Chewing the Fat: Careers in Old Grease
"My fat never made me less money"
--Dolly Parton
Careers in FOG (Fats, Oils, and Grease): wastewater treatment. City of Tacoma. Pierce Conservation District. The FDA. USDA. Animation. Army Corps of Engineers. Cosmetics. Biofuels. Feedstocks. ummm...a lot.
"Where does it wander when it's lost?"
Oh, the days of taking educational tours with Kathy Smith. One of the best hands-down was the water treatment facility (LOTT) at Budd Inlet in Olympia. It is a gorgeous building on a nice property where equipment and parking meanders carefully around plants and 'spacebreakers' that lower the direct percentage of impervious surface while keeping it clean and aesthetically pleasing. I still have some of the swag from the welcome center--a white plastic lid to fit over my soup cans so I can store bacon grease and cooking fat in comfort and style. I was modern enough that I didn't ask for more than 1 (real orthodox kitchen recyclers separate FOG according to origin, such as vegetable, pork, beef, poultry, and grease used to cook seafood...it's sort of like a terrible eyesore of a kitchen spice rack...or what would happen if your spice rack went to the toilet)
When I say 'fat' I mean the whole shebang of FOG, Fats, Oils, and Greases as defined by the City of Tacoma. The list of synonyms as follows:
FOG is easier to save and reuse than it is to render from the raw materials. You could fill an analog telephone directory (and write it in binary) with all the uses FOG is used for and why that's a huge re-purposing and recycling initiative. From makeup to pet food, curing metals, making candles (hopefully heavily scented ones) and making a meal last longer in leaner times, FOG has gone just about everywhere with humans...and that includes where it is not supposed to go.
Your kitchen sink.
Before we go into that song and dance, let's discuss the market value of FOG. It goes back a long, long way and you'll know the recipe for obsession when you bump into a serious student of organic chemistry. They have probably managed to not blow up their childhood homes multiple times, know what bees-wine is really made of, and reverse-engineered Uncle Joe's secret recipe for white corn distillate and why he kept that flock of chickens by the mash.
Put it in the garbage, please.
Because if you don't, you'll dump it down the sink and besides the $84.00/hr plumber, you'll be adding to the eldritch horrors such as this fatberg. Photo taken in all its technicolor profanity and used for Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2019, celebrating the induction of fatberg.
This induction was a real 'ha-hah!' moment among the poor underappreciated folks who work in water/wastewater management and then have to go home and explain their job (again) to the relatives every holiday. ("No, Ed, 'what the floc!' is not swearing!") Because Merriam-Webster doesn't put 'new' words in their linguistic hall of fame. Nope. It has to be a word that that will last because it is being used. A word that was valuable. In other words, legacy.
When fatberg arrived, folks, it was a really, really big deal. A watershed moment for our language.* When you think about it, fatberg is long overdue. Humans have been working with the problems of salvaging used FOG for a really, really long time.
Below: This old photo dated from 1917-1918 shows the bloody-minded effort that went into collecting fat. Now, to put this in perspective, if *any* country could afford to let fat go to waste, it would be America in WWI because...dirigibles. The gasbag liners for these behemoths were only made from the upper intestinal tract of oxen. Thousands of those beasts were slaughtered for the British-American munitions market. And they weren't killed just for their upper-intestinal tracts. A surplus of meat and tallow hit the market and suddenly, there was an interesting level-up on the whole problem of household cooking and waste disposal.
Below: Girl Scouts. Note the poster in the background. You'll see it again.
I am going to divert, slightly backwards in time and remind you (assuming you didn't have my social studies teacher) about the Indian Rebellion of 1857. It was a under-empathizing with your own army. There were Hindu soldiers who would not touch beef fat. There were Muslim soldiers who would not touch pork fat. This went all the way back to their respective sacred laws. Rumors started that the grease in the rifle cartridges (which had to be bitten to be opened) were beef tallow or pork lard. With the clarity of hindsight, the British could have worked really hard to prove it was mutton (sheep) fat instead, or make a sweeping change that demonstrated their willingness to accept the values of people who were going into battle in their name.
They did not.
From this kerfuffle, which graduated into a burach,# we have the phrase, 'bite the cartridge' which evolved into 'bite the bullet'. Folks, grease is important. Or to quote Star Trek's Scotty when asked to imagine the perfect wish for military advance, 'even a totally frictionless ball bearing would make a helluva lot of difference'
Flash forward. During WWII, Disney accepted several paid contracts to teach the public how they could support patriotism and the war efforts. President Roosevelt was one of the direct movers and shakers to these works, and one of the more entertaining shorts was Out of the Frying Pan and into the Firing Line. In it, Pluto and Minnie learn that rather than pour that bacon grease from the breakfast skillet on to Pluto's breakfast bones (seriously, Minnie you were feeding him bones??), they can support Mickey (who is abroad fighting) by collecting the grease and selling it to the government. Presumably, Pluto gets to live longer without a diet of greasy bones and continues to help Mickey with delivering grease to market, plus getting paid enough to live on much-healthier strings of sausage.
The <3-minute film is worth watching for many other reasons than this example of our history++ but take a look below. Here are some of the posters Pluto trots past on his way to the butcher's with his collected coffee can of fat--note the dainty feminine hand with perfect nails and tasteful (yet demure) nail polish:
And for those of us who prefer a less feminine touch with munitions production...
...and yeah, no, there will be no lousy jokes about FIGHT CLUB in this blog.
Someone like Minnie would have this teeny 4" little strip of paper on their wall:
It wasn't all going to bullets. Some fat was used in the making of sulfa drugs, which kept a fair number of people alive. This particular awareness campaign was the government intention to get all housewives in on this effort, because honestly, even with the endorsement of Minnie Mouse, only about 50% of the housewives at best turned in the grease. I know 50% seems like a really high number (and it sure is when we consider how many Americans vote), but compared to the sheer output of FOG...it wasn't that much. What happened next was an ever-increasing effort to make the housewife squeeze the literal last drop of grease out of the last ribbon of paper-thin-sliced war era bacon.
This makes sense when you churn the numbers over. The government needed grease, but they also wanted the housewives. Housewives were a rather valid factor in the criticisms/supports of the soldiers at war, so psychologically it was important to get the housewife to join in. Come back with your shield or on it, son. If she shared in the sacrifice she was less likely to demand an end to the war--after all, she was doing her part too, wasn't she?
Because...things like The Sullivan Rule happened. Follow this link if you don't know what I mean, and keep your box of tissues on hand. If you prefer audible history, go listen to Caroline's Spine on YouTube.
There was also the definite punch to morale when you ran out of palatable food and medicine. Again...fats. You needed FOG for both. I'm not sure I can accurately convey the level of pride in many homes during this time--you wouldn't even call the doctor for your own kid if it looked like you were taking a doctor's precious time from helping a More Unfortunate. Home remedies weren't the half of it. Old cookbooks are very strict about what sort of fat from what species of animal or plant is used for which purpose. And I can't say I blame them, as the grease was used for about 8,000 things to keep the household running, and the household was not rosy with all the wage earning menfolk at war. Things were bad. People were making Betty Lamps out of shallow dishes, scraps of cloth, and grease.*
Below: Minnie Mouse would look for stickers like this in the butchers' windows before she turned her coffee can of solidified/filtered grease in for some money.
Not to mention there were SCADS of media saturation that showed celebrities saving their meat grease for PR campaigns. I just bought this one off eBay, so I'm fine with sharing it (this is Dodgers' Mickey Owen):
The exposition in the back isn't at all subtle, is it? I mean, it's all down to his wife to make the delivery?? So nice of him to do the hard work of pouring it off for the camera...P.S. there were images I'm not going to share because they equated people who didn't turn in their fat as hoarders, and drew them as greedy, weak-willed, lazy, timid/cowardly...yes...obese people. Fat-shaming on a completely new zip code here.
And speaking of zip code...the government even used the mail to support the war effort.
In one of those neat little twists, I get to tell you that the Lakota name for the white man was 'Wa?í?u'--fat-taker--as they observed we took more than needed.
OK SO WHY ARE WE PUTTING IT IN THE GARBAGE?
Because as far as personal home use goes...you're much better off putting it in the garbage. Fry shops and fast food addresses have their own waste FOG bins, which is collected by approved venues. Down the sink is not a good idea, but even with people doing their part...grease clogs are the reason for half the sewage blocks. Restaurants use grease traps for accumulation and collection of this waste, and huzzah. Go HERE for lots of reasons why your local wetlands is glad your favorite fast-fooderie uses grease traps. There is probably a lot more than the estimated 150-250 lbs of diverted grease salvaged each week in the States... If you're contemplating a career as an inspector, this is the sort of thing you might be checking.
Washington State's inventors of the Gaslamp Fantasy, Phil and Katja Foglio, use grease traps as a tongue in cheek side-gag throughout much of the first part of GIRL GENIUS:
The Foglios Do Science. so I'm not betting against the idea they were unaware of the grease trap interceptors as patented in 1884 (the original patent is online).
My invention relates to a trap or apparatus which is to be applied to the discharge-pipes, to of sinks, 8mo. and which is especially designed to separate grease and sediment from the water and collect it in a body, so as to be otherwise disposed of, while allowing the water to escape without being loaded with substances which would tend to choke and clog the sewers. --https://patents.google.com/patent/US306981A/en
If you are at this point of the blog and still have trouble falling asleep, I can only recommend to you the PDF posted by the City of Tacoma about Grease Interceptors. You only think you don't need them or use them. I hope you are really, really glad that your favorite eating establishments conform to all this tracking:
Still. This is not a job for everyone. On the other hand, if the growing desire to create a mandatory year in service for Americans takes root, this might be one of the jobs a young person might try. Perhaps even willingly.
Or not...
Gosh, you must surely be thinking. So much...time and effort on...grease. It must be important, I guess...
Yeppers. Know what happens when you don't invent FOG interceptors? Feral, free-range FOG. And then, inevitably...your taxes dealing with a credulous public that believed a foreign government was buying up blobs of fat found in the River Thames, rendering it, and selling it back to the London public under 'Dutch Butter'. Yeah, NO, that is so very very gross and chemically impossible but boy did it sell some papers! Fake news, how I loathe you even as I laugh.
What's true about the scandal: there were lots and lots of blobs of fat floating around, but it was from some truly terrible sources besides Victorian fatbergs floating around in open sewage (as if that isn't terrible enough, sorry to crush your already dying optimism here). It wasn't just the ship cooks who poured hot cooking-fat overboard when they were finished with the pans. Cooking for forty every day = a lot of grease to dump all at once. Or the close proximity to the slaughterhouses. It was also...sewers. London's sewers were (thank goodness) a minor wonder of the world thanks to Bazalgette, but sewage is still full of fat. When there were heavy rains that overloaded the system, the water pressures flushed out the tunnels and whoosh, everything went into the receiving waters of the Thames. They didn't have a word for fatbergs back then...but boy, was there commerce to be had in what you could find. With a 22-foot foreshore in the tidal range, you had a lot of potential for finding something to sell, and that's what the Mudlarks did. Bones, cloth, rope, metal...and...lumps of fat.
Some of the more hilarious lines in the history of Stuffy Old English can be had in the accounts of the men who thought some persona, first-hand investigations with a top-grade chemical lab would finish the rumors once and for all. My sweet summer children and your faith in true media.
"We subjected it to various purifying processes, but completely failed in rendering the fat bright and free from offensive and disgusting odour, and we can have no hesitation in assuring the public that there need not be the least apprehension of their breakfast table being supplied with "best Brittany" manufactured from fat recovered from Thames mud. That the refuse fat from the millions of kitchens in London, and contained in the sewage discharged into the Thames near Barking Creek, may in part be recovered and utilised, is beyond a question of doubt, but it is equally certain that the fat so recovered can only be purified to such an extent as to fit it for use in the manufacture of the most common kinds of soap and dip candles.
' — Sanitary Record. (https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZT18770511.2.19)
And munitions. It went to munitions too. There were several munition plants just down the figurative road. In this blog spot called PURE BOSH here, you can read a horricomedic falsified account that sort of gives a whole new layer to the term, 'yellow journalism'...
A fortnight ago we (South London Press) mentioned the fact that the butter of South London was adulterated with tallow, starch, manganese, salt, and water. We thought then that we had reached the Ultima Thule of adulteration, but an ingenious individual has since added another sophisticating agent. A friend has in his possession a specimen of a pure white fat, tasteless and perfectly inodorous which has been obtained by a clever analytical chemist from — what do our readers suppose? Simply from a portion of the Thames mud, taken from the river at Battersea! And we are afraid that this new discovery of science is no longer a secret, for the owner of a small wharf on the banks of the Thames had an offer this week from a person desirous of becoming the tenant, and on asking the purpose for which the wharf was required he was told it was to be used for manufacturing butter, to be sold to the poor at a shilling per pound! No doubt it was the intention of this philanthropic individual to have supplied the public with dairy butter fresh from the bosom of old Father Thames.
- reprint in?Littell's Living Age, Volume 105, page 720
In recap all this under the simplest possible terms, DO NOT DUMP GREASE DOWN THE SINK. you ever watch Venture Brothers? Remember the creators' first famous creation, THE TICK? I sure hope you do. It was wittier. In TICK VS. FILTH we see a group of noble warriors of the sewage outlands, unblocking a pipe only to find...something more outré than bleached alligators: sentient monsters made of fatberg material. I laugh every time at the leader's almost operatic methods of employee morale.
Now, hilarious and thought-provoking as THE TICK was back in the day, in the year 2019 sanitation workers finally, at long last, became super-heroes in their own right. The similarity of the fatberg monsters makes me think someone besides me geeked out over THE TICK back in the bad old days of the 1990's. In my defense, there were so many bad days in the '90's.
Most of my blogs are about Flett Creek and its little Patch 'o Heaven in the wetlands by the college. Now you're about to see why the wetlands are involved in all this...muckety-muck.
The wetlands receives for the benefit of the City of Tacoma, absorbs a whale of a lot of stormwater. When the pump station is on, it churns up over 10,000 gallons a minute. Thanks to the OCD beavers building dams hither to yon, it holds the 40 inches of rainfall/stormwater collection Tacoma gets in an average year. One of the more 'reliable' pollutants in the stormwater is FOG, plus O&G (oil & grease). When I mean 'reliable' I mean it in an uncomplimentary way, such as, 'there's Joe, off to go find a date at the family reunion again' kind of way.
There are no machinery-based filtration systems to get these elements out of the stormwater. The wetlands do this for us.
Involved volunteers often put down awareness stencils or markers in a Great Outdoors version of 'put it in the garbage, please'. Below: a stencil from Seattle
Human-hour projects like this is just the thing for student interns, and some of them move on to jobs in water/wastewater management where the FOG is actively filtered out of the incoming water. It is smelly. It is necessary. And we couldn't do without it. And while we work on it, trust me, like Young Dumedd here, we are all thinking of ways in which we could possibly improve the system.
Crazy Old History:
*English will never be 'ok' as a language. It is the drooling, brain-damaged opportunistic omnivore. But...slowly and surely, great successes are achieved. The recognition of 'fatberg' as a genuine word is one of them.
# Gaelic is not the professional language for mind-boggling messes, but it is a dedicated practitioner of the art.
*Betty Lamps were horrible. The saltpetre miners called them "Bitch Lamps" for a pretty good reason. However, vegetable oil or rendered butter was a lot more efficient than soft, squelchy and salty bacon grease.
++This is also an interesting and significant film because in it, Minnie is clearly married to Mickey as she is the 'housewife' in question and you'll never see Mickey in uniform ever again in a Disney film.
Saving Bacon Fat and Meat Drippings: The Disney Way. A crazy-informative article. Dave Bossert. February 18, 2018. Cartoonresearch.com. Accessed May 19. 2021. <https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/saving-bacon-fat-and-meat-drippings-the-disney-way/#:~:text=Collecting%20bacon%20grease%20and%20meat,of%20goods%20was%20the%20norm.&text=Minnie%20Mouse%20starred%20as%20the,effort%20and%20her%20dog%2C%20Pluto.>