When I first heard about Chinese gutter oil, I thought it was a joke. I was unfortunately wrong, but in my defense, I never would have imagined that people would be rendering cooking oil out of discarded meat and dumped kitchen oil in back alley vats. But it does indeed happen, as evidenced by the more than one hundred people recently arrested in China for making what has to be one of the foulest ingredients I could ever imagine.The process makes me think of cooking crystal meth: assemble a cornucopia of heinous materials and whip them into an equally foul, but profitable, product. In this case, the recycled oil is whipped together from rotting animal parts and scraps chucked into the streets by butchers and meat processors. The whole mess is boiled and rendered in shoddy vats and sold to China’s least-discerning kitchens.As foul as it is, gutter oil is a pervasive problem in China. China Real Time cites a Ministry of Public Security statement that said Chinese officials, on top of arresting scores of offenders, also shut down 13 operations across mainland China and seized 3200 tons of oil made from thrown-away animal fat. It’s not some Podunk operation, either: the Ministry statement said that “it took nearly five months of painstaking investigation” for public security officers to nab the gang behind the network of gutter oil producers.The oil is mostly destined for restaurants, who buy oil in bulk and may end up with a gutter/regular oil blend. According to the statement, the ring sold more than $1.6 million before getting busted, and helped kitchen scrap dumpers in the process. The ongoing battle is just the latest toxic food scandal to grip China, with reports popping up regularly about food being poisoned by toxins and improper additives. It’s enough to make you glad that, even if your cheeseburger has pink slime in it, at least your fries weren’t cooked in a soup made from trash off the street.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @drderekmead.
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