Google me: A positive spin for the marvellous bag of lard

By JULIET ROWAN

When Paul Holmes called Tariana Turia a "bag of lard" on his radio show in April, listeners complained.

But on Tuesday, the Broadcasting Standards Authority said Holmes was within his rights. It ruled that while his comments were abusive and unfair to the Maori Party co-leader and then Labour Party MP, they were not beyond the bounds of good taste and decency.

Though it's probably little consolation to Mrs Turia, she is not the only public figure to have been called a "bag of lard".

A Google search reveals that controversial American filmmaker Michael Moore has also worn the label.

Holmes prefixed his jibe at Mrs Turia with the adjective "confused".

The Fahrenheit 9/11 director got "slobbering" from a chatroom critic at Enneagram Institute

As a term of abuse, "bag of lard" conjures up images of someone fat, lazy and useless.

But lard is quite useful.

The layer of fat along a pig's back underneath its skin, lard is "the mainstay of AmeriMex cooking", says Recipe Goldmine. Without it there would be no tacos or tamales.

Pie crusts, biscuits and other baked goods would suffer too.

The whale's equivalent, blubber, allows the giant mammals to survive in freezing seas.

And for humans too thin to imagine what that is like, lard can be used to replicate the experience.

Several websites offer guides to an experiment for teachers wishing to demonstrate blubber's insulating properties to students.

The Royal British Columbia Museum gives the ingredients as a sink or bucket of cold water, ice cubes, Ziploc bags, rubber bands and lard.

The method:

1 Put the ice cubes in the sink or bucket of cold water.

2 Smear 1 or 2cm of lard on the inside of a Ziploc bag.

3 Turn another Ziploc bag inside-out and place in the lard-filled bag.

4 Put one hand in the bag. A rubber band may help to keep it in place.

5 Place both hands in the icy water.

And voila, you know what it feels like to be a whale, wrapped in a wetsuit of fat.

A more disturbing use of lard was proposed by an Israeli rabbi this year.

Rabbi Eliezer Fisher suggested that bags of pig fat could be hung in buses to deter Palestinian suicide bombers (BBC News).

He believed doing this would stop Muslim extremists loath to have any contact with the "unclean" animal.

But as www.muslimwakeup.com. points out, Rabbi Fisher obviously didn't think too hard about the passengers on these "lard mobiles".

"Can you imagine what a 33 gallon bag of lard and gizzards would do to the ambience, especially if it has been 'guarding' a bus in the hot Middle East summer for the better part of a week?" wrote Jawad Ali.