Anyone that has ever been involved with sports has had a coach yell “get the lead out” usually paired with an anatomical part of your body that is synonymous with your neighbor’s donkey. That phrase has been used “since Hector was a pup” and generally means to get moving faster.

Many attribute “getting the lead out” to soldiers who had to reload lead balls faster or, more likely, to horse racing where lead was added to the saddles to even up the differences in the jockey’s weight and thus even the competition.

But wherever it came from, it's been used a lot to get slowly moving people into a more generous state of propulsion.

Just the other day Ol’ Dutch got to thinking -- a dangerous proposition according to Miss Trixie – about what he had read on the Internet about lard. Yes, that lowly concoction made from the fat of animals that grandma used to cook everything from grits to fried chicken.

Old fashioned lard, just like a lot of things that we were sold a bill of goods for lately, was given a death sentence many years ago in favor of mass-produced oils. We were fed a continuous crock of bull about the dangers of lard and the great things to come from the new oils. We were then given Corn Oil, Canola Oil, Vegetable Oil, Sunflower Oil, Rape seed Oil and of course to go with that last one, Virgin Olive Oil.

Not to be outdone on the last one we also have Extra Virgin Olive Oil but for the life of me I don't have a clue how you can rate virginity on any kind of scale regardless of its purity. But they do and people buy it for an inflated price.

But regardless of semantics, the food industry proclaimed the dangers of using lard and they laughed all the way to the bank with the proceeds from the sale of the bottled oils that they produced. Now it seems that using lard like your grandmother did is better for you than all the processed, preservative-laden slickness they sell in clear bottles at the store.

This rush to supposedly better products also included the replacement of butter with oleo, margarine and other unrecognizable mixtures of chemicals which were supposed to be better for you. And of course, they now find out that the plain old butter is better for you.

And you may ask just why they would do such a thing and I can tell you this. No matter the situation in this old world, if you follow the money trail long enough you will come to the reason something occurs. So yes, people made a killing producing oils from all kinds of things and selling them to people under the guise that it was better for you than what your own past generations had used and prospered on. And they seemed to do just fine too.

Of course, the key to anything we consume is not so much what we eat but how much of it we let go down the old gullet. But I am sad to think that for most of my life I have been deprived of the scrumptious goodness of fried chicken cooked in a cast iron skillet filled with lard.

I cannot see that eating all those other concoctions has really benefited me a whole lot either and that adds to the disappointment that I have for missing out on so much good food. Of late Ol’ Dutch has had to put a whip to himself and Miss Trixie to “get the lead out” as we are building a house and doing a lot of the work ourselves.

And now I am going to start a new campaign to “get the lard out” and start having some tasty fried chicken, okra, steaks, gravy and cornbread. I’ll at least be living the last years of my life in comfort and satisfaction.

Kevin Kirkpatrick and his Yorkie, Cooper, fish, hunt, ATV or hike daily. His email is [email protected]. Additional news can be found at www.troutrepublic.com or on Twitter at TroutRepublic.