Harold McGee

Portable Energy: Fat

Appears in
On Food and Cooking
On Food and Cooking

By Harold McGee

Published 2004

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Like any machine, the muscle protein machine requires energy to run. Almost as important to animals as their propulsive machinery is an energy supply compact enough that it doesn’t weigh them down and impede their movement. It turns out that fat packs twice as many calories into a given weight as carbohydrates do. This is why mobile animals store up energy almost exclusively in fat, and unlike stationary plants, are rich rather than starchy.

Because fat is critical to animal life, most animals are able to take advantage of abundant food by laying down large stores of fat. Many species, from insects to fish to birds to mammals, gorge themselves in preparation for migration, breeding, or surviving seasonal scarcity. Some migratory birds put on 50% of their lean weight in fat in just a few weeks, then fly 3,000 to 4,000 kilometers from the northeast United States to South America without refueling. In seasonally cold parts of the world, fattening has been part of the resonance of autumn, the time when wild game animals are at their plumpest and most appealing, and when humans practice their cultural version of fattening, the harvest and storing of crops that will see them through winter’s scarcity. Humans have long exploited the fattening ability of our meat animals by overfeeding them before slaughter, to make them more succulent and flavorful.