Tallow is a pretty incredible product. And you can take it from me, because my first adult job was at a tallow factory. (Beat that, Kamala!)
If you’ve been on the internet this week, you’ve seen images of Donald Trump at McDonald’s, working the fryer or handing bags laden with Big Macs out the drive-through window. Trump’s homage to the American fast-food staple — and to the people who work and dine at the establishment — was one of the best campaign stunts his team has put on so far.
RFK Jr. — who is gunning for a health-related position in a second Trump administration — picked up on the Donald-at-McDonald’s trend with his own post on X. With the motto “Make America Healthy Again,” one might assume RFK Jr. is anti-fast-food. Wrong! The real culprit? The demise of tallow within the industry.
Fast Food is a part of American culture. But that doesn’t mean it has to be unhealthy, and that we can’t make better choices. Did you know that McDonald’s used to use beef tallow to make their fries from 1940 until phasing it out in favor of seed oils in 1990? This switch was made because saturated animal fats were thought to be unhealthy, but we have since discovered that seed oils are one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic. Interestingly enough, this began to drastically rise around the same time fast food restaurants switched from beef tallow to seed oils in their fryers. People who enjoy a burger with fries on a night out aren’t to blame, and Americans should have every right to eat out at a restaurant without being unknowingly poisoned by heavily subsidized seed oils. It’s time to Make Frying Oil Tallow Again
Many of my colleagues here at NR long for the days of tallow fries and have shared tales of their crunchy-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside, golden goodness. There is even a Change.org petition you can sign: “McDonalds, please do Throwback Fries — The Original French Fries with Beef Tallow.”
I mourn that I am too young to have tasted the golden crisp of a McDonald’s tallow fry, and only one major chain restaurant still cooks its fried goodies in tallow: Buffalo Wild Wings. (However, a disgruntled vegetarian is trying to sue the company for using animal by-products in the fryer — so who knows how long this last leg will stand.)
And I must admit, dear Reader — they’re onto something. Tallow is a pretty incredible product. And you can take it from me, because my first adult job was at a tallow factory. (Beat that, Kamala!)
How did a Yalie end up working at a facility that renders tallow, you ask? (Your prejudices betray you.)
During my freshman year of college, I assumed I would return home to Minnesota and work a summer job as I had done in high school, whether as a barista, nanny or vacation Bible school leader. However, I slowly learned that most of my peers were slated to partake in some gleaming internship in a great American city over the summer. Living at home making Caribou Coolers now seemed unambitious. What was a girl to do?
I had one lead — my older sister was slated to live in Houston that summer to undertake research required for her premed degree. If I could find a gig in Houston, I’d have free housing and a built-in buddy.
I had already blazed past most internship application deadlines, so I had to take what I could get. In shaking the last few beans out of the can, an opportunity emerged — my dad had a buddy who worked as an executive for a “commodities” company based in Houston that just so happened to have an opening for a “Business Intern.”
Knowing nothing about “business,” save the basic functions of Excel, I thought it would prove an excellent learning opportunity. That it did. And so, behind the wheel of my grandpa’s old white Honda Accord — equipped with a nonexistent A/C system — I drove to my “office” on the shores of the Houston shipping channel. As I neared my destination, the results of the city’s libertine zoning laws became more and more bleak. (Think: a day care next to a pawnshop next to an adult store next to a church.) Soon I was greeted by the silhouette of large tanks (full of toxic chemicals), barbed-wire fences, and an army of power lines.
After crossing one last set of train tracks, I was hit by a thick wall of stench — something like a cow carcass, left on the scorching-hot asphalt for a few days, melted by the rays of the Houston summer sun. In a short time, my car, my office, my clothes, and my hair would wear the smell.
Within the confines of the property stood a squat, concrete square — the office building. I was led to what can only be called a cell — a windowless closet with a sole light bulb hanging from the ceiling.
Unbeknownst to me, I was hired to clean the spreadsheets of years of mis-accounted data regarding the company’s fixed assets and automate the valuation of future inputs. With steel-toe boots and a hard hat, I soon learned the market value of all the different pumps, tanks, and machinery across the property.
Working in my little cell, reconfiguring endless data entries, I listened to Virginia Woolf novels on loop — they were the only texts I knew that cohered with the dismal air of the place. While my own work confirmed that I lacked a vocation in accounting, the whole experience left quite an impression on me of the wonders of industrial rendering.
Imagine the sheer girth of a 1,400-pound beef cow. Let me tell you — when that critter is butchered, there are leftovers that do not end up in the freezer section of your local grocery store. Most of the remaining meat scraps are used for pet food or similar products. But that doesn’t account for all of the leftover sludge.
This brownish by-product — mostly beef fat — is pumped into tanks and shipped to a processing plant to become glorious, snowy tallow. Glistening chrome pipes pump the sludge into giant washing machines (at least, that’s what they look like). Clarifying compounds are mixed in with the sludge and spun for hours on end: The chemicals latch onto impurities and filter them out of the mixture. After several rounds through the “wash,” a white, waxy, smooth substance emerges: tallow.
While tallow used to be a main ingredient in products such as soap and candles, most industrialized nations have switched to synthetic substitutes, and so the tallow is exported for use in Asia and South America.
Tallow — this ancient raw material, this miracle of recycling — has every capacity to make a glorious return to the golden arches and beyond.
I’m with RFK Jr. on this one. Make Frying Oil Tallow Again.