually composed almost exclusively of blends of cottonseed oil, corn oil (extracted from husks, not kernels), and soybean oil, most of which are extracted using harsh chemicals and/or high heats that cause all sorts of nastiness.

Praise the lard! If you eat meat, you're sure as heck better off eating a lard pie crust than a Crisco one. Healthier, and you don't get that greasy film in your mouth.

I've always wanted to make pie crust myself, but fear all-butter crusts and hate vegetable shortening. I've always been curious to try lard, but the room-temp stuff packaged on shelves at our local ethnic market kind of scares me. Is it partially hydrogenated?

I, too, would like to know where to get decent "leaf lard."

I think it's just because lard is fat and fat has become very demonized in our culture. Even though we know butter is full of fat, it's *butter* so we can deal with it. Lard is literal fat with nothing to hide it and no other qualities to excuse it. People can't get over the mental block. I would be curious to use some but I don't even know where to find it, (I've never seen it at the grocery store), which only furthers its alienation.

I read an interesting article about this very topic a while ago. It mentions everything has been brought up in the comments, and believes that the reason lard is so frowned upon is due to media attacks against it in the '50s when animal fat was linked to coronary heart disease:

"But shortening really vanquished lard in the 1950s when researchers first connected animal fat in the diet to coronary heart disease. By the '90s, Americans had been indoctrinated to mainline olive oil, but shortening was still the go-to solid fat over lard or even butter in far too many cookbooks. "

and:

"Only one thing may put lard back on the slippery slope: Google the word as news, and it might as well be lard-fearing 1969 all over again. Newspaper food pages still routinely advise using olive or canola oils rather than "fattening" or "artery-clogging" lard. Or they print idiotic utterances like "you get all the lard you need at McDonald's" (a chain that actually abandoned beef tallow for frying its fries only to be saddled with a trans-fatty substitute)."

Full article: http://www.slate.com/id/2219314/

It's the name, "Laaaarrrdd" it just sounds so fat and lazy and mockable. Surprised to see these reactions, but it makes sense, if 3 options in front of you are bad for your health but one is at least natural, may as well go for that one at least part of the time.

I'm a vegetarian, so obviously I don't want lard in my pie crust. Nor do people who keep kosher/halal. I haven't a clue why the average bacon-loving omnivore would shun a lard pie crust.

But if you are in business, the customer is always right. You can make lard crusts and try to convert people, you can make all butter or shortening-butter (or all-shortening) crusts and just skip the issue. Or you can lie because it's no big deal, get caught by some rabbi/iman/committed vegan with a Twitter account, and watch your business wither away.

I've been trying to find a good source of lard, or fat to render myself, but have been unsuccessful thus far. Crisco has no place in my house or my body and I use butter instead. Bacon fat is also amazingly tasty with a long shelf life and high smoke point. And if I recall correctly, all these fats have a good amount of vitamins in them. Real food FTW.

Crisco is a chemical abomination; lard is all-natural and healthy.

In our house, we won't touch anything made with Crisco, but have no problems with lard. (but then, we've looked into lipids research)

My issue is just not wanting to be surprised that food I thought was vegetarian/kosher(ish) really isn't. I don't eat pork products and have actually gotten kind of paranoid about checking the ingredients on baked goods. I guess I'd just like to see labeling to indicate when foods that aren't obviously meat-based contain animal products.

So I just purchased a pig, and I was given my lard back. Can I just use the lard? or do I have to do something with it to make it useable? What do I do with it? Any advice?

Ditto to what cmcinnyc said. To me, lard seems like an unnecessary way to ruin an otherwise tasty vegetarian product, but why the average meat-eater wouldn't want animal fat in their pie, I don't know.

I think the shortening marketing people won the war. Think about it- is "lardass" a term of endearment? No, and regular lard - rendered from doG knows what- is nasty.

LEAF lard on the other hand is a whole different ballgame: The best pie I ever had was made with gnarly-looking apples from a backyard tree, a lard crust and it was cooked in a wood oven. That was probably 40 years ago and I haven't had anything even close, since.

The same sort of people that won't eat lard (not vegetarians, obviously) buy the leanest meat they can find.

Fat has flavor -- but some people are more interested in trends than in taste.

As 4-H members growing up in the Midwest, we were discouraged from using lard for pies or cookies due to its tendency to become rancid if not stored properly. Previous generations had used the traditional method of storing rendered lard in crocks kept in cool basements or root cellars. With warm weather this would lead to fats becoming rancid over time.

I started experimenting with variations of pie crusts and found I liked the results with lard. The lard you find in stores is partially hydrogenated to make it firmer. Our local meat locker renders their lard and sells it by the gallon or 1/2 gallon. I use a 1/2 cup scoop to divide it into balls that I double wrap and freeze so they are ready to be used in my pie recipe. A half gallon is enough for 14 double crust pies. The quality is great and I know the animals have been grown locally.

My only issue is that in my head, it makes everything taste like meat. So that apple pie would also taste meaty. Which is just not what I want. I realize it's probably not the case, but that's my perception.

Leaf Lard is great to make pies with and, with the addition of equal parts of butter, I use it 95% of the time. But, if you are a vegetarian, an all butter crust is the way to go. And, if a vegan, Earth Balance products are good. The main thing is to Bake (with a capital "B") and not to get caught up in the minutia of ingredients, sizes and types of pie pans, ovens, etc. Be Happy, Make Pie!
www.artofthepie.com

A few more theories.

1. For many people, lard was associated with the poor. It seems that Crisco was enthusiastically embraced by the growing middle class, to the exclusion of lard; whereas poor folk tended to continue to use lard or other forms of animal fat. Not sure why...

2. Lard can go rancid, and has a shorter shelf-life than Crisco. It's probable that many people use lard that is slightly "off" without realizing it, thus making the finished dish taste unpleasant. People then make a bad association with lard, not realizing that it was spoiled.

3. I also think that the ick factor is at play... "animal fat in my dessert?" Case in point: beef suet tends to elicit an even stronger response of revulsion than lard does. And of course, anyone who observes kosher or halal laws is apt to be disgusted by anything derived from swine.

Personally, I have been dying to taste a pie crust made with leaf lard, but haven't had that pleasure yet. I've never cooked with lard in my life, because I don't trust the freshness of grocery story lard.

The thought that lard could be lurking in pies everywhere grosses me out and makes me sad...

I'm all for flavour, health and desert, but as a vegetarian it's a no-go for me. I'd rather just not have it.

Thanks for pointing this out - I'll be sure to inspect/ask about anything I'm unsure of. If anyone runs a bakery, please remember that most vegetarians/vegans would rather know about animal ingredients than be mislead. As @cmcinnyc pointed out, you only need one prolific vegetarian Twitter user to cause a lot of ruckus.

Natural, unprocessed lard is wonderful for baking if you have access to a pasture-based piggery. But it is hard, hard, hard for most people to find. And the places that do have know its worth so it quite expensive, easily the cost of pastured butter.

Processed lard (such as shelf stable Farmer John) is terrible stuff.

I adore all butter pie crust but when I do have real, good lard I sub in a little for a special crust.

Beef tallow is really inferior for baking sweets or neutral items but has a place in some savoury applications. Even hard to find.

To those asking about rendering lard, there is an excellent guide at serious eats:

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/03/how-to-render-leaf-lard-welsh-griddle-cakes-recipe.html

Fatback is also mentioned in the article, and I can attest that rendered fatback is divine in cooking, especially if you get it from a good source.

Lard is wonderful. Crisco is evil. The end. :)

I say "whatever" to lard making the best crusts. When my grandma moved back to MN she got to eat my pies and always loved them. After a few years she was telling her garden club how my pie crusts were the best she ever had. Finally she asked if she could watch how I made them to learn my secrets. She nearly hit the floor when I pulled the butter out of the fridge. She thought for sure I was using lard and never put together that I wouldn't since I was vegetarian. She cracked me up.

My dad loves making pies and he always used half lard/half butter in his crusts. But my fiance keeps kosher so I use all butter or buy vegetarian pie crusts.

Though I love the taste and characteristics of cooking with lard I have friends and family who are vegetarians and vegans. About a year ago I set out to find an alternative to lard for pie and pasty crusts. I ended up finding Spectrum Organics Natural Shortening, it tastes real good and is great to work with. It has a kind of dry consistency to it, so cutting it in is really slick. Even to this day, though I like lard, there is a little bit of a yuck factor. Especially when I found out the best Mexican refried beans are using it!

i've made a lot of pies. i've used shortening, lard, butter, and combinations thereof. I like the texture that lard produces, but the flavor is not so great for me. i'll stick with butter, pun intended....

i'll have to try it...did someone say quiche for next week? :)

Thanks for all of your wonderful comments and feedback today...learned a little something!

Because hidden pork is a huge issue. There are many religious groups that don't eat pork. If you're putting lard in the crust, just TELL PEOPLE.

There's always hidden pork: pinto beans at chipotle, or "natural casings" on chicken sausages. It just needs to be clearly labelled.

Ugh, as a vegetarian, it'd be nice not to have to worry about hidden dead animals in desserts.

I agree with username26 and Violet Veil and GradStudent. I hate "hidden ingredients" in things and always read labels to make sure I'm not eating something that shouldn't be in my diet. Blech.

I totally agree with Betsy in Minnesota - I make wonderful pie crusts with butter and a bit of oil (usually a nut oil). I am always asked for my recipe. The Marge website says the pies have "butter crusts" - is there lard in those? If so, that would be super misleading.