The Florence Henderson Fallacy

Talk about somethin' for nothin' - imagine cooking a notoriously greasy comfort food favorite, and have it practically make fat work in reverse.  Using some twisted logic, Wesson oil sonds too good to be true.

I got to thinking of those old Wesson Oil commercials from my youth, the ones with Florence Henderson doing her Bradyesque kitchen magic.  She'd start off with a cup of oil, fry some chicken, and then measure the oil that was left in the pan.  Seems she'd be just two tablespoons short of her original cup.  Goodness, that chicken must be virtually fat free!

I cooked some chicken in the oven the other day, and managed to extract nearly half a cup of schmalz from the bird.  So if I had fried it in Wesson, I would have ended up with all that fat, plus the extra two Florence tablespoons.

That old commercial had logic that sort of made sense, if you didn't think too hard about it.  The non-Bizarro version would have her measuring an extra half cup of grease, rather than coming up short.  At least Wesson is unsaturated, unlike the dreck that comes out of a chicken.