Why Are the Chinese Cooking With Gutter Oil?
What is Gutter Oil?
Some scavengers in China have found a way to make a living producing 'gutter oil', which is recycled fat from various waste sources turned into cooking oil. Some gutter oil producers collect used oil from restaurants, some collect fat from slaughterhouse waste, some even collect blobs of fat that are found floating in the sewer to be converted into cooking oil!
How is Gutter Oil Made?
The dirty, raw fat that is collected from sewers and slaughterhouses is refined into cooking oil using very rudimentary refinement processes including boiling and filtration. In some cases cooking oil can be produced from sewer waste and converted into cooking oil after just being boiled down. This practice is profitable because cooking oil in China is very valuable.
Why Is Cooking Oil So Valuable?
China is a nation with 1.3 billion people, and food that is stir-fried in a wok is a very popular everyday dish. Therefore there is a huge demand for cooking oil. The price and demand for oil can vary in different regions, and in some areas gutter oil is a hot commodity.
Health Effects
There have been numerous adverse health effects linked with consuming food prepared using gutter oil. The most immediate symptoms are diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and indigestion. But gutter oil is also often very toxic, and consuming it regularly can lead to stomach and liver cancer and even cause developmental disabilities in children. Gutter oil is absolutely not safe to eat.
his Can't Be Legal!
The production, distribution, and use of gutter oil are all illegal in China. The gutter oil trade is a black market activity, but a thriving one. The government doesn't currently have the tools to effectively enforce the laws though; they are only now developing tools necessary to test cooking oil and determine if it is gutter oil or contains gutter oil (sometimes it is mixed with clean cooking oil).
How Widespread Is It?
According to an article in International Business Times, Chinese experts believe that around one tenth of all the cooking oil used in China is gutter oil! If you divide up China's 1.3 billion population, that means as many as one hundred thirty million people are eating food prepared with sewage waste every day!
Who's Serving Gutter Oil?
If you are planning to visit China or currently live there, don't start freaking out! Gutter oil isn't served everywhere, it is mostly being used in the extremely cheap restaurants. Most nice restaurants and those that cater to tourists are very unlikely to be cooking with gutter oil.
Street Vendors
A large portion of the gutter oil produced in China is sold to street vendors who sell hot food on the street. Street food is a very popular tradition in China, as it tends to be a fast, convenient, and cheap way to enjoy a hot meal on the go. Unfortunately, street vendors are also very hard to regulate, so the government is having a hard time cracking down on street vendors who are serving gutter oil to their customers.
How to Avoid Gutter Oil
We hate to advocate this because there is so much yummy street food in China and there are a lot of cooks making their livelihood this way using clean oil, but until the situation improves, we would recommend avoiding Chinese street food altogether. You should be particularly wary of the cheapest street vendors; gutter oil is an easy way of cutting costs. You should also avoid very cheap restaurants in general.
Crackdowns
The good news is that in the past couple of years the Chinese government has begun a very large campaign to shut down gutter oil production. Between 2011 and 2012, over 100 gutter oil manufacturers were shut down and 900 people were arrested for crimes involving the production and sale of gutter oil. The Beijing city government also passed new regulations that clean up the process of waste oil disposal as well as better regulations for sewer waste in hopes of eliminating two of the biggest sources of the raw materials used to make gutter oil.