(Photo by Ben Fulton)
Maybe it sat on the sill of your mother’s kitchen window near the sink. Or perhaps it lodged in an old tin coffee can on your back porch. Wherever it resided, this pale-colored solid, speckled with bits of meat floating below a film of watered residue, was the leftover that would never spoil, even at room temperature. Like the scent of tuna casserole or the sight of a Hamburger Helper package of pre-mixed seasoning, it was also a salient dietary marker of social class. Only “underprivileged people” cooked with beef or pork fat. And in their secret revenge, only “underprivileged people” knew how delicious a dinner or dessert pie could taste when the crust recipe included animal fat rather than Crisco or some other imitation fat concocted by assembling various hydrogenated oils in a factory.
Today, thanks to U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., everyone knows that beef tallow is back. But with Americans’ perpetual love affair with meat on their plates, did it ever really go away?
“Tallow.” Say it carefully even once or twice and we notice instantly its phonetic advantage over the word “lard,” which sounds suspiciously like “lord” but falls just one vowel short of such esteem because no one would like to think of using God’s name in vain, much less as something to cook with. “Lard” carries uncouth vibrations, while “tallow” sounds almost like a designer suit you never heard of.
And yet anyone who ever worked at a fast-food restaurant during the 1980s will know exactly what you are talking about when discussing tallow. Long after the sleep was shunted from my eyes at 4 am to work the morning shift at a Wendy’s during my freshman year in college, long after I pulled the fat off too many chicken breasts to count, and hours after left-over hamburger meat was sorted from the franchise’s walk-in refrigerator to make chili my young male co-workers delighted in puncturing an industrial size can of tallow for the deep-fryers to churn out legions of fries. The running, and admittedly disgusting, joke was that this substance looked suspiciously like male ejaculate. Seconds after an explosion of juvenile laughter from the male employees, bookended by eye-rolling disgust from our female counterparts, the manager would descend in a stern reprimand that everyone stop joking around. No part of the deep-fryer, or even that which it used to fry, was the least bit funny. Rather, this vital fast-food apparatus was a constant danger against we were all warned. Tallow looked peculiar enough for jokes. But it was no joke at all to suffer its excruciating, deep skin burns, not to mention a slew of workplace compensation forms for any hospital trips that might result. Tallow was disgusting enough for lewd jokes and dangerous enough to induce fear in equal measure. No one gave a second thought to its taste.
Around 1990 Wendy’s, and eventually every other fast-food franchise, switched to vegetable oil to prepare its fries. The hydrogenated varieties of frying oil would, in time, be declared bad as well. Still, health experts agree seed oils are better for health than beef tallow. But as we all know by now, such is the topsy-turvy world of health and nutrition advice. Today’s food boons are tomorrow’s food banes.
Today, this curious fat is so all-the-rage that you purchase it bulk in Costco, on Amazon, and in smaller amounts at your local grocery store. Maybe it is the manosphere vibe—real men eat animals and animal products—that lends it appeal. Perhaps it is the Kennedy mystique, that loose but tangible sentiment that you are telling the industrial food complex to take a flying leap by ingesting a substance most nutritionists balk at. You might think that tallow, along with its origin from dead animals, might be off-limits to the feminine sphere. But no. These days beauty influencers recommend it as a facial cream.
The most bizarre aspect of the current tallow craze is that it has somehow taken on a political veneer. Steak ’n Shake’s many Midwest franchises can insist ’til they are blue in the face that switching out seed oils for tallow was done for reasons of taste and nutrition of their customers. We all know that if nutrition was the reason, the franchise would also eliminate up to one-third of its menu.
The political vibes at stake (if you can forgive the pun) are not nearly as prone to partisanship as we should believe. After all, nutritionists worth their advice warn off any food that fried in oil. Somehow, amid this nascent debate the noble air fryer escapes its deserved, elevated stature. And that is a shame. So is the fact that so many have fallen for tallow, when what they have really succumbed to is a working-class cooking staple dressed in oily, slicked-up faux virtues best left grimy and congealed in a bowl, and sitting on the kitchen-sink window counter.
