Steak 'n Shake gets political after switching to beef tallow fries (Nation's Restaurant News)

[Emrys]

37. Here in the UK, many years ago, one time my mother for some reason decided to get some beef dripping

from the butcher - which you'll be more familiar with as tallow, and deep-fried the family a bumper batch of chips (fries to you) in it. They were without any distant comparison the very best chips I've ever eaten - flavour, crispness, colour, the works. I've never eaten chips fried in dripping since, but I remember it so well.

For a pre-tea time (small late afternoon/early evening meal) snack sometimes, we could choose bread and dripping - just plain bread spread with the dripping from a Sunday beef roast, complete with dark tasty bits to liven up the grease.

Somehow we survived, but then I haven't eaten any of this stuff for decades.

I do try to be choosy with oils and food nowadays. We can get cold-pressed extra virgin rapeseed (canola to you) oil very cheaply here, which does for frying, braising and most other uses and I'd happily use on salads, we also use cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil on salads, never for cooking, and we have ordinary peanut and corn oil handy for the odd frying procedure (e.g. Chinese food) where you want something lighter.

This nonsense fad about seed oils being BAD is a load of bullshit as far as I've been able to figure from quite wide reading. It's to do with garbled and sometimes wilfully misrepresented ideas about the balances of omega-3 and omega-6 oils in our foodstuffs. There's nothing intrinsically harmful in seed oils, and no evidence they cause inflammation, which is the most popular claim. Highly processed foods are another matter, but oil content is usually just one factor among many that make them a bad idea for regular consumption. If you're worried about cholesterol, empty carbs are likely to do you more harm than any amount of fat.