this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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The beef tallow thing is painfully stupid...
I have started to wonder if the fact that adding it back makes it so vegetarians and vegans can no longer eat french fries (that are made with it) had anything to do with that decision... Or was that just an "unexpected bonus" in their minds?
I'm guessing that you're too young to remember. Lucky 10000! In the 1990s, McDonald's was under attack for a variety of anti-environmentalist practices, and by 2001 there was a class-action lawsuit against them for using beef tallow in fries from a coalition of vegetarians, vegans, and primarily Hindus who were deeply offended that they had been tricked into consuming what they consider to be a sacred animal. In a nutshell, it's a very racist and revanchist move, not just an anti-environmentalist move.
Unlike normal, I can't link to good peer-reviewed articles on the topic. McDonald's is one of the few groups who can successfully control their Internet presence, and they've washed away these controversies as best they can. I almost feel like linking to this summary of the case on Wikipedia is unhelpful, since it's got so many apologetic caveats. They do this all over Wikipedia; McLibel or Liebeck are also heavily edited in favor of McDonald's. You'll have to explicitly add "hindu" or "indian" to search queries; for example, instead of "mcdonalds beef tallow", try "mcdonalds beef tallow hindu indians".
I still don't understand what that was about, like do fries made in tallow taste better? Or at least noticeably different?
Idk if I have the formulation right on this but I imagine it’s a combination of various things:
I can’t speak for the taste. However, the fat used to fry fries does make a difference, as fat is a conveyance of flavour. Many fry recipes call for peanut oil, for example, while many people prefer using a neutral oil like canola to deep fry. I don’t think I know instinctively what the taste of beef tallow is like, but I imagine it’s just… beefy?
Notably different oils have different smoke points, meaning you can fry at higher temperatures for different textures. That’s why duck fat potatoes are a thing, for example.
Malcolm Gladwell famously has a podcast episode on the crusade against beef tallow, where he also replicates mcdonalds fries with beef tallow. But Gladwell is a chud, so fuck all that.
This is so weird to me like you can literally just go out and have fries today and they're great? They're so much better now because there's so many different places that literally just sell fries with various sauces so they have to be in an arms-race for the most delicious kind of sauce and the best fries. Plus everyone now offers sweet potato fries if you're bored of the normal ones. There's never been a better time for fries. When I was a kid fries fucking sucked man, and they had only ketchup.
100%. Nostalgia is a toxic impulse.
People remember fries used to taste better, and they'll attribute it to anything except the maturation of their pallate.
It prob is a "some culture warrior/bodybuilder misread a piece of research and it turned into a culture war conspiracy" thing. Like soy. (My silly nickname predates the culture war stuff by several decades, it comes from Shadowrun).
E: yes looked it up, comes via RFK of course and is anti seed oils thing. https://www.diningandcooking.com/1742624/america-stopped-cooking-with-tallow-for-a-reason/ and the anti seeds oil thing is an idea that has been spreading through the (far) right blogosphere for a decade or more (that is when I heard of it, so prob existed before that).
Our friends of the pod at lw also joined in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DHkkL2GxhxoceLzua/thoughts-on-seed-oil (but it concludes the seed oil theory is full of shit, points for LW there, well done (dont read the comments, there is roundup in the seed oils)).
Well, LW is only being no more wrong than Andrew Tate there, so they don't deserve too many points.
And Yud himself went full-blown anti-seed-oil.
Yes the score is still negative even of they had one win. Note how the glyposate asspull still got 50 upvotes. (And how one person went 'wow i have the same' in reaction to that to then just go 'it was gluten'. Enormous levels of contrarian so open minded their brains now have worms stuff. And amazing that all of this started just because Yud thought others were not unbiassed enough to properly understand his argument about training agi safely. Talk about 'I realized my initial goals were impossible so I made secondary goals which were also impossible so I'm going to become a weird (far) right winger scope drift. See also Musk. Whos plans for Mars were replaced with AI robots, and now is starting a company townwith all the women he has kids with (see also 'the implication'). (Yeah I made up that his women compound and company town are in the same place, but you get my point I hope).
Interesting how they fail in similar ways, Musk ignores the community notes and spouts his bs, vs Yud and ignoring the post (i assume 2023 yud vs 2024 lw) and already going anti meta study (??) in the tweet. Womens compound vs math pets. Weird science fiction bs vs weird science fiction ba. Has group of haters he claims are actually a small (undead) Jewish cabal who are behind all his hate vs Has group of haters who all are (goth) David Gerard.