Fats and Oils: New Trends

While the food industry devoted its energies to its laboratories and to Madison Avenue, a food-focused minority created a market for more obscure fats and oils. In upscale grocery stores European and European-style butter joined tubs of duck fat, jars of avocado oil, and imported tins of walnut oil. Chefs in American restaurants experimented with French grapeseed oil, Moroccan argan oil, and Austrian pumpkin oil. An average grocery store stocks dozens of types of oil, butter, margarine, and even the lard that was so indispensable to America’s founding mothers.