The Aesthetics Advisor

In the early 1900s, Americans consumed about   18 pounds of butter   per person per year—and that doesn’t include the butterfat they got from whole milk, cream, and cheese. Today that number stands at about five pounds, a slight increase over the last few years from a low of four pounds per person per year. What happened? Why did butter consumption in the U.S. plummet? What happened is that America became electrified and stopped using candles. I am not kidding, this is the genesis of butter’s decline. An American company called Procter and Gamble had figured out a way to solidify liquid cottonseed oil—a waste product of the cotton industry—into a hard fat that could burn in candles. The process was called partial hydrogenation, which reconfigured the molecules in liquid oils into an unnatural type of fat called trans fats, which are hard at room temperature. Since their candle business was declining, Procter and Gamble decided to  promote partially hydrogenated ...