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In the food culture of the mainland, edible lard has a history of nearly 1,000 years, and in the memory of the post-70s and 80s, the oil residue of refining lard is a rare delicacy.
Li Shizhen's "Compendium of Materia Medica" also included a number of recipes for using lard as medicine, and recorded its beneficial effects on the stomach and intestines and regulating the five organs.
However, lard has been labeled as easy to cause cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, and has become an unhealthy representative, causing people to avoid lard, and the market has been replaced by various vegetable oils.
Is lard really unhealthy? As the dusty history was revealed, a conspiracy against China's grain and oil also surfaced......
Is lard really unhealthy?
Pigs are one of the first domesticated poultry and have been the main source of meat for people since ancient times.
According to the data, the total pork consumption in mainland China in 2022 is 54.475 million tons, accounting for half of the world's pork consumption, ranking first in the world. It is enough to see the status of pigs on the table of the Chinese people.
Lard is made from the fat of the pig's body, "lard", which has a lustrous color, and when cooked, a little can greatly increase the flavor of the food.
The consumption of lard has a long history, which can be traced back to the Shang and Zhou dynasties, and it was recorded in "Zhou Li•Tianguan Mound Zai" that beef venison should be cooked with lard in autumn.
In addition, in the "Compendium of Materia Medica" and "Yellow Emperor's Neijing", there are also records about the efficacy of lard, which can not only treat chapped skin, but also have a good effect on external cold, wind heat and other diseases.
Before the 80s in the mainland, basically every household would have a large rhubarb porcelain basin filled with lard. In that era of scarcity of material resources, a serving of lard fried rice and lard noodles was delicious.
However, after the 80s, lard gradually disappeared from people's tables, and vegetable oils, led by soybean oil, quickly occupied the market. What is it that has changed people's eating habits over the years Xi
The origins of it all started with a study in the United States. In 1945, after the death of US President Roosevelt due to a heart attack, the US government began to organize people to increase research on cardiovascular diseases.
At this time, the American scientist Anker Keyes proposed that cardiovascular diseases are caused by fat.
Between 1958 and 1983, Anker Case collected 16 sets of data from seven different countries, and through studies looking at the target diet, physical health, and mortality, he found that dietary fat was directly related to the rate of cardiovascular disease.
Anker Keys's research was strongly promoted by the U.S. government, and he began to call for a low-fat diet. Holding high the banner of health, the common people also have deep faith in his doctrine. Anker Case's influence in the industry is skyrocketing, and he has also appeared on the cover of Time magazine.
But the vigorous promotion of low-fat diets has not reduced the incidence of related diseases in the United States, and the consumption of fats can cause cardiovascular disease is just a dosage aside, and Anker Keys's conclusion is nothing more than a hoax.
He collected dietary data from 22 countries, all of which are characterized by high fat in their daily diets, but have low rates of cardiovascular disease.
Anker Keith only took the part of the data he wanted, and naturally came to the conclusion that fat causes cardiovascular disease.
According to a study in the prestigious journal Nature, in 1980, China had one of the lowest cholesterol levels in the world, but now it is one of the highest. Even if vegetable oil is used instead of lard, the number of people with three highs in the mainland has not decreased.
With the development of science, lard has gradually washed away grievances. Lard is mainly composed of saturated fatty acids, linoleic acid, and oleic acid, which are the source of energy for the growth of the human body and an important component of the synthesis of human fat.
It is easy to affect people's health is the long-term excessive consumption of oil, which will lead to the occurrence of cardiovascular diseases, not that only eating lard can lead to three highs.
The dispute between lard and vegetable oil is not simply whether it is healthy or not, but behind it is a war of grain and oil between countries.
A grain and oil war without gunpowder
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once put forward a famous theorem: whoever controls food, oil, and currency means who can control the world.
The reason why the United States has become a global hegemon is that it holds the lifeblood of all countries, tying its own currency to oil, and three of the world's four major grain merchants are American.
The British "Guardian" once said: As long as you live, you will never be able to escape the world's four major grain merchants. The people live on food, and who can skip food?
The grain war is the real victory that can be won without blood, and the collapse of the Soviet Union is a good reflection. In the eighties of the last century, nearly two-thirds of the foreign exchange in the Soviet Union was obtained by selling oil, and then buying grain through foreign exchange.
The Soviet government at that time believed that if the food problem could be solved by purchasing, then there would be no need to develop agriculture.
As a result, the Soviet Union focused most of its energy on heavy industry, which directly led to the continuous decline of Soviet agriculture, which was tantamount to handing over its own lifeblood to someone else.
Naturally, the United States did not miss this opportunity, and at this time the US hegemonic system in the Middle East had already been initially established, so the United States asked the Middle Eastern countries to increase oil production, causing the price of oil to plummet, and the Soviet Union, which relied on oil in exchange for foreign exchange, was severely attacked, and more than $10 billion of foreign exchange was evaporated in an instant.
In addition, they also took the opportunity to raise the price of grain, and the Soviet Union had no money to buy grain, and the Soviet people could not buy food and had to go to the garbage heap. Faced with this situation, Soviet officials even went to the United States and even expressed their willingness to accept expired food.
But capital is ruthless, not to mention that the United States is still the initiator, they will not send charcoal in the snow, they will only take the opportunity to fall into the ground, and finally this once smash hit empire collapsed.
The end of the Soviet Union also sounded the alarm bell for us, but we were still caught off guard, and this defeat was the "soybean war".
Soybeans, also known as soybeans, are the most common food in our lives, and the main growing areas of soybeans in mainland China are in the northeast region.
After 1995, with the improvement of living standards, the population of the mainland began to grow rapidly, and the amount of domestic soybeans could not meet the needs of the people, so they began to import soybeans.
The high quality of soybeans in the United States, coupled with the subsidies of the U.S. government, has made the price of imported soybeans even cheaper than the domestic price, so domestic companies have begun to import large quantities. There will be no pie in the sky, and all the United States has done is to control the domestic market.
Domestic soybeans were affected, and the planting began to decrease, and soybean production fell from the first place in the world to the fourth, and the dependence on American soybeans gradually deepened.
In August 2003, the soybean harvest in the United States was about to be harvested, and many countries were waiting for American soybeans, especially Chinese companies. As a result, the U.S. Department of Agriculture suddenly announced that soybean production would be the lowest in two decades due to weather conditions.
At this time, the capital of Wall Street heard the wind and began to speculate on the price of soybeans in the world, which rose rapidly from 2,300 yuan/ton to 4,400 yuan/ton in 2004.
Seeing that the price of soybeans remains high, and there is even a risk of rising again, mainland enterprises can only join forces to buy 8 million tons of soybeans at a high level.
Just after Chinese companies snapped up soybeans, the U.S. Department of Agriculture once again announced that it would increase soybean inventories, and capital began to cooperate with the reduction of soybean prices, and in less than two years, soybeans fell from 4,300 yuan per ton to 2,200 yuan.
As a result, many enterprises were in difficulty or even went bankrupt, and the four major grain merchants took the opportunity to buy them. Since then, the upstream, midstream and downstream of the domestic soybean industry have been firmly controlled by foreign capital, accounting for nearly 85% of the market. The Arowana, orchids, and so on that we are familiar with are all brands controlled by foreign companies.
After learning the lessons of soybeans, the mainland was approved by the State Council to become the China National Grain Reserves Group, which clearly stipulated the red line of 1.8 billion yuan of cultivated land to maintain grain stability on the mainland.
How could American capital, which had tasted the sweetness of soybeans, give up and once again point the finger at wheat. First of all, they purchased grain from the countries surrounding the mainland and raised the price of grain, but the central grain reserves were not fooled by them at all.
The grain reserves in the central region continued to be sold, and the four major grain merchants continued to eat in, and in the later period, they even threw them away every other day, resulting in the four major grain merchants not being sure how much grain reserves the mainland had.
At this time, the China Grain Reserve directly and openly stated that the mainland's grain reserves are enough for more than 1 billion Chinese to eat for an entire year! In addition, a new round of grain harvest in China is about to occur, and the four major grain merchants can only stop there, losing hundreds of billions of dollars.
Digging deep holes and accumulating grain, food security is the lifeline of the country, and this lifeline can only be in our own hands!
Bibliography:
[1] Lv Xinye, Ji Xianqing, Rethinking China's Food Security Problem
[2] "Heilongjiang Grain", unveiling the mystery of the four major international grain merchants
[3] Fan Fuhao, lard, vegetable oil, who is the health killer?