You cannot read a book or article on nutrition nowadays without someone claiming to have found ‘the new superfood’. Delicacies such as seaweed, cranberries, rocket, kiwifruit and asparagus have all recently had their five minutes of fame but people seem to have forgotten the original and best superfood of them all, I refer of course to lard. Rich in all sorts of vitamins from A to K, packed with calcium to build stronger bones as well as other trace elements such as magnesium and zinc, americium, plutonium and lead this old favorite is still unbeaten in terms of nutrition and health giving properties.

‘But what about the calories!’ I hear you cry. Well, as with the confusion between good (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated) fats and bad (trans fatty acids and saturated) fats, the latest research is starting to show that there are good and bad calories as well and (yes you guessed it) lard is made up almost entirely of these recently discovered slimming calories. When you come to think of it it makes perfect sense. When was the last time you saw an obese person eating a lard sandwich?

Studies have also shown a distinct correlation between the amount of lard you eat and your annual income. Simply put, the more lard you eat the richer you tend to be. Now a sceptic might suggest that this is because rich people have a tendency to appreciate the finer things in life, such as lard, so in the interests of science we got an impoverished orphan and fed him on a diet of lard. Unfortunately he died of a heart attack before the tests could be completed and the orphanage refused to give us another one but we feel sure that he would have gone from being as broke as the ten commandments to being able to afford a fiat panda by the end of the week had he survived.