Hmmm...
We don't need an alternative to the transfat loaded margarine and vegetable shortening that the baking industry seems to be so in love with. They are the alternatives. The cheaper, lower quality alternatives.
Any baking company or bakery that tells you their business is being threatened by this ban is kind of trying to pull the wool over your eyes when they say the alternatives won't give you the same taste and texture.
The truth is that they don't want to use more expensive, higher quality ingredients that will make their products taste even better. They are looking only for cheap alternatives, which just won't cut it.
Seriously...which would you rather have?
A butter cookie made with real butter? Or a butter cookie made with artificially flavored partially hydrogenated vegetable fats that can kill you?
Do you honestly think the cheaper artificial crap is going to make a better tasting butter cookie than real butter?
Are we really supposed to be fools that think there was no such thing as cookies, pie crust, donuts, or anything else that is currently being made with margarine or vegetable shortening before those things were invented? Or that the cookies of the past tasted like crap because the cheaper alternatives didn't exist yet?
What they want you to hear is that those cookies you love will be ruined, that it will be impossible to make the same taste and texture with the alternatives. They left out the important part. It will be impossible to make the same cookies you love that taste exactly the same (or better), with the same profit margin. That to make a good tasting cookie without the transfats will require them to use costlier ingredients like real butter or leaf lard.
That's what the bakers used before margarine and shortening existed. And they only stopped because the margarine and vegetable shortening was a cheap alternative, not because it resulted in better baked goods. These things increased their profit margin. They don't want to go back to using those costlier, higher quality ingredients. They would rather kill you for an extra buck.
Most of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers made better fried chicken, better cookies and pie crusts, and they did it because they used the real thing and not the cheap transfat loaded, hydrogenated alternatives.
And if you still want to rally around the "suffering" businesses, will you do the same for Coke & Pepsi if the FDA tells them they have to stop killing you with HFCs and go back to using the higher priced, better tasting, real cane sugar?