Up until the 1990’s many commercial products like crackers and cookies used lard as the shortening.
Most ingredient labels would say “vegetable shortening and/or lard”.
Today few items use lard as the shortening. Why the change? Was it for health concerns, cost, or both? Or is it something else?
A mix of real and perceived health concerns. You’ve probably noticed how processed food products have diminished in taste and texture over the years. People easily convince themselves that removing some components from junk food magically makes it healthy, so the food manufacturers love this game. The cost factor is interesting. These changes correlate with business decisions from major agricultural companies who have the ability to control supply. It’s hard to evaluate how much palm oil and lard would now cost compared to the processed oils that are now the only ones available in quantities sufficient to meet demand and provide volume pricing.
Also, eliminating lard opens up vegetarians as customers (assuming the rest of the item isn’t meat-based). Not an overwhelming demographic, but there are enough of them that a smart manufacturer wouldn’t want to eliminate them unnecissarily.
In regards to lard, this is most important. Lard rules out Jewish and Muslim consumers as well as vegetarians.
While these groups are significant within the US, they’re huge in international terms. Companies are working hard to be successful on a global scale.
This is true. I grew up in a religion that kept kosher. I remember having to check every box of cookies or crackers at the store to make sure they didn’t have lard in them. I remember not being allowed to eat certain things because the stupid ingredient list said and/or on it.
But why did it take until about the 1990’s for manufactures of these items to dump lard?
Because the 1990s was the era when the American Muslim political bloc arose. I lived here near Washington DC at one of the epicenters of political American Islam and watched while that was happening. When the halal activists added their political shoulder to the anti-pork wagon being pushed by the kashrut activists, they all together got it going. The political American Hindu groups joined in too, because beef as a sneak ingredient tweaked halalists, kashrutists, and Hinduists alike. Even if not necessarily directly allied with one another, the cumulative force of their movements toward a given goal still added up to real influence, over this one specific issue.
Pork marketing changed also - the “other white meat” meant that pig-raising methods changed to produce lower-fat hogs. Hence, less lard being generated.