Beef tallow is a conservative dog-whistle! Who knew?
One of the delights of our trip to England in 1994 was that the London MacDonald’s served Hot Apple pies deep fried in beef tallow, even after the U.S. McDonald’s had switched to pitiful smooth baked pies without the bubbly crust.
Everyone seemed to abandon tallow in the 90s. I remember being in the cafeteria at Big Barnes downtown in 1998 and listening to a doctor mourn that Burger King was the only place you could get tallow-fried french fries anymore. (He then said the requisite doctor-talk about moderation.)
Friday I told a friend that my weekend plans involved getting a retro Hot Apple Fried Pie into my face, and she said, “Do you know Steak and Shake went back to using beef tallow in 1995?”
I then adjusted my weekend plans to eat skinny fries and Hot Apple pies, free of shame.
First off: Hot Apple Pie. I don’t know if they used tallow but they did get the crust just as it ever was. I ate it the way that was literally BURNED into my memory: remove the top edge, eat that gingerly, blow onto the filling until a bit of it looked edible, proceed.
The Steak and Shake tallow fries tasted exactly like they always have. Pre-tallow or post-tallow, I can’t tell the difference. They did make me smile with their advertising send-up of the Chik-Fil-A ads with the cows imploring us to “Eat Mor Chikin.”
And now I find to my dismay all this return to tallow is due to RFK Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again campaign. Evidently seed oils are “woke” and tallow is good and it all supposedly hearkens back to when America was “Great.”
I was there. Not Great … Gays couldn’t get jobs, I couldn’t rent a chainsaw, rest of society was awful … EXCEPT FOR THE HOT APPLE PIES. They were, and are, briefly, great again.
6 responses to “TWIL: Tallow”
If I recall, the main feature of McD’s hot apple pies was that they would ruin one’s life by burning the roof of one’s mouth with several days of pain ensuing.
Yeah, it’s the snake-wrangling frog-throated man’s fault. I wonder if he thinks beef tallow is a seed oil.
Common Household Mom – ew … I just realized RFK Jr. knows what raw beef tallow tastes like. Also, yes, it was like eating apple-flavored magma from the center of the earth.
… see, I thought the thing we had Learned from the last 50 years of nutritional advice was that Americans like fads but that fad diets are usually actually quite bad for your health, and if there is an Enemy Food Of The Day, it has good odds of being at least somewhat overstated and whatever you use to sub in for the Enemy Food Of The Day will probably turn out to not be… great… for you if eaten in excess. And that diversity of color in fruits and veggies will probably get you your vitamin totals, and that the elderly need more protein than they often eat.
Well. That and, for the sedentary, don’t eat too much, and focus on high-nutrient foods. And that fad diets make *serious money* for the people who promulgate them and should therefore not be trusted on two counts (1. it is difficult to make a man understand something when his job relies on not understanding it, or something to that effect, plus the more prosocial aspect 2. we do actually want to fix things, either to help other people or to be important or both, so generally be a bit skeptical).
But ALSO I thought we had learned that raw milk was a phenomenally, spectacularly bad idea especially for pregnant women and for children, and that vaccines were a vital public health measure that had been helping reduce child mortality for over a century AND YET, so.
(personally I’m on Team “If Some Group Of People With Similar Caloric Intake Needs Has Eaten A Diet And Lived A Long Time For Hundreds Of Years, That Diet Has Better Odds Of Being Safe Than Something Someone Just Theorized Out Of Nowhere.” But I am reasonably confident that we have not collectively learned this.)(I also do not think beef tallow is The Worst Ever when it is being a small “part of a balanced diet” especially for people who are doing high-calorie-intake-required physical labor – but saying it is *healthy* in the way we think about broccoli as “healthy” and suggesting people eat TONS of is, uh… well.)
I’m so glad the apple pie was Just Right! And also so glad that it did not remove the roof of your mouth.
KC – Raw milk – that terrifies me, but then I talk with rational people who see no problem with raw milk from trusted cows.
I am aware of those rational people and then I am also aware of people who *own a couple of cows* who are like “NO PLEASE DO NOT DO THAT, NOT EVEN FROM OUR COW” – at least if you are in any way at risk (really young, really old, immune whatever, pregnant). But then also some people do drink raw milk from their own cows (although also usually are not in high-risk categories?).
I do think the risk of some things is a chunk *lower* at least from cows whose caretakers are watching them like hawks for signs of illness, and the risk of some things is lower when there are *really* extremely sanitary conditions for milking and processing the milk, and where the temps are kept low after milking so it’s harder for things to grow, etc., but: y’all: some of those germs are lethal and this is *100% optional* and you can just *pasteurize the good milk* and eliminate that *entire* sector of risk from your life while still having the milk that has a stronger milk flavor to it and that was produced by happy cows?
It’s not even like eggs where some fancy dishes *require* raw eggs for the dish to work at all [also some of the historic raw egg dishes have somewhat-anti-bacterial ingredients in them automatically, which is fascinating to me!] – it’s just so very, very optional to drink raw milk.
(SO MANY infants used to die from ‘summer complaint’ aka a set of summer-linked GI problems most likely caused by unpasteurized milk where the germ count per cup of milk grew really really fast under summer temperature conditions. SO MANY. Just, a *bewilderingly* large number. In 1900, one in ten babies died in their first year of life; 18% of children did not reach five years old; some of this has been remedied by antibiotics and ability to use IV fluids and other medical tech improvements, but from the turn-of-the-century causes-of-death survey, it looks like really the bulk of the shift from ~10% dying to ~.5% for infants [aka nearly 19 out of 20 of those babies in 2024 who would have died in 1900 lived instead] boils down to 1. widespread vaccination and 2. pure food/milk and water regulations, enforced, 3. US eradication of malaria and 4. some improvements in housing laws that substantially reduced disease transmission [ventilation, how many people you can jam in a room to sleep overnight when renting things out, vermin].)
Also, kids regularly got tuberculosis from milk back then, which is another thing you can – say it with me here – stop via pasteurization! (if you share air with someone with tuberculosis, that’ll still have good odds of giving it to you, but if pasteurized milk is universal, as it was for quite a while, then there are a whole bunch of homes and schools and daycares and whatnot that won’t be ground zero for a tuberculosis epidemic and that seems worthwhile to me, esp. now that we have antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis?)
Anyway. If someone is an adult who just really likes the taste of raw milk that much, and has a source they trust via personal connections rather than “the videos on their tiktok are so convincing and their smile is trustworthy” sort of trust [you need to be confident they’ll take a financial loss, potentially putting their livelihood at risk, rather than sell you milk if *anything* went slightly wrong; this is a lot of trust], I still think that’s not really *smart* statistically, probably, but I can understand deciding to take the risk. I don’t think riding motorcycles is really smart, either, but it’s worth it for some people.
If I didn’t know “reasonable people” who think they personally are definitely exempt from serious diseases [that existed before pesticides] because they only eat organic food, or otherwise “reasonable” people who think they really might win the lottery if they buy tickets when the jackpot is really high [people who think the fun and excitement is worth $5: they might be right; people who think they have a better chance of winning than of being hit by a car: uh], I would have more confidence in apparently-rational people’s assessment of raw milk.
Fundamentally we’re all somewhat irrational, though (not all *equally* irrational and usually individual people have areas of greater rationality and lesser rationality), and maybe I’m Just Too Risk-Averse and missing out on the glorious wonder of Raw Milk? (and modern refrigeration would cut down a *lot* on the germ multiplication) But still. That’s a no for me, and from a public-health perspective I hope it stays a “no” for nearly everyone, since I really *like* the “most of the population doesn’t have even latent tuberculosis” situation the US has had, on the whole?
KC – well I can’t judge them all that much, given that I was all over the raw milk cheese when I was in Paris.