EDIT: I wanted to make a quick update, specifically regarding the individual in the video - they actually reached out ibb.co/hg9XZsZ and everything tracks. I myself would be appalled to be defined by my low points, and his misunderstanding was understandable given the mess of information that's out there (even in China). I'm going to blur his face in the video, but it'll likely take a couple hours for it to take effect. Just wanted to get that out there at first Hey guys, just a few things that I wanted to emphasize... and a couple more than I wanted to clarify: 1. *Videos of people collecting oil from the gutter outside of restaurants is not evidence the restaurant is using gutter oil.* Outside of restaurants in China is a contraption known as a grease interceptor. This is a critical device that helps ensure that oil does not hit the sewage system, generally accessed through a manhole. The grease interceptor must be cleaned regularly. Specific regulations depend on the city and the district, but the ultimate responsibility is on the restaurant to maintain their grease interceptor. In particular, the fire department takes the situation incredibly seriously. In many larger cities there is a specific service (that the restaurant needs to pay for, in Shenzhen I recall it was about 5000 RMB per month?) that pumps the grease interceptor with some proper machinery. But the specific situation will depend on the locality. It is not unheard of for a restaurant to clear their interceptor themselves if there is a buildup. 2. *The oil collected in these videos are not being directly used in restaurants.* In many videos - though not all - it is implied that the oil is being collected from the grease interceptor is then being repurposed directly by the restaurant. Even from the more salacious media outlets, once the story is delved into in detail… it is made clear that the issue at hand is related to subsequent reprocessing of that collected oil. This was, indeed, the crux of the original gutter oil scandal: oil collected from grease interceptors was being neutralized, bleached, deodorized (in a similar way an edible neutral oil is produced) and sold back to restaurants. Due to contamination from bacteria and heavy metals in the sewer system, consuming this oil presents some health risks. But you would likely be oblivious to whether you were consuming it or not in the moment, particular in the context of other flavors. Perhaps you knew this already, but I felt it was important to emphasize. 3. *Recycled oil also has legitimate uses.* The most common destinations for recycled oils in China are industrial lubricants and biodiesel. It’s worth mentioning that the United States also has a lively market for recycled oil, as it’s a common inclusion in livestock feed (though to be clear, in the United States the oil used in livestock feed is sourced from deep fryers, not grease traps). In the past, one of the biggest issues was that recycled oil as a cooking oil commanded a 50% price premium over that bound for industrial purposes. Of course, markets tend to shift faster in the face of price-based carrots than punitive regulatory sticks (though the two can be especially effective in tandem). While the Chinese government has cracked down on gutter oil - as we discussed in the video - perhaps the more important development has been the dramatic increase in demand for recycled restaurant oil for use in biofuels. 4. *Videos of people collecting oil in rather-suspicious-looking unmarked vans (that perhaps respond poorly to being filmed) is not evidence of gutter oil.* Throughout the world, there is the phenomenon of grease theft. While more current information is available from a quick google, this 2000 Salon article province a nice overview: www.salon.com/2000/11/06/grease_wars/ In the USA, a grease thief will usually need a utility truck to get the job done. In China, it can be as easy as popping open the grease interceptor. This is in large part due to specific multi-compartment designs of grease interceptors that are popular in China (likely given the admittedly rather oily nature of Chinese restaurant cooking). 5. *Recycling restaurant cooking oil is a common practice worldwide.* In the industry in America, used restaurant grease is divided into brown grease (sourced from interceptors) and yellow grease (sourced from used deep frying oil). The general rule of thumb is that latter has much wider range of potential uses - in the USA, livestock feed appears to be the dominant application - and commands a much higher price. It is difficult to parse why oil sourced from interceptors in China is recycled while those in the United States is not. The obvious explanation the mind turns to would simply be a lower regulatory bar, which could potentially be problematic. But perhaps the destination of the recycled oil itself requires less of a regulatory hurdle - the dominant (legitimate) uses of recycled cooking oil in China are industrial lubricants and biodiesel. Perhaps some minerals and free fatty acids are less of an issue when you’re not feeding it to chickens. The standards given to oil recyclers in China would corroborate this idea, as from the document it appears that animal feed is not an allowable destination. www.leo-king.com/jtxw/info_24_itemid_778.html But this is an area that we’re quickly bumping into the limits of our understanding, and I’m worried that our analysis could begin to veer into confirmation bias. 6. *The original gutter oil scandal was real and not a fabrication. The most legitimate academic analysis we found put the market share of gutter oil at about 10% during the ‘00s.* It is important to emphasize that the gutter oil scandal was very real, stemming from well researched pieces of investigative journalism and made an indelible impact on Chinese society. The original gutter oil was called “frying oil” as it was generally being used for deep frying (i.e. an application where low quality oil would have less of an impact on taste). Researchers from Wuhan Polytechnic University estimated that roughly 10% of oil purchased by restaurants during this time was gutter oil, though other researchers had (unspecified) lower estimates. zqb.cyol.com/content/2010-03/17/content_3139053.htm 7. *There was a crackdown in 2011 and 2012 that - anecdotally - dramatically diminished (but likely not extinguished) the market for gutter oil.* I should be quite upfront in that this final point is primarily based off of discussions that we’ve had with friends in the industry. Take as well salted as you would any anecdotal evidence. Pre-2012, gutter oil was a bit of an open secret, and it was sometimes found in a perhaps surprisingly diverse array of restaurant settings (while you would be more likely to bump into it at a street stall than a hotel, it wasn’t necessarily the case). This has drastically changed post-2012. However, it is important to note that refined used cooking oil is still something that is available for restaurants to purchase, especially from grey market distributors. Said distributors will make it clear that the oil is not for use as a cooking oil, but it’s certainly possible that there is someone - somewhere - in China that is flying too close to the sun and using this sort of oil in 2024. Everyone emphasized that no restaurant owner in their right mind would use it in the larger cities, but it would probably be wrong to claim it as completely 100% eradicated. --- Anyway, delving into this whole morass hasn't been... great... for my personal headspace. Food is a lot more fun (though in fairness, absent the political dimension & people pushing narratives in bad faith... sewage is actually really interesting!). Anyway, apologies in advance for likely not engaging very much with this particular comment section - I'd much rather spend my waking hours researching our next dish than fruitlessly arguing with the fuck-anything-and-everything-about-china crowd. Our take is in the video and in the notes above. We probably overlooked some stuff, we're might even be wrong about some stuff. Take at face value :)
If people value traditions and culture over profit and greediness then they should believe in karma and someone misdeeds schemes to get rich fast could boomerang back and bite them hard. On a separate note and to prove this kind of scandals is not exclusive to Chinese culture, way back in the 60's there was a scandal in a Middle East country I cannot recall exactly that someone bought surplus and used mechanical oil from an Army depot and mixed it with vegetable oil destined for Human consumption and caused a large scale poisoning with many people getting chronic neurological diseases or even killed. Also the scandal of fake Olive oil being imported to the US and other countries that doesn't contain any oil from any Olive plants.
@@Themyscara Some other cultures like Japan they can drink straight form the tap, but that is because their preserve their water sources and keep them in pristine condition, others like South Korea albeit having the same standard of life as Japan but because they are adjacent to North Korea and fearful of warring foul play, nobody drink water form the taps, even for cooking I think they use bottled water. But if you are calling negligent management of aqueducts nobody topple the mishap in Flint Michigan that corroded their piping system by pumping untreated water from a polluted river. So what's your point with your question?
9:17 "kill a chicken to scares the monkey" aka saat kei geng hau (殺雞警猴) is a chinese idiom that means punish someone severely to set an example for the rest..
We have the equivalent in Thai as "เชือดไก่ให้ลิงดู" or, literally translated, "slaughter a chicken for a monkey to see". I wonder if this has been borrowed from Chinese immigrants and integrated into Thai everyday lingo, much like many words of Chinese origin in Thai.
While not the same and more of a "kill a monkey, to scare monkeys" approach, but Voltaire also once said "in this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others".
Living in California, the idea of "oh yeah these people are dubiously illegally stealing recycleables" makes complete sense. We have folks who come and just dump our recycling bins looking for cans and guys who steal catalytic converters to sell for scrap, and hell there were/are guys who steal used cooking oil HERE for biodeisel, it makes a lot of sense.
I'm trying hard not to be emotional, but not once have I ever seen a non-Chinese person shed such a respectful & accurate light on Chinese culture / cuisine. I'm part of a Chinatown BIA in North America, and a lot of our businesses need to deal with this gutter oil stereotype that affects business, especially since the COVID era. We've had longtime restaurants close as a result of false accusations around pests & supposed gutter oil collection. We even got the city hall to do inspections for the accused restaurants, but even when we got those establishments cleared they would still suffer from the TikTok videos.
Come on dude! Stop being so Radical, and outright Wrong. If that were the case... then MILLIONS of Chinese restaurants, wouldnt exist in the USA. Its a fact, that millions of Americans, Love Chinese cooking... and consume it on a frequent basis. Nobody that I know.. thinks that the Gutter Oil problem, is from within the USA. Its clearly a "China only" problem. If there are issues in CA... its more likely from mentally Ill radicals, from inside of your state. That, and or the Govt. shills, trying to shut down ALL businesses... because CA and the Corrupted Demoncrats.. want to covert the USA into Communism. And what better way to do it... than to cause massive inflation... stop punishing criminals... and cause businesses to go into bankruptcy. The MAIN reason why places are closing... is because people can no longer AFFORD to eat out ! Groceries are like Double the prices that they used to be... and cooking for yourself, is still infinitely cheaper than paying for prepared food + delivery fees.
It’s… annoying… when people harp on about gutter oil in China. People doing that shit to Chinese-American restaurants *in the United States*? Gross to a borderline unfathomable degree. I’m sorry you have to deal with that
I'm not going to pretend that Chinese restaurants, like any, have never had hygiene issues - but it boggles my mind how perhaps the world's most delicious cuisine is sometimes insulted as particularly filthy.
@@timmccarthy9917 It's just racism. People from Asia are often very high achievers when they immigrate to or study in English-speaking countries, which means racist people within that society can't use the same kind of bullying they use for the systematically disadvantaged people of their countries. The alternative is to say "yes, Chinese people (or Indian people, or Korean people) are very accomplished/intelligent, but eating their food makes you sick because it's unhygienic, or the ingredients are substandard, or the food culture itself is unethical (e.g. Western focus on "eating dogs" as a trope specifically attached to Chinese people even though many of the most revered and expensive dog breeds in the world originate from China.)
@@hoodedferret Lol, yes, "it's just racism." Absurd reductionism to justify your moral superiority won't backfire at all. Remember to get your Covid booster, those tens of thousands of VAERS reports are all fake and easy to file after all.
Yes - and one of them is people USING GUTTER OIL TO COOK FOOD IN CHINA! It's common knowledge among the Chinese who actually have to eat this stuff. And this video calls Winston Sterzel a "grifter" 28:10 . . . just for telling the truth? (BTW, he lived in China for over a decade, is fluent in Mandarin, has half Chinese kids, etc. You talk like he's just some random racist loser.) The whole premise of this video - that Xi and his "reforms" got rid of the problem - is frankly offensive to anyone who cares about the future of China and holds out hope for the reform or (hope beyond hope) eventual replacement of the CCP. This is Xi's China, where it's normal for a building owner, for example, to bribe elevator inspectors, leading to his tenants plunging to their deaths, which happens frequently, where EV manufacturers make shoddy batteries that cause cars to burst into flames, where highways are collapsing due to tofu dregs construction, etc, etc. You think with so many examples of "cha bu duo" mindset that there aren't still countless small vendors buying that processed gutter oil to save a few Yuan?
It always seems cruel when poor people are just trying to figure out ways to get by and others respond by getting that behavior outlawed or saying they’re garbage dogmonkeys and whatnot.
@@Leto_0 True, but the culture that influences those people is relevant. In China under the CCP, everyone understands: you do whatever you can to survive because no one is going to save you. There's a big problem in China with bystanders just looking on during kidnappings, attacks, etc. Funny, it turns out an evil gangster communist government ruling with an iron fist for 70 years isn't the best thing for social cohesion.
Came for the recipes, stayed for the nuanced analysis on western misconceptions, chinese history and deconstruction of "authenticity" as a culinary concept. Great work Chris, probably my favourite cooking channel on YT.
"authenticity" pisses me off. Like people put tons of stock into French cuisine but a ton of "authentic" recipes were just 1 way of a hundred to make a dish and the "authentic" version is just whichever recipe Escoffier happened to prefer. Like French onion soup used to have water or a milk broth but the "authentic" recipe uses beef broth, the old version would have bread on the side and _maybe_ cheese on the side but the "authentic" version has melted cheese on top of bread thats on top of the soup. The same is true with tons of other dishes where different regions had different versions and of course every cook made it slightly different, only centuries later did celebrity chefs write down their version and that became the standard and people assume the older versions are derivatives.
very this, and very elegantly said. also it just makes me happier knowing that the channel i follow for recipes is headed by people with good critical thinking skills... next to self-awareness it's the quality most important to me, but they really go hand-in-hand.
Years ago I worked at a movie theater with a 2 basket fryer in FL, popular chain, eventually I worked there long enough to be given the task of cleaning the fryer every Friday and to get a management position. We changed the oil every 7 days, the whole fryer was broken down into pieces and scrubbed, washed and then refilled with new oil, the old oil went into the grease trap. Anytime id overhear people say we used "old oil" I rolled my eyes, the fryer was never on all the time, it went off at the end of the shift and honestly the days it got the most use Friday-Sunday were the days it got the most use and the oil was the freshest. People need to work in the food and beverage industry once in their lives to see what goes into getting them their "restaurant quality" food. I believe it would give them a lot more respect for the good well run establishments out there and be more picky about the sketchy places that are treated like they are so clean you can eat off the floor.
THIS! like maam your popcorn is fresh! There's 300 people coming thru these doors and we are constantly popping....did you think we popped and stored this popcorn 3 days ahead???? .....Also the "butter" is coconut oil ☺
@@epicka The OP made the point most people eat from that fryer on the freshest oil days. If you can taste old oil in your food and it's a problem for you, as it is for me, you should stop eating at that restaurant. Most people who don't like the food at a restaurant just stops going there and that speaks louder than anything. If that place was in business long enough for an employee to go from regular worker to manager, it's safe to say the oil was good enough to keep the restaurant open. Fryers that have heating elements off the floor of the fryer can keep the oil tasting fresher for longer.
@@epicka I worked in similar (not identical) conditions to OP, and while 7 days feels like a long time, there are a couple of additional factors. For one, restaurant supply companies like Sysco offer filter pods that contain what I can only assume is some kind of flocculant, to pull a lot of the burnt and off-tasting compounds out of the fryer oil. You leave them in overnight and they do a pretty good job at extending the life of the oil. And in addition to that, we were pretty vigilant using a combination of square spider and bench scraper to pull any large chunks left behind by the food, so it wouldn't dissolve into the oil and burn. That being said, when our restaurant changed ownership, they did bump us up to twice-a-week oil changes. So once a week is probably *the longest* you'd actually want to go. But it's by no means unusual for the industry.
@@robertp457 It doesn't really change the fact that seven days is a long time. If it only gets changed once a week and the weekend oil is freshest, that screws over everyone who ate something fried in it on Thursday. And really, oil starts chemically changing the instance it's being heated; if it's getting heavy use on the weekend, by Monday it really shouldn't be usable. A twice-weekly change on Monday and Friday would be the bare minimum I'd hope for in this situation. And saying " If that place was in business long enough for an employee to go from regular worker to manager, it's safe to say the oil was good enough to keep the restaurant open" is a massive assumption. Lots of people are not versed in food safety, nor can they readily tell when their food is cooked in old oil. Old oil is not the same as rancid oil; more often than not, using old oil doesn't alter the flavour of the food or the oil at all. If anything, I have often heard it said that some people even prefer food cooked in repeatedly reused oil, as it makes the food more "characterful", which is a myth coming from the opposite direction. And if you ask people who work in kitchens (as I have done as I've known many over the years) from cheapo diners to really fancy places, they'll readily tell you about the kitchens using obviously rancid and even long out-of-date oil, and it clearly never affected their business or bottom line.
Most of the channels on china is either propaganda channels from pro-US agencies (negative pieces) or from the Chinese govt (overly positive pieces). I like Chinese cooking demystified for it's informed contents...not blatant biasness.
@@chiangweytan5937but let’s be honest, it sells to be anti-China much more than being nuanced or even “pro-China.” Even though a lot of “pro-China” or positive pages get labeled as CCP propaganda or paid shills / WuMao’s.
I also think a big part is poverty tourism. There are big videos of Indian street foods and how unsanitary it often is, particularly viewed through the American lens. It's framed as disgusting but they real issue is poverty. I'm sure the cooking would look different if people had access to clean, running water, for example, or refrigeration. Your clip of the Wire is on point. Thanks for making this
It also doesnt help that things like "gutter oil" are a common myth in China to the point its become slang. It also doesnt help that China isnt the only country to have this semi-true myth, tons of western restaurants get accused of using old oil even when they replace their oil once or more a week and even when oil gets reused for a few days they'll likely filter it daily or more. I worked at a restaurant that had a filter built into the fryer and the oil was changed twice a week so your "gutter oil" was 3 days old at worst. You see similar in China where restaurants get accused of using "gutter oil" all the time.
this is the same argument as poverty causes crime, yet certain groups cause more crime in poverty than others, sweden right now is a great example. onto another example, i recall an indian restaurant being shut down in england (uk) because they found literal shit everywhere. the chef didnt believe in using toilet paper, opted for his hands, and barely if ever washed his hands. he would certainly be living richer than in india at the least
@@thefutureisnowoldman7653 you do realize india has a lot more people than both of those countries combined, right? during the industrial revolution when the poor lived in slums or crowded cities, before the importance of sanitation was realized, there was filth everywhere on the streets. I'm talking about 19th century England, and I think this was the case for the U.S. too.
@@MGX93dot If you've ever watched Gordon's shows (e.g. Nightmare Kitchen), you'll know that White people can have disgusting restaurants and poor standards of hygiene/food quality too. Btw "Sweden right now is a great example" is not self-explanatory; the context of your response makes your meaning ambiguous, especially since the smaller, near-homogeneous European countries typically have better care for their populace in general, given their high taxation and social welfare. When there aren't many ppl to look after, it's easier to keep track of everyone and get what they need. Larger countries don't have that luxury -- example problems being in the U.S. (healthcare), Russia (Putin), and Mexico (cartels). To say or imply that any one ethnic group is more "dirty" or "morally-compromised" (inferred from your brief mention of crime) than another is always a product of negative bias from a lack of adequate exposure to said ethnic groups and the understanding that no demographic is a monolith
I'll say this much, working as a fry cook at red lobster, we'd use the same oil in the fryers for a week, and sometimes my manager would wait 2 weeks or more before replacing the oil, it would turn color like used motor oil, and smell, and nothing would fry properly. I think the off chance of getting "gutter oil" from chinese food should be the least of people's worries
same thing here. worked at a popular american chain (not saying which), and the oil in one of the fryers regularly degraded to the point of it being nearly pitch black. you could paint with it like black watercolor. less than a centimeter of visibility, and smoked like the depths of hell the moment you heated it up.
@@Ahayeahishere Yes, we know the difference between "digouyou and laoyou" -we watched the video. And it reminded us of our own experiences in restaurants. We are commenting on the topic of the last third of the video (the inevitable difference between the law and restaurant practices- even here in the usa). You obviously didnt watch the very end- doubt you got to 19:19. Read the title and came down here to complain. Classic. "There you go. Given a fuck where it aint your turn to give a fuck"
"We live on an internet that is completely inundated with bulls**t, and there's no valor in adding to the pile." Amen. Also, isn't there an episode of The Simpsons where Homer tries to make money by stealing oil/grease and selling it to a recycling plant?
Also, today I looked up more information about Pascal's Wager thanks to this video than I did when I first heard about the theory. Thank you Chinese Cooking Demystified!
I worked with an oil recycling company in NYC, and the key question asked was "what is the best day of the week to change your fry oil?" When it's dirty simple as that. Buy clean oil sell old to a recycler/refiner
Yeah, but the idea behind changing it on a schedule would be making sure it gets done regardless of any individual's perception of cleanliness. Deciding which day would be important in that case because it would affect when in the week the oil tastes the best, but that mainly depends on the restaurant than anything the recycling company could provide input on. I have yet to work in a restaurant that changed their oil weekly, in the fast food industry, so even scheduled changes would've been an improvement. And that's not for a lack of trying, I've had managers get mad at me for asking them to change the oil too often when they let it get weeks old before bothering.
It does get a bit weird when random videos of people removing oil from gutters get instantly branded as a part of the gutter oil operations if they're from China (or, at least, labeled as China). That stuff just happens all the time in any country where there's inexperienced cooks absolutely mishandling cooking oil. There's even a whole genre of Korean videos dedicated to removing sewer blockages caused by oil.
@@ChineseCookingDemystified "Genre" may have been a bit of overexaggerating, but there's a channel called "하수구의제왕" (King of Sewers) who has an absurd amount of views for what's really just sewer cleanups-- over half of which is related to oil crusting over stuff.
@DrainCleaningAUSTRALIA is a channel I have watched where he has delt with drains blocked due to grease. I remember one where he specifically opend up the grease trap to sort out a clogged pipe.
Like other people have said. Too few people have worked in the "blue collar" side of food service. They dont know what its like to take care of waste that people callously leave for other people to "take care of"
It's like if the situation is slightly different, those people would've picked up on that many parts of rural China still have manual labor of handling "night soil". as in a bamboo pole slung on the shoulders, carrying 2 wooden buckets of night soil to be carried out of the village and dumped at a facility. someone who doesn't know what's going on will likely latch onto that and make up all sorts of fiction as to what those buckets of excrement will be used for, and there's no way they'll accept anything but the worst scenarios as they're simply... racists looking to be racists.
Holy crap. Finally someone who explains what's going on with those scooping oil out of the gutter video. I never understood how there was enough oil in the sewer to make gutter oil but now everything makes sense.
It is funny when my parents own a restaurant we would recycle to a company to take care of our use oil. We fellow the health guidelines here in the US. We have them pick up our use oil every week. The health inspector will check your paperwork every week. At the end of the year the recycle company would send us boxes of bath soap as gifts.
I've heard this rumor once or twice from people before and thought "ain't no way" and didn't even give it a second thought This really brought a lot of information to me, some of which I'll probably mention if I hear things about this again. This is genuinely why I love this channel. It brings a completely thought-out perspective to a lot of things, and it's one of my only sources that I use when cooking Chinese food because the recipes are so well researched and have a basis in the country itself. The Mapo Tofu recipe is practically engrained in my head, and it's all thanks to you two bringing an experience and information to an English market that's so hard to find anywhere else.
Gutter oil is old news, nowadays it's commercial cooking oil being transferred in industrial oil tankers. Also there's hotpot soup broth being frozen and reused hence spit soup lol
As a dietitian who basically feels like she just spends all day fighting against the pandemic of medical misinformation, i appreciate when content creators spend time to make nuanced videos. Sometimes the tidal wave of influencers spoon feeding fear-mongering seems endless. Thank you so much and i learned a lot!
Not the video I was expecting from you guys, but very interesting and informative. It sucks you can't have any sort of dialogue about China without it resorting to jingoistic vitriol. In any case, looking forward to the next recipe!
The rage-bait Chinese videos keep popping up in my feed and it annoys me to no end. I so appreciate you ACTUALLY breaking down the history and context rather than just showing a random video and saying "China bad"
Press "don't show again" on any video you see on your feed. Then find another video you wish to be shown, and press the like button. Stop commenting on rage bait. UA-cam will get the point and adjust it's algorithm.
"don't recommend this channel" or "don't show me this" are very useful buttons, I also clear my whole history when I find my algorithm to be borked to some extreme view, sometimes it happens really quickly just because I get morbidly curious and watch one video my whole feed gets destroyed. Sometimes I have to clear multiple times per week. The downside is I have to re-ban channels after clearing the history. I can't tell you how many times I banned sunny_v2 from my algorithm
I remember there was a simpsons episode where homer and bart literally tried to get into the waste oil recycling industry and tried to steal Willies retirement grease
lol. i worked back of house at a restaurant in michigan for three months before i learned that there was an oil filter for the deep fryer that was supposed to be run every night before closing, and also that the oil was supposed to be changed twice a week not once, the guy who trained me just never bothered with that stuff. the restaurant has closed since i left when the building was deemed unsafe for occupation
Sadly, your experience is not unique. I worked in a fried chicken restaurant in Michigan where the normal practice was to filter the oil in the deep fryer when too much burnt breading was sticking to the food. The owner's policy was to change the oil once per week. The oil would be a dark brown color by the time it was changed. It looked like used motor oil.
The problem with restaurants is that there is never enough time/money to do things properly. Every time I would clean the fryer I would have to fight with management all week to leave early when it wasn't busy so that I could come in before open and clean the fryer. Never was I thanked and everyone in management just acted like I was wasting time.
It saddens me that all of this thoughtful work culminates in the 40/60 UA-cam comments you mentioned. This channel is fabulous. We came for the noodle recipes, but we learn SO MUCH every time we watch. Keep up the good work!
Restaurant manager in the US here. We recycle our old oil,we have a dedicated oil dumpster for it when we change it. I'm not sure what happens to it when the recycling company comes to take it away, but I'm pretty sure you're just seeing a small Chinese operation doing the exact same thing over there, taking it away to be recycled into something else - *not* food oil.
Unfortunately, another commenter running Chinese restaurant business in Chinatown in the US was talking about how they're still bothered by this kind of sterotype, even their business is in the US.
@@ChineseCookingDemystified Yeah, sadly, there's a growing tide of Sinoracism here in the US, egged on by the same politics driving the current trade war. It's stupid and atrocious, but there you have it. These recent gutter oil videos are just a symptom of that.
@@jeremiahmiller6431 That laowei influencer that filmed the drain cleaners was aiming his rage in the wrong direction and effecting badly the wrong people. If the lax of proper supervision is from unregulated gray area of businesses then the main problem is with the administration of the city itself, not the people that try to comply with the lax Laws.
I worked in American restaurants for 10 years and I can tell you that of all the places I worked, the only one that changed their oil more than once a *week* was a KFC. And frankly, since I've moved back from abroad, I've eaten enough rancid takeout to suspect the standards these days are far worse in a lot of places, from local joints to big chains. As always, look to your own house, before you start chucking stones at the neighbor's.
Yes this 100% happens in America. Lots of Boomers think old grease is good. It is not. It goes rancid like any fat. Fryers should be deep cleaned regularly. At a place like KFC, it is possible to go through oil so fast you refill it faster than it goes rancid, and you can keep rotating oil for a long time when you're busy. The food is taking away all the old grease. But - as stated - you must absolutely drain the whole thing and deep clean it regularly. Once a week is actually fine in some situations. Buy the places cutting corners? You ever notice how a few local kitchens catch fire every single summer? Grease problems are a big factor.
Yes, in the section of the video where he mentioned restaurants perhaps pushing their oil a bit farther than they should, I definitely had the thought that restaurants of all kinds do that. It's a business thing, not a specific cuisine thing. I can also vouch for the fact that the US refines and recycles used cooking oil- my workplace has a machine to collect and filter it (it looks different than the ones shown in this video, but it does the same thing), and the resulting oil gets poured into lidded buckets, palletized, and shipped out.
There's even a restaurant in America that prides itself on deep frying cheeseburgers in the same oil they used when the restaurant was founded. They get featured on travel shows where they talk about the "unique flavor" their oil gives their burgers.
I worked for a chicken restaurant here in the states. We served steak biscuits as well and the GM would use oil so old and reused to cook the steak biscuit patty that the oil was black. The only time that the steak fryer got actually fresh oil was when I accidentally changed it, and once when the health inspector was coming by. That was twice in over a year. You would put the steak on a biscuit and if you looked under it the biscuit would be stained black.
@@dan339dannot op but I've worked in kitchens 20 years, mostly in NZ. You notice it in things like french fries first, but soon you'll notice the bitterness and plasticky rancid taste in anything. Most places strain the oil & wipe out the deep fryers every day and top it up with fresh oil. One day a week is the full clean and fresh oil. The old stuff sits in a drum out the back for recycling into non-food uses.... Given how 90% of olive oil is "fake", it doesnt surprise me places all across the world would also sell and buy refined used oil not meant for human consumption cos "it's refined, right? How bad can it be? It doesnt have any bad taste" But going back to the flavor of unchanged dark oil? Yes you'd definitely notice. I've sent food back before... Once, very embarrassingly, I had a customer send their food back to me with a note "tell the chefs they need to change their fry oil"... and that was only 4 days old!
@@dan339dan the GM said that people didn’t taste it. Before I worked there I used to eat steak biscuits. My dad would stop by get breakfast and the steak biscuit was my go to. Then I noticed that yeah they started tasting bad and when I worked there years later I found out why. They had a Cajun steak biscuit for a bit. I thought it was that that made me nauseous because they smelled bad.
I'm sorry but if you're alluding that old and reused oil is the same as gutter oil. That's just false equivalency. Sure it's disgusting. But not as disgusting as oil in sewers.
As an American, this makes a lot more sense to me than grainy stock-footage of vaguely Southeastern-Asian looking people moving buckets of anomalous liquids from street-hatches to trucks with an overly dramatic voiceover whining nonsense about "gutter oil IN CHINA".
Wdym? Its proven that this is and was in fsct happening. Restaurants getting the gutter oil and using it to cook with it. Its a fact. The thing that is the question is how often does thst happen and thats what the video talking about esdentially. Your comment makes it seem like you think its just completely made up thst restsjrants used it
@@Ahayeahishere The problem is the channel owner's "clarification" in his list.. his firstt few points sorta say it is untrue and people don't read beyond and jump in to go " AH HAH it's fake!"
I’ve never heard of ‘gutter oil’ but this was super engaging, really well reasoned and researched and I would welcome more of this type of content from you.
I really appreciate when you guys do these kinds of videos. Much like when you did the stuff on wet markets years ago; as an outsider it's hard to know what the truth is when these narratives spin up.
A really good rule of thumb is if something gets you immediately riled up, it's probably false and designed to get you riled up. Like if something seems like it lacks nuance, then it lacks nuance 😄 If you want actual information you need nuance.
lol my face shows up every now and then Basically just don’t want people to get the impression that this is “that expat white dude’s channel”, when Steph’s by far the more important part of the whole operation. Like, this whole channel is very much the product of the weird mind-meld the two of us have going on, but I’m definitely the more replaceable of the two brain hemispheres
This video actually made me ponder the entire seed oil meme going on right now. If the Chinese eat so much oil (likely seed oils) and don't seem to have the claimed adverse health affects, then it seems like it's overblown.
its been downhill ever since american fast food chains have been introduced and well established actually, u cant really make the comparison when country a barely consumes real food and country b does, plus processed sugar context and big differences in whats considered breakfast and dessert. 😂
Idk if this is still an issue but there was a study showing some brands olive and avacado oils consisted of rancid old oils or cut with cheaper vegetable oils. Companies cutting corners to increase profits is just a human thing not unique to any specific country or ethnicity.
I had never even heard of this whole "gutter oil" fiasco going on until this video title, and just based on the thumbnail I got a pretty good guess. I didn't work for a restaurant, but I did work for a factory that made cured meats, some of which were larded, or encased in lard. The lard after using a few times would then be liquefied and stored in barrels to dispose of with our biohazard pickup company. I just assumed that this is what's going on, and the casual observer has no idea how this all works and assumes malicious intent.
I think the person in the original video was witnessing oil theft like you suggest. I worked in a fast food restaurant that was part of a truck stop type complex off a major US interstate in the 90's. We had people steal our fryer oil fairly often. When I first stared working there I thought the lock on the fryer oil container was to keep pests out, but I was told later it was mostly to deter the casual theif. From what I understand someone would come by in the middle of the night with a pump truck, cut the lock, empty everything out, and then hop on the highway before anyone could stop them. It was such a bummer since we sold our oil to a local person who made biodiesel. Any waste product that has even a little value like used fry oil, scrap metal, aluminum cans, and bottles will have shady gleaners and not-so-legit recyclers.
The bit about old oil had me thinking about how theres a place in my american city that uses about century old grease to deep-fry its burgers and brags about it...
US is the most loosely regulated country ever and your regulators are so ridiculously under-staffed is genuinely distressing 😄 Like if there was even e-coli found in food, nevermind anyone dying from it, where I live it would be major fucking deal and big news. I think it's been years if not a decade since I heard about an incident. Oh and we eradicated salmonella from our chicken stock in co-operation with our neighbouring countries, it's safe to use raw eggs here.
That's a good bit different though. Much of the oil used in China in restaurants is used for Hot Pot, a style of eating where flame-heated chili oil is placed in the center of the table for people to cook their own meats and food in. The problem is that it can lead to contamination from the people over and over dipping a piece of meat, taking a bite, maybe redipping it, over and over thus becoming contaminated with human pathogens, germs, ect. Presumably reused oil at a restaurant that is used ONLY for cooking will not be host to the same sorts of pathogenic contamination.
@@pbjandahighfive BREAKING NEWS: High temperature, BOILING SHIT at that, now no longer kills pathogens because pbjandahighfive said so. ridiculous point.
Thank you for explaining this phenomenon. When I was studying in Shanghai, way back in 2010, this was something that we were warned about at orientation, but no one ever gave an explanation as to why this was potentially an issue. For the record, I don’t remember anyone getting sick from the street vendors around campus. The only thing that seemed to afflict students were hangovers 😅
If there's one uniting thread through the videos in this channel, it's the dedication to opposing a sense of alienation. Whether that is helping westerners substitute ingredients they may not be able to find locally, or revealing that actually public health and infrastructure systems can be misunderstood anywhere in the world, or being compassionate when people in poverty are alienated from society everywhere, this channel always does a good job.
that opening video was really uncomfortable. I never knew about gutter oil, but you're absolutely right. It's better to mind my own business than to be ignorant about someone else's business. Thank you for this great video.
I've known way too many of these people. Like, I get it, dude is steeped in the same ignorance as 99 % of reddit or YT comments, but at some point, yelling at random couples you don't have the slightest clue about seems like the dumb thing to do. People just don't care about the truth when "sewage outrage oil" is a much better sell - viral salaciousness, as it were.
@@minhuang8848 Fr, as soon as I heard him call them inhuman dog monkeys that deserve to die the next day I was like 'well there's no way this person isn't a total piece of shit'.
Personally, if something like this happens in my neighbourhood I wouldn't mind my own business. I'm that person who reports unattended luggage and calls the emergency number when I hear someone shouting "Help!" However, I would probably watch these guys, maybe take a picture or video so I can ask other people what they're doing, and also ask them what they're doing. I wouldn't start swearing at them, that's unnecessary.
@@julesverneinoz That's because food safety has become the number 1 (non-economic related) issues in China. Counterfeit baby formula, chemically bleached food, counterfeit alcoholic drinks, counterfeit food products... the list is endless, and news and rumors spread like wildfire about a new scandal every month, the latest being cooking oiling being transported by trucks used to move chemicals without being cleaned in between. To simply put, Chinese people don't trust the food industry, they don't trust the government regulators who kept promising food safety and they don't trust the Chinese media to report honestly. So they're taking matters into their own hands in whichever way the system allows them to.
@@julesverneinozNot only was he yelling at them, he was dehumanizing them, calling them names that imply they're not human. This looks especially bad coming from a non-chinese person. Even if these people are operating illegally, it's absolutely inappropriate to treat them that way for doing something discreetly that doesn't directly harm anyone.
Another issue with non-cooks not understanding why frying oil is dark is they don't realize even with a relatively fresh batch of oil, it oxidized quickly depending on what it's fried in, and whether what's being fried involves liberal use of salt, or some batter, nevermind different seed oils used and their natural color vs oxidization rates. It's about as ridiculous as saying brown sugar/jaggery/kokuto is "nastier" than refined white sugar.
But high oil oxidization directly impacts your health (oxidative stress, right?), whereas brown sugar isn't more oxidized or anything; so I don't think this is a good comparison because people are accurately using pattern recognition to avoid unhealthy stuff in one example and the other is totally arbitrary.
@@BooBooKeyshehe it was never a matter of actual science, but people's incorrect assumptions based on color as an indication of "purity" (in many senses of the word). also, sugar is bleached with bone char or other substances, and has nothing to do with “burn”. and by your logic, unrefined sugars have more anti-oxidants and trace minerals. lol.
Thanks for doing this. I'd seen a few videos claiming that gutter oil was a thing, but the channels that had them had a pretty strong anti-China vibe. Definitely set off my BS detector. But there's usually some grain of truth behind these things but I never expected to find out what it was. So it's really great to have a sane explainer. Keep up the awesome work!
There’s a certain inherent risk in letting someone else prepare your food, no matter where you are in the world. I wish more people in general were conscious of that, because I feel like it’d challenge more of their own biases with stories like this.
The problem with this is that the person you are buying food from might be trustworthy and being lied to. This is about how trustworthy the people trusted by the people you trust are.
It's crazy how many things westerners fear about China are happening in their own backyards (or worse) and they just never think about it because it was never sensationalized to them. You're making faces about five day oil, and I worked at a joint that changed their oil every seven days when I was in college. Health and safety violations happen everywhere all the time! That's our race to the bottom economic system at work! And we don't even know the context in that video! Since when are angry drunks good, level-headed information sources? Just like you say, you can jump to whatever conclusion you want, but you don't have to share it on the internet. Too much ignorance and hearsay out there already.
I don't think it's a fear also it's not just China. If anyone even saw people in their own country taking oil out of the gutter to cook with they would be upset. They are upset that people eat that stuff without knowing. Yes all over the world people are using 5 day old oil, most fast food places change their oil every 4 or 5 days they are neve daily. Also China is definitely not the only places that has the few to use gutter oil. You will always have they few who don't care and just need to make money without a thought about others.
I worked for environmental consulting companies for several years, and grease traps are a vital part of managing the waste stream of restaurants. They stink like hell and require occasional pumping to stay functional and keep wastewater systems from getting clogged. The trucks that pump the grease out have to put it somewhere, and indeed that usually means biofuel or lubricant reprocessing. It's not great to have that stuff in landfills.
Every restaurant in the US where I have worked has a smaller grease interceptor inside, usually under or near the dishwashing machine or sink. Depending on how oily the rinse is, we can often get away with using a digestor enzyme, but that stuff is only so effective. At the BBQ place I worked, I had to personally empty the thing a few times a month, and it was the foulest smell I have ever experienced. Also, here on the west coast a pretty sizeable part of the population rides around on "salvaged" bikes collecting cans. The trash bin outside my apartment gets picked over a dozen times a day. As long as they don't make a mess, I much prefer the can collecting over the catalytic converter and bike theft that also occurs with some regularity.
This exactly. But I was speaking with someone who moved here from the UK, and they mentioned seeing this as something crazy that you only see late night. So I guess it's less common in some cities, and seeing laws against it makes some sense as to why.
I drive my diesel car with HVO100, which is hydro-treated vegetable oil, so the basis for my fuel is exactly the stuff that is being collected here. I loved the video (and always love to see your handsome mug)!
@kusazero we actually do have similar done in small and large operations. Bio-diesel is oil which has been treated to remove glycerine and break down fatty chains into shorter, more readily combustible hydrocarbons. Most fuel producers will have it make up about 10% of your diesel, because it does a fantastic job of replacing sulfur as the main lubricant inside diesel engines. Alternatively, if you make it yourself, you can run most diesel engines with 100% bio-diesel with no problems
@@kusazero there are some videos you can look up that show the process on small scale. It may not be doable for you, or maybe you will find it's easier to do than you thought. Fuel aside, you can make a lot of glycerine as well, a key ingredient in many soaps and moisturizers.
I worked in a restaurant in north Canada 25 years ago. It wasn't even connected to sewers. They had a huge septic tank that was cleaned regularly. The frying oil was changed once a week but it was strained and the deep frier cleaned every night. If the cook thought the oil was too off they would change it early. There was no oil recycling companies. The oil was sealed in a bucket and put in the dumpster. So stretching oil as long as it would last was a necessity.
This was just my understanding of cooking oil. Fried food joints will go through it faster than a place just making some fries a few times. I've even heard that older oil (not broken/off/rancid, just not first use I guess) is better for flavour.
@@a_trauma_llama2991 well if burnt oil is a flavour you like then sure. But I always found the deep fried food there tasted better the fresher the oil was. It was a typical greasy spoon diner so they had lots of deep fried food like mozzarella sticks, chicken fingers, zucchini sticks, etc, etc.
I am a Hawaiian speeding jaywalker that is happy to see your face for the first time after all these years of watching your videos. I have to say that UA-cam watchers need this video. Period.
Who knew 2024's most sane English-language take on China-West cultural relations was going to come from cooking youtube! In our era where the most respected US and European newspapers struggle to summon more than a zero-research hitpiece, this was refreshingly reasonable. I learned stuff and had fun. If you ever have the mental resources to wade into additional morasses for future videos, we will appreciate it.
Right with you until the ending sum up to not worry about a problem until it's your problem. I can think of a number of times where that thinking bit us in the ass. There are definitely some categories of things that thinking should not be applied to.
You're taking the ending in a pretty pessimistic way. From the framing of the video, gutter oil seems to be a non issue that is being weaponized as propaganda. Why feed into misinformation when you aren't educated on the topic? Yes, everyone's entitled to their opinion but engaging with the content only feeds into more misinformation.
I don't care what anyone says. You are a thoughtful and honest person, and unlike tourists you understand how local infrastructure works. In much of the rest of the world grease and oil is handled at a water treatment facility, so the practice of cleaning the sewage grease trap is generally unknown.
Food safety in china is a problem, no matter how you want to sugar coat. Most recent scandals is the cooking oil tanker trucks and Goji Berry. I am glad my ancestors left China long ago.
Well then you should not be eating at McDonalds or any fast food franchise with teens running the operation. I used to work there as a teenager...we have these big buckets of pickles and some of the teens prank/dare including pissing into the bucket of pickles because pickle juice is yellow and you can't really tell since it's mostly vinegar, but occasionally some coworker would warn you so and so did it on their shift, so don't order hamburgers with pickle for your meal today.
Hey, Western restaurants can also have disgusting practices sometimes. It’s the equivalent of watching some Kitchen Nightmares and saying all Western dining establishments are terrible and unhygienic.
You guys talking about some restaurants and some kids, China is entire industry national wide. Including baby milk powder in the past. Don't have to defend China little pinks, feel free to eat whatever you want. Its your health not mine.🤣
@@elmerloh mate, the baby milk power poisoning thing was from power made by Nestle. you know, that western company which has piles upon piles of health and worker's rights violation scandals
Here in Jakarta (Indonesia), we have 'Pemulung', doing basically the same thing with plastic/cardboard trash + used electronics and furniture. They're a lot more open with what they do though. In the past, they'd buy your trash for the price of some pot ash (to clean the underside of your pot/woks) and resell it to a recycler for tiny marginal profit compared to the hard work
Pemulung are different though, people generally respect them more as they function more as a proto-recycling company. They don’t work with consumables like cooking oil. As someone who loves to cook the Indonesian way, a more similar concept would be to stretch out the minyak jelantah (reused oil) until longer than usually advised
They're both bright, clearly well-educated and most importantly have inquisitive minds. It's what makes their approach to recipes so good. They put things in context all the time where food is related; no surprise they're capable of doing it on other topics as well.
When I scowled at the security guard who wanted to check my bag as I went into Gilbert Jeune, he said, "Don't hold it against me. It's the deontology of my job."
Such a level headed, well argued piece. And it's not like most of these issues (using old oil in the kitchen, food hygene, etc.) are not common place in the EU or UK.
Great video! As someone who has only seen the most context-less, rage bait-y videos on the subject, this was very informative and helpful. Much like your “wet market” segment of yesteryear :) I do find your wording of the “don’t worry about things that don’t affect you” sentiment somewhat off-putting in the grander scheme, but it makes sense in this specific context, given the people you’re politely referring to
I generally agree with what you are saying. But I would also point out (not necessarily applicable in this case) that marginalized groups often need to rely on people without "skin in the game" to have an opinion and care about the issues affecting them.
I was always skeptical of reusing gutter oil because of how hard it is to get rid of bad stench from used oil, it's just impossible. So I always thought that they must be using the oil for something else that's not food. Now this video explained everything I didn't know, thank you.
I've never heard of this phenomenon of "gutter oil", and I've been running kitchens in the US for twenty-five years now. I will say, though, that this is a really great breakdown of it with very realistic points across the the board. This is a really awesome video, and very much appreciated by me. Thank you.
It was really great to see an informed and considerate take on the whole affair. I've only seen one sort of pseudo-documentary video on gutter oil street vendors, and I'm sure it's very easy to manipulate footage and subtitles to create a narrative. And even with the example you brought up - good intentions or no, the speaker was putting his own ideas onto what was going on. I had no other context. It's far better to understand what could be happening so I can actively think for myself. I know it's not your usual video but don't feel bad for making it. This is an interesting topic that touches on that fuzzy area where business and culture intersect. I learned a lot and I'm always excited by anything eco-friendly and love knowing that used oil can be recycled for industry use, used in biodiesel and even partially composted - all better than mere trash.
I remember, as a foreigner with a chinese face in ~2013, being in Beijing and being told by local students all about the gutter oil scandal. it was understandably a topic of great interest to a lot of people, but unfortunately some other foreigners took it to be a "chinese" thing rather than a "dang, we had a problem and are addressing it now" sort of thing. essentializing any country is wacky but people definitely took it and ran with it as something that people widely knew and accepted, rather than something that was seen as messed up and scandalous.
Chris. This is next level. Possibly your magnum opus. (At least to date.) I can only hope it reaches some of the people who could stand to learn from it.
psychologically it's hard for me to deep fry anything because i'm so used to just putting a spoonful of oil into a pan and using that. the thought of dumping a most of a bottle of oil (even if i plan to save the oil in a container in the fridge) just feels so...extravagant...though recently i've gotten used to pouring oil a little more freely (like olive oil...where i tell myself the oil is actually a large part of the sauce (like oil/garlic pasta). and similarly with salad dressing i have to use more than a spoonful of oil all at once..
My view on China and what rules and morality means there was based to a great degree on my presumed knowledge of gutter oil. This content changed my view on gutter oil completely, so it will probably change my view on China in a way, that only time can tell, as such a process takes time and new thoughts have to be thought to rewire my brain. I'm looking forward for this re--exploration and thankful for you re-opening my eyes. We need more quality content like this.
I find it difficult to believe that with economic conditions, the push for food in China to be as cheap as possible (razor thin profits), and the prevalence of oil in Chinese cooking, that restaurants are not HIGHLY incentivized to grab the cheapest cooking oil they can get. I am not saying lots of restaurants actively choose dangerous oil to realize a profit, but there is a fantastic amount of seize-the-opportunity activity in China and I would be entirely surprised if some group(s) of individuals did not process gutter oil on the cheap and pass it off as cooking oil at a lower price point. Processing it doesn't make it safe for consumption, and since this is an illegal activity they are not going to be regulated. Also, didn't China just recently have a huge scandal, in July of 2024 ,with cooking oil and being transported in liquids trucks that were not cleaned out, resulting in the contamination of massive amounts of cooking oil? If something like this is happening to save a buck along the supply chain, impacting hundreds of millions of people for who knows how long and where major corporations repeatedly lied and obscured activities to the public, then why is it even unlikely that somebody else is processing gutter oil for human consumption?
Well, the condition you speak of can be applied broadly as well. Pretty sure every restaurants are incentivised to lower their cost. However , for china if you are caught serving gutter oil it's a death penalty so this is already a deterrent on what the government to reduce such occurrence compared to the past .
As a guy that grew up working as a 15 year old in a kitchen just to have an "under the table" cash job, there's nothing worse than the smell of a backed up grease trap. Good lord, opening that during business hours was guaranteed to clear out the back of the restaurant.
This video didn't tell me much I didn't know about the subject, but it's just refreshing to see an educated, level-headed take on a contested topic that isn't so emotionally charged on either side of the debate that it feels the need to push the scales the other way. Usually people will react to this sensational outrage culture by treating it like a myth, or just a bygone reality. It's a shame that the same qualities I just praised are exactly why videos like this won't end the debate and result in cooler heads. People only want to see other people getting angry at the same things they are.
I think my main throughline is "Does this hurt anyone?" followed by, "if everyone did this, would it violate the categorical imperative?" Where the first test is testing for harms to other people, followed by a second prong about the harm to the social contract, if it harms the first it automatically fails the second; but if it only fails the second, to what extent is it deleterious to the social fabric?
30:24 incredibly powerful ideology that I 100% agree with: "be very careful accepting arguments if you don't personally have skin in the game one way or the other"
I disagree, you would be dismissing opinions and be making them invalid just bc it doesn't affect you If someone does something "wrong" but I'm not personally affected why am I not allowed to voice my opinion? Are we not allowed to make our own judgements? I think the key idea should be that we should try to be more educated on topics and don't jump to hasty conclusions since misinformation is everywhere.. but just my two cents
@@-Undine-"be very careful" is different from "disengage completely". The whole idea is that if you are not knowledgeable about the subject, and are not willing to engage with the subject on a deeper level beyond the first thought piece you hear about the subject, then you will simply do more harm than good by having an unpolished opinion on it. He never said you can't have an opinion, just that you shouldn't be so haphazard with them
I think, that was actually a very weak point in an overwhelmingly strong video. There is a reason why victims are never judges. People having skin in the game are biased.
@@RamirezGold I agree. I like this channel to learn about delicious Chinese food. I don't live in China, and it is not the food of my heritage, but I have opinions about why I like it. The video today teaches many interesting things and then leaves me feeling like I don't have a right to an opinion about what I learned! Maybe too, I don't have a right to have an opinion about Chinese food except to eat it, and keep my mouth shut. I wish he had ended the video on a more hopeful message.
Lots of American restaurant owners chiming in as to how normal this kind of stuff is here when it's done legit and I just want to add: I've worked at plenty of small scale places with cheapskate owners who would stretch oil and do all kinds of stuff your average American consumer would puke over. Regardless of how restaurants are regulated, if there's poverty you will have restaurant owners trying to cut corners regardless of safety. Your Asian village street vendor is no different than your McDonalds in a town of 1k people
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I saw the grease videos and was very worried because I will travel to China next year. This does give me some peace of mind, but your overall philosophy is good too. I also love the cooking videos too. So keep it up.
I wouldn't compare it to jaywalking, and no, speeding is dangerous and people shouldn't do it 18:40 . I think maybe it would be a good idea for the locals to continue to stigmatize taking oil out of the drainage trap in sketchy ways and at sketchy times. Even if it's a bit more expensive, it should be done the right way, because who knows where that oil ends up.
Idk. The "It was a developing country" line just doesn't cut it for me. I'm from Italy and 100 years ago it was also pretty poor, but something like gutter oil would NEVER have been deemed acceptable. That's so nasty. The only thing that oil should be used for is turned into diesel fuel.
As huge Evangelion fan, The phrase "The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away" sounded thematically similar to NERV's motto, "God's in his Heaven, All is right with the world."
This was very good! I'm glad you made it. Very wise words at the end (even if they were a bit vulgar). I lived in China for about 14 years. It was an incredible experience. I learned a lot about food and cooking. I did always have that "gutter oil" in the back of my head when I went out eating but it never stopped me from enjoying the food.
NGL, my first thought on the video was that they were collecting the oil to sell to recyclers. Side hustles like that are so common nowadays. I gotta respect folks who are doing what they gotta do in order to provide for their families.
17:51 there's a saying in North America; if you see a mother stealing diapers, you didn't see anything. Thanks for the youtube essay, I learned a lot and I appreciate the edutainment.
Thank you for making videos like this. Calm, good, balanced reporting that is honest about its biases, as thorough as possible, and approachable is incredibly rare, especially when it comes to presenting issues pertaining to China to an American Audience and vice versa. People like you maintain my faith in online journalism.
The dude called Serpentza a Grifter. Serpentza, is an ACTUAL JOURNALIST. This dude is merely a Shill... shilling for China. Wake up. This Dude didnt even mention the RECENT discovery... of tanker trucks that carried chemicals / fuels... were also being filled with cooking oils, without washing them out first. (because it was cheaper, and easier)
From some of the horror stories here, I guess I work at proper places that follow regulations in Singapore. When I was in McDonald's, we change the oil daily even as an establishment that runs 24/7. At a Japanese restaurant that did some deepfrying, we still change it every day. How the food tasted changed quite a lot from the fresh oil to end of day oil so I cannot imagine some of your cases of week old oil
There are other deep fried fastfood chains in Singapore that use oil filter, and do not replace "old" oil. Why will there be "old" oil when the deep fried food soak up all the "old" oil and the deep fryers have to be constantly top up with fresh oil.
EDIT: I wanted to make a quick update, specifically regarding the individual in the video - they actually reached out ibb.co/hg9XZsZ and everything tracks. I myself would be appalled to be defined by my low points, and his misunderstanding was understandable given the mess of information that's out there (even in China). I'm going to blur his face in the video, but it'll likely take a couple hours for it to take effect. Just wanted to get that out there at first
Hey guys, just a few things that I wanted to emphasize... and a couple more than I wanted to clarify:
1. *Videos of people collecting oil from the gutter outside of restaurants is not evidence the restaurant is using gutter oil.* Outside of restaurants in China is a contraption known as a grease interceptor. This is a critical device that helps ensure that oil does not hit the sewage system, generally accessed through a manhole.
The grease interceptor must be cleaned regularly. Specific regulations depend on the city and the district, but the ultimate responsibility is on the restaurant to maintain their grease interceptor. In particular, the fire department takes the situation incredibly seriously.
In many larger cities there is a specific service (that the restaurant needs to pay for, in Shenzhen I recall it was about 5000 RMB per month?) that pumps the grease interceptor with some proper machinery. But the specific situation will depend on the locality. It is not unheard of for a restaurant to clear their interceptor themselves if there is a buildup.
2. *The oil collected in these videos are not being directly used in restaurants.* In many videos - though not all - it is implied that the oil is being collected from the grease interceptor is then being repurposed directly by the restaurant.
Even from the more salacious media outlets, once the story is delved into in detail… it is made clear that the issue at hand is related to subsequent reprocessing of that collected oil. This was, indeed, the crux of the original gutter oil scandal: oil collected from grease interceptors was being neutralized, bleached, deodorized (in a similar way an edible neutral oil is produced) and sold back to restaurants. Due to contamination from bacteria and heavy metals in the sewer system, consuming this oil presents some health risks. But you would likely be oblivious to whether you were consuming it or not in the moment, particular in the context of other flavors.
Perhaps you knew this already, but I felt it was important to emphasize.
3. *Recycled oil also has legitimate uses.* The most common destinations for recycled oils in China are industrial lubricants and biodiesel. It’s worth mentioning that the United States also has a lively market for recycled oil, as it’s a common inclusion in livestock feed (though to be clear, in the United States the oil used in livestock feed is sourced from deep fryers, not grease traps).
In the past, one of the biggest issues was that recycled oil as a cooking oil commanded a 50% price premium over that bound for industrial purposes.
Of course, markets tend to shift faster in the face of price-based carrots than punitive regulatory sticks (though the two can be especially effective in tandem). While the Chinese government has cracked down on gutter oil - as we discussed in the video - perhaps the more important development has been the dramatic increase in demand for recycled restaurant oil for use in biofuels.
4. *Videos of people collecting oil in rather-suspicious-looking unmarked vans (that perhaps respond poorly to being filmed) is not evidence of gutter oil.* Throughout the world, there is the phenomenon of grease theft. While more current information is available from a quick google, this 2000 Salon article province a nice overview: www.salon.com/2000/11/06/grease_wars/
In the USA, a grease thief will usually need a utility truck to get the job done. In China, it can be as easy as popping open the grease interceptor. This is in large part due to specific multi-compartment designs of grease interceptors that are popular in China (likely given the admittedly rather oily nature of Chinese restaurant cooking).
5. *Recycling restaurant cooking oil is a common practice worldwide.* In the industry in America, used restaurant grease is divided into brown grease (sourced from interceptors) and yellow grease (sourced from used deep frying oil). The general rule of thumb is that latter has much wider range of potential uses - in the USA, livestock feed appears to be the dominant application - and commands a much higher price.
It is difficult to parse why oil sourced from interceptors in China is recycled while those in the United States is not. The obvious explanation the mind turns to would simply be a lower regulatory bar, which could potentially be problematic. But perhaps the destination of the recycled oil itself requires less of a regulatory hurdle - the dominant (legitimate) uses of recycled cooking oil in China are industrial lubricants and biodiesel. Perhaps some minerals and free fatty acids are less of an issue when you’re not feeding it to chickens.
The standards given to oil recyclers in China would corroborate this idea, as from the document it appears that animal feed is not an allowable destination. www.leo-king.com/jtxw/info_24_itemid_778.html But this is an area that we’re quickly bumping into the limits of our understanding, and I’m worried that our analysis could begin to veer into confirmation bias.
6. *The original gutter oil scandal was real and not a fabrication. The most legitimate academic analysis we found put the market share of gutter oil at about 10% during the ‘00s.* It is important to emphasize that the gutter oil scandal was very real, stemming from well researched pieces of investigative journalism and made an indelible impact on Chinese society.
The original gutter oil was called “frying oil” as it was generally being used for deep frying (i.e. an application where low quality oil would have less of an impact on taste). Researchers from Wuhan Polytechnic University estimated that roughly 10% of oil purchased by restaurants during this time was gutter oil, though other researchers had (unspecified) lower estimates. zqb.cyol.com/content/2010-03/17/content_3139053.htm
7. *There was a crackdown in 2011 and 2012 that - anecdotally - dramatically diminished (but likely not extinguished) the market for gutter oil.* I should be quite upfront in that this final point is primarily based off of discussions that we’ve had with friends in the industry. Take as well salted as you would any anecdotal evidence.
Pre-2012, gutter oil was a bit of an open secret, and it was sometimes found in a perhaps surprisingly diverse array of restaurant settings (while you would be more likely to bump into it at a street stall than a hotel, it wasn’t necessarily the case). This has drastically changed post-2012. However, it is important to note that refined used cooking oil is still something that is available for restaurants to purchase, especially from grey market distributors. Said distributors will make it clear that the oil is not for use as a cooking oil, but it’s certainly possible that there is someone - somewhere - in China that is flying too close to the sun and using this sort of oil in 2024. Everyone emphasized that no restaurant owner in their right mind would use it in the larger cities, but it would probably be wrong to claim it as completely 100% eradicated.
---
Anyway, delving into this whole morass hasn't been... great... for my personal headspace. Food is a lot more fun (though in fairness, absent the political dimension & people pushing narratives in bad faith... sewage is actually really interesting!). Anyway, apologies in advance for likely not engaging very much with this particular comment section - I'd much rather spend my waking hours researching our next dish than fruitlessly arguing with the fuck-anything-and-everything-about-china crowd. Our take is in the video and in the notes above. We probably overlooked some stuff, we're might even be wrong about some stuff. Take at face value :)
so palm oil and canola oil or others like it are already gross af and not for human consumption too
Hows that trustworthy Chinese tap water you are cooking with? Tasty?
If people value traditions and culture over profit and greediness then they should believe in karma and someone misdeeds schemes to get rich fast could boomerang back and bite them hard. On a separate note and to prove this kind of scandals is not exclusive to Chinese culture, way back in the 60's there was a scandal in a Middle East country I cannot recall exactly that someone bought surplus and used mechanical oil from an Army depot and mixed it with vegetable oil destined for Human consumption and caused a large scale poisoning with many people getting chronic neurological diseases or even killed. Also the scandal of fake Olive oil being imported to the US and other countries that doesn't contain any oil from any Olive plants.
Never has the phrase “garbage dog monkey people” sounded so funny. 😆
@@Themyscara Some other cultures like Japan they can drink straight form the tap, but that is because their preserve their water sources and keep them in pristine condition, others like South Korea albeit having the same standard of life as Japan but because they are adjacent to North Korea and fearful of warring foul play, nobody drink water form the taps, even for cooking I think they use bottled water. But if you are calling negligent management of aqueducts nobody topple the mishap in Flint Michigan that corroded their piping system by pumping untreated water from a polluted river. So what's your point with your question?
9:17 "kill a chicken to scares the monkey" aka saat kei geng hau (殺雞警猴) is a chinese idiom that means punish someone severely to set an example for the rest..
We have the equivalent in Thai as "เชือดไก่ให้ลิงดู" or, literally translated, "slaughter a chicken for a monkey to see". I wonder if this has been borrowed from Chinese immigrants and integrated into Thai everyday lingo, much like many words of Chinese origin in Thai.
Thank you! I knew I was missing some context there.
In Turkish we say 'set the blankets on fire to kill a flea'
For those who don’t know OP uses the Cantonese pronunciation. In Mandarin/ Hanyu Pinyin it would be “sha ji jing hou”
While not the same and more of a "kill a monkey, to scare monkeys" approach, but Voltaire also once said "in this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others".
Living in California, the idea of "oh yeah these people are dubiously illegally stealing recycleables" makes complete sense. We have folks who come and just dump our recycling bins looking for cans and guys who steal catalytic converters to sell for scrap, and hell there were/are guys who steal used cooking oil HERE for biodeisel, it makes a lot of sense.
The cans and converters are everywhere , I worked for a phone company ppl were stealing copper wire off towers.. fact is, poverty
I'm trying hard not to be emotional, but not once have I ever seen a non-Chinese person shed such a respectful & accurate light on Chinese culture / cuisine. I'm part of a Chinatown BIA in North America, and a lot of our businesses need to deal with this gutter oil stereotype that affects business, especially since the COVID era. We've had longtime restaurants close as a result of false accusations around pests & supposed gutter oil collection. We even got the city hall to do inspections for the accused restaurants, but even when we got those establishments cleared they would still suffer from the TikTok videos.
Come on dude! Stop being so Radical, and outright Wrong. If that were the case... then MILLIONS of Chinese restaurants, wouldnt exist in the USA. Its a fact, that millions of Americans, Love Chinese cooking... and consume it on a frequent basis. Nobody that I know.. thinks that the Gutter Oil problem, is from within the USA. Its clearly a "China only" problem.
If there are issues in CA... its more likely from mentally Ill radicals, from inside of your state. That, and or the Govt. shills, trying to shut down ALL businesses... because CA and the Corrupted Demoncrats.. want to covert the USA into Communism. And what better way to do it... than to cause massive inflation... stop punishing criminals... and cause businesses to go into bankruptcy.
The MAIN reason why places are closing... is because people can no longer AFFORD to eat out ! Groceries are like Double the prices that they used to be... and cooking for yourself, is still infinitely cheaper than paying for prepared food + delivery fees.
It’s… annoying… when people harp on about gutter oil in China. People doing that shit to Chinese-American restaurants *in the United States*? Gross to a borderline unfathomable degree. I’m sorry you have to deal with that
I'm not going to pretend that Chinese restaurants, like any, have never had hygiene issues - but it boggles my mind how perhaps the world's most delicious cuisine is sometimes insulted as particularly filthy.
@@timmccarthy9917 It's just racism. People from Asia are often very high achievers when they immigrate to or study in English-speaking countries, which means racist people within that society can't use the same kind of bullying they use for the systematically disadvantaged people of their countries. The alternative is to say "yes, Chinese people (or Indian people, or Korean people) are very accomplished/intelligent, but eating their food makes you sick because it's unhygienic, or the ingredients are substandard, or the food culture itself is unethical (e.g. Western focus on "eating dogs" as a trope specifically attached to Chinese people even though many of the most revered and expensive dog breeds in the world originate from China.)
@@hoodedferret Lol, yes, "it's just racism."
Absurd reductionism to justify your moral superiority won't backfire at all.
Remember to get your Covid booster, those tens of thousands of VAERS reports are all fake and easy to file after all.
The reality is poor people are going to do 'poor people things' because they're poor. I've travelled extensively, there are things like this all over.
Yes - and one of them is people USING GUTTER OIL TO COOK FOOD IN CHINA! It's common knowledge among the Chinese who actually have to eat this stuff. And this video calls Winston Sterzel a "grifter" 28:10 . . . just for telling the truth? (BTW, he lived in China for over a decade, is fluent in Mandarin, has half Chinese kids, etc. You talk like he's just some random racist loser.)
The whole premise of this video - that Xi and his "reforms" got rid of the problem - is frankly offensive to anyone who cares about the future of China and holds out hope for the reform or (hope beyond hope) eventual replacement of the CCP. This is Xi's China, where it's normal for a building owner, for example, to bribe elevator inspectors, leading to his tenants plunging to their deaths, which happens frequently, where EV manufacturers make shoddy batteries that cause cars to burst into flames, where highways are collapsing due to tofu dregs construction, etc, etc. You think with so many examples of "cha bu duo" mindset that there aren't still countless small vendors buying that processed gutter oil to save a few Yuan?
It always seems cruel when poor people are just trying to figure out ways to get by and others respond by getting that behavior outlawed or saying they’re garbage dogmonkeys and whatnot.
The difference is obviously whether or not anyone is being hurt, and your opinion on whether it's "right" to hurt other people for your survival
@@Leto_0 Would you sell drugs to feed your family? Some do and we glorify them as rapstars.
@@Leto_0 True, but the culture that influences those people is relevant. In China under the CCP, everyone understands: you do whatever you can to survive because no one is going to save you. There's a big problem in China with bystanders just looking on during kidnappings, attacks, etc. Funny, it turns out an evil gangster communist government ruling with an iron fist for 70 years isn't the best thing for social cohesion.
Came for the recipes, stayed for the nuanced analysis on western misconceptions, chinese history and deconstruction of "authenticity" as a culinary concept. Great work Chris, probably my favourite cooking channel on YT.
This channel and Adam Ragusea: Came for the cooking, stayed for the nuance.
Same, I love learning the history and evolution and blending of food and cooking techniques. It helps you across any type of cooking
"authenticity" pisses me off. Like people put tons of stock into French cuisine but a ton of "authentic" recipes were just 1 way of a hundred to make a dish and the "authentic" version is just whichever recipe Escoffier happened to prefer. Like French onion soup used to have water or a milk broth but the "authentic" recipe uses beef broth, the old version would have bread on the side and _maybe_ cheese on the side but the "authentic" version has melted cheese on top of bread thats on top of the soup. The same is true with tons of other dishes where different regions had different versions and of course every cook made it slightly different, only centuries later did celebrity chefs write down their version and that became the standard and people assume the older versions are derivatives.
very this, and very elegantly said.
also it just makes me happier knowing that the channel i follow for recipes is headed by people with good critical thinking skills... next to self-awareness it's the quality most important to me, but they really go hand-in-hand.
nuanced my anus. he's a shill.
Years ago I worked at a movie theater with a 2 basket fryer in FL, popular chain, eventually I worked there long enough to be given the task of cleaning the fryer every Friday and to get a management position. We changed the oil every 7 days, the whole fryer was broken down into pieces and scrubbed, washed and then refilled with new oil, the old oil went into the grease trap.
Anytime id overhear people say we used "old oil" I rolled my eyes, the fryer was never on all the time, it went off at the end of the shift and honestly the days it got the most use Friday-Sunday were the days it got the most use and the oil was the freshest.
People need to work in the food and beverage industry once in their lives to see what goes into getting them their "restaurant quality" food. I believe it would give them a lot more respect for the good well run establishments out there and be more picky about the sketchy places that are treated like they are so clean you can eat off the floor.
THIS! like maam your popcorn is fresh! There's 300 people coming thru these doors and we are constantly popping....did you think we popped and stored this popcorn 3 days ahead???? .....Also the "butter" is coconut oil ☺
Not sure what you fried but 7 days is still a very long time for only cleaning it once a week.
@@epicka The OP made the point most people eat from that fryer on the freshest oil days. If you can taste old oil in your food and it's a problem for you, as it is for me, you should stop eating at that restaurant. Most people who don't like the food at a restaurant just stops going there and that speaks louder than anything. If that place was in business long enough for an employee to go from regular worker to manager, it's safe to say the oil was good enough to keep the restaurant open. Fryers that have heating elements off the floor of the fryer can keep the oil tasting fresher for longer.
@@epicka I worked in similar (not identical) conditions to OP, and while 7 days feels like a long time, there are a couple of additional factors. For one, restaurant supply companies like Sysco offer filter pods that contain what I can only assume is some kind of flocculant, to pull a lot of the burnt and off-tasting compounds out of the fryer oil. You leave them in overnight and they do a pretty good job at extending the life of the oil. And in addition to that, we were pretty vigilant using a combination of square spider and bench scraper to pull any large chunks left behind by the food, so it wouldn't dissolve into the oil and burn.
That being said, when our restaurant changed ownership, they did bump us up to twice-a-week oil changes. So once a week is probably *the longest* you'd actually want to go. But it's by no means unusual for the industry.
@@robertp457 It doesn't really change the fact that seven days is a long time. If it only gets changed once a week and the weekend oil is freshest, that screws over everyone who ate something fried in it on Thursday. And really, oil starts chemically changing the instance it's being heated; if it's getting heavy use on the weekend, by Monday it really shouldn't be usable. A twice-weekly change on Monday and Friday would be the bare minimum I'd hope for in this situation.
And saying " If that place was in business long enough for an employee to go from regular worker to manager, it's safe to say the oil was good enough to keep the restaurant open" is a massive assumption. Lots of people are not versed in food safety, nor can they readily tell when their food is cooked in old oil. Old oil is not the same as rancid oil; more often than not, using old oil doesn't alter the flavour of the food or the oil at all. If anything, I have often heard it said that some people even prefer food cooked in repeatedly reused oil, as it makes the food more "characterful", which is a myth coming from the opposite direction. And if you ask people who work in kitchens (as I have done as I've known many over the years) from cheapo diners to really fancy places, they'll readily tell you about the kitchens using obviously rancid and even long out-of-date oil, and it clearly never affected their business or bottom line.
Recognising he has his biases, already makes this video more truthful than 90% of the videos on this platform when it regards to China.
Most of the channels on china is either propaganda channels from pro-US agencies (negative pieces) or from the Chinese govt (overly positive pieces).
I like Chinese cooking demystified for it's informed contents...not blatant biasness.
@@chiangweytan5937but let’s be honest, it sells to be anti-China much more than being nuanced or even “pro-China.” Even though a lot of “pro-China” or positive pages get labeled as CCP propaganda or paid shills / WuMao’s.
Any thoughts on accented cinema?
I don’t have many anti China biases I had Asian friends growing up and got rejected by most whites….
@@antokarman2064Accented Cinema is fantastic, we’re Patrons
I also think a big part is poverty tourism. There are big videos of Indian street foods and how unsanitary it often is, particularly viewed through the American lens. It's framed as disgusting but they real issue is poverty. I'm sure the cooking would look different if people had access to clean, running water, for example, or refrigeration. Your clip of the Wire is on point. Thanks for making this
It also doesnt help that things like "gutter oil" are a common myth in China to the point its become slang. It also doesnt help that China isnt the only country to have this semi-true myth, tons of western restaurants get accused of using old oil even when they replace their oil once or more a week and even when oil gets reused for a few days they'll likely filter it daily or more. I worked at a restaurant that had a filter built into the fryer and the oil was changed twice a week so your "gutter oil" was 3 days old at worst. You see similar in China where restaurants get accused of using "gutter oil" all the time.
Not true Afghanistan and South Sudan are poor but a 100000 times cleaner than India
this is the same argument as poverty causes crime, yet certain groups cause more crime in poverty than others, sweden right now is a great example. onto another example, i recall an indian restaurant being shut down in england (uk) because they found literal shit everywhere. the chef didnt believe in using toilet paper, opted for his hands, and barely if ever washed his hands. he would certainly be living richer than in india at the least
@@thefutureisnowoldman7653 you do realize india has a lot more people than both of those countries combined, right? during the industrial revolution when the poor lived in slums or crowded cities, before the importance of sanitation was realized, there was filth everywhere on the streets. I'm talking about 19th century England, and I think this was the case for the U.S. too.
@@MGX93dot If you've ever watched Gordon's shows (e.g. Nightmare Kitchen), you'll know that White people can have disgusting restaurants and poor standards of hygiene/food quality too. Btw "Sweden right now is a great example" is not self-explanatory; the context of your response makes your meaning ambiguous, especially since the smaller, near-homogeneous European countries typically have better care for their populace in general, given their high taxation and social welfare. When there aren't many ppl to look after, it's easier to keep track of everyone and get what they need. Larger countries don't have that luxury -- example problems being in the U.S. (healthcare), Russia (Putin), and Mexico (cartels).
To say or imply that any one ethnic group is more "dirty" or "morally-compromised" (inferred from your brief mention of crime) than another is always a product of negative bias from a lack of adequate exposure to said ethnic groups and the understanding that no demographic is a monolith
I'll say this much, working as a fry cook at red lobster, we'd use the same oil in the fryers for a week, and sometimes my manager would wait 2 weeks or more before replacing the oil, it would turn color like used motor oil, and smell, and nothing would fry properly. I think the off chance of getting "gutter oil" from chinese food should be the least of people's worries
This is what I kept thinking during this video. Like don't y'all know how nasty American restaurants get. Worked at a few- never seen an inspector.
same thing here. worked at a popular american chain (not saying which), and the oil in one of the fryers regularly degraded to the point of it being nearly pitch black. you could paint with it like black watercolor. less than a centimeter of visibility, and smoked like the depths of hell the moment you heated it up.
Are you joking? Gutter oil would still be way way worse than old frying oil
@@Ahayeahishere Yes, we know the difference between "digouyou and laoyou" -we watched the video. And it reminded us of our own experiences in restaurants. We are commenting on the topic of the last third of the video (the inevitable difference between the law and restaurant practices- even here in the usa). You obviously didnt watch the very end- doubt you got to 19:19. Read the title and came down here to complain. Classic. "There you go. Given a fuck where it aint your turn to give a fuck"
Changing your oil every 2 weeks is absolutely normal and perfectly fine in restaurant settings.
"We live on an internet that is completely inundated with bulls**t, and there's no valor in adding to the pile." Amen.
Also, isn't there an episode of The Simpsons where Homer tries to make money by stealing oil/grease and selling it to a recycling plant?
Also, today I looked up more information about Pascal's Wager thanks to this video than I did when I first heard about the theory. Thank you Chinese Cooking Demystified!
My retirement grease!
I worked with an oil recycling company in NYC, and the key question asked was "what is the best day of the week to change your fry oil?"
When it's dirty simple as that.
Buy clean oil sell old to a recycler/refiner
Yeah, but the idea behind changing it on a schedule would be making sure it gets done regardless of any individual's perception of cleanliness. Deciding which day would be important in that case because it would affect when in the week the oil tastes the best, but that mainly depends on the restaurant than anything the recycling company could provide input on. I have yet to work in a restaurant that changed their oil weekly, in the fast food industry, so even scheduled changes would've been an improvement. And that's not for a lack of trying, I've had managers get mad at me for asking them to change the oil too often when they let it get weeks old before bothering.
It does get a bit weird when random videos of people removing oil from gutters get instantly branded as a part of the gutter oil operations if they're from China (or, at least, labeled as China). That stuff just happens all the time in any country where there's inexperienced cooks absolutely mishandling cooking oil. There's even a whole genre of Korean videos dedicated to removing sewer blockages caused by oil.
I'm curious about the genre, any key words suggestions?
@@ChineseCookingDemystified "Genre" may have been a bit of overexaggerating, but there's a channel called "하수구의제왕" (King of Sewers) who has an absurd amount of views for what's really just sewer cleanups-- over half of which is related to oil crusting over stuff.
@DrainCleaningAUSTRALIA is a channel I have watched where he has delt with drains blocked due to grease. I remember one where he specifically opend up the grease trap to sort out a clogged pipe.
Like other people have said. Too few people have worked in the "blue collar" side of food service. They dont know what its like to take care of waste that people callously leave for other people to "take care of"
It's like if the situation is slightly different, those people would've picked up on that many parts of rural China still have manual labor of handling "night soil". as in a bamboo pole slung on the shoulders, carrying 2 wooden buckets of night soil to be carried out of the village and dumped at a facility. someone who doesn't know what's going on will likely latch onto that and make up all sorts of fiction as to what those buckets of excrement will be used for, and there's no way they'll accept anything but the worst scenarios as they're simply... racists looking to be racists.
Holy crap. Finally someone who explains what's going on with those scooping oil out of the gutter video. I never understood how there was enough oil in the sewer to make gutter oil but now everything makes sense.
yeah, weird to have a street facing grease trap but it makes way more sense.
😂when you said mountains are high emperor is far away, I was shocked
山高皇帝远
It is funny when my parents own a restaurant we would recycle to a company to take care of our use oil.
We fellow the health guidelines here in the US.
We have them pick up our use oil every week. The health inspector will check your paperwork every week.
At the end of the year the recycle company would send us boxes of bath soap as gifts.
I've heard this rumor once or twice from people before and thought "ain't no way" and didn't even give it a second thought
This really brought a lot of information to me, some of which I'll probably mention if I hear things about this again.
This is genuinely why I love this channel. It brings a completely thought-out perspective to a lot of things, and it's one of my only sources that I use when cooking Chinese food because the recipes are so well researched and have a basis in the country itself. The Mapo Tofu recipe is practically engrained in my head, and it's all thanks to you two bringing an experience and information to an English market that's so hard to find anywhere else.
Gutter oil is old news, nowadays it's commercial cooking oil being transferred in industrial oil tankers. Also there's hotpot soup broth being frozen and reused hence spit soup lol
As a dietitian who basically feels like she just spends all day fighting against the pandemic of medical misinformation, i appreciate when content creators spend time to make nuanced videos. Sometimes the tidal wave of influencers spoon feeding fear-mongering seems endless. Thank you so much and i learned a lot!
Right... because the Chinese government is a great source
Eat meat only.
What does being a dietitian have to do with this?
Not the video I was expecting from you guys, but very interesting and informative. It sucks you can't have any sort of dialogue about China without it resorting to jingoistic vitriol. In any case, looking forward to the next recipe!
The rage-bait Chinese videos keep popping up in my feed and it annoys me to no end. I so appreciate you ACTUALLY breaking down the history and context rather than just showing a random video and saying "China bad"
I am seeing a lot more propaganda than critcism tbh
Press "don't show again" on any video you see on your feed. Then find another video you wish to be shown, and press the like button. Stop commenting on rage bait. UA-cam will get the point and adjust it's algorithm.
@@trystanfranziskus I never said I didn't see Chinese propoganda. Both are annoying
Are you talking about David Zhang? Cause his shorts have been popping up in my feed a lot
"don't recommend this channel" or "don't show me this" are very useful buttons, I also clear my whole history when I find my algorithm to be borked to some extreme view, sometimes it happens really quickly just because I get morbidly curious and watch one video my whole feed gets destroyed. Sometimes I have to clear multiple times per week. The downside is I have to re-ban channels after clearing the history. I can't tell you how many times I banned sunny_v2 from my algorithm
I remember there was a simpsons episode where homer and bart literally tried to get into the waste oil recycling industry and tried to steal Willies retirement grease
lol. i worked back of house at a restaurant in michigan for three months before i learned that there was an oil filter for the deep fryer that was supposed to be run every night before closing, and also that the oil was supposed to be changed twice a week not once, the guy who trained me just never bothered with that stuff. the restaurant has closed since i left when the building was deemed unsafe for occupation
and yes, you could Definitely tell when the oil had had a few days too long. but it's like they say, nobody wants to see how the sausage gets made
@@opensourceq Very foamy oil that overflow the fryer and make a big mess.
Sadly, your experience is not unique. I worked in a fried chicken restaurant in Michigan where the normal practice was to filter the oil in the deep fryer when too much burnt breading was sticking to the food. The owner's policy was to change the oil once per week. The oil would be a dark brown color by the time it was changed. It looked like used motor oil.
The problem with restaurants is that there is never enough time/money to do things properly. Every time I would clean the fryer I would have to fight with management all week to leave early when it wasn't busy so that I could come in before open and clean the fryer. Never was I thanked and everyone in management just acted like I was wasting time.
It saddens me that all of this thoughtful work culminates in the 40/60 UA-cam comments you mentioned.
This channel is fabulous. We came for the noodle recipes, but we learn SO MUCH every time we watch.
Keep up the good work!
Restaurant manager in the US here. We recycle our old oil,we have a dedicated oil dumpster for it when we change it. I'm not sure what happens to it when the recycling company comes to take it away, but I'm pretty sure you're just seeing a small Chinese operation doing the exact same thing over there, taking it away to be recycled into something else - *not* food oil.
Unfortunately, another commenter running Chinese restaurant business in Chinatown in the US was talking about how they're still bothered by this kind of sterotype, even their business is in the US.
@@ChineseCookingDemystified Yeah, sadly, there's a growing tide of Sinoracism here in the US, egged on by the same politics driving the current trade war. It's stupid and atrocious, but there you have it. These recent gutter oil videos are just a symptom of that.
@@jeremiahmiller6431 That laowei influencer that filmed the drain cleaners was aiming his rage in the wrong direction and effecting badly the wrong people. If the lax of proper supervision is from unregulated gray area of businesses then the main problem is with the administration of the city itself, not the people that try to comply with the lax Laws.
Oil is recycled into FUEL in the US. Not food. Seriously, dude. It IS sold for food oil in China.
@@toomanymarys7355 Got a source for that?
SerpantZA lived in China for 14 years
I worked in American restaurants for 10 years and I can tell you that of all the places I worked, the only one that changed their oil more than once a *week* was a KFC. And frankly, since I've moved back from abroad, I've eaten enough rancid takeout to suspect the standards these days are far worse in a lot of places, from local joints to big chains. As always, look to your own house, before you start chucking stones at the neighbor's.
Yes this 100% happens in America. Lots of Boomers think old grease is good. It is not. It goes rancid like any fat. Fryers should be deep cleaned regularly. At a place like KFC, it is possible to go through oil so fast you refill it faster than it goes rancid, and you can keep rotating oil for a long time when you're busy. The food is taking away all the old grease. But - as stated - you must absolutely drain the whole thing and deep clean it regularly. Once a week is actually fine in some situations. Buy the places cutting corners? You ever notice how a few local kitchens catch fire every single summer? Grease problems are a big factor.
Yes, in the section of the video where he mentioned restaurants perhaps pushing their oil a bit farther than they should, I definitely had the thought that restaurants of all kinds do that. It's a business thing, not a specific cuisine thing. I can also vouch for the fact that the US refines and recycles used cooking oil- my workplace has a machine to collect and filter it (it looks different than the ones shown in this video, but it does the same thing), and the resulting oil gets poured into lidded buckets, palletized, and shipped out.
There's even a restaurant in America that prides itself on deep frying cheeseburgers in the same oil they used when the restaurant was founded. They get featured on travel shows where they talk about the "unique flavor" their oil gives their burgers.
He produces a Chinese cooking channel and used to live there. Mind your own business
@@TheMultiHeadphoneYour point being?
what a world, where I get a more elaborated media and publication essay from my cooking channel than from The Economist. Thanks for your work!
I worked for a chicken restaurant here in the states. We served steak biscuits as well and the GM would use oil so old and reused to cook the steak biscuit patty that the oil was black. The only time that the steak fryer got actually fresh oil was when I accidentally changed it, and once when the health inspector was coming by. That was twice in over a year. You would put the steak on a biscuit and if you looked under it the biscuit would be stained black.
Can you not taste the staleness from the oil? (hard to describe, plasticky) Or does the flavor cover up the foul taste?
@@dan339dannot op but I've worked in kitchens 20 years, mostly in NZ. You notice it in things like french fries first, but soon you'll notice the bitterness and plasticky rancid taste in anything.
Most places strain the oil & wipe out the deep fryers every day and top it up with fresh oil. One day a week is the full clean and fresh oil.
The old stuff sits in a drum out the back for recycling into non-food uses....
Given how 90% of olive oil is "fake", it doesnt surprise me places all across the world would also sell and buy refined used oil not meant for human consumption cos "it's refined, right? How bad can it be? It doesnt have any bad taste"
But going back to the flavor of unchanged dark oil? Yes you'd definitely notice. I've sent food back before...
Once, very embarrassingly, I had a customer send their food back to me with a note "tell the chefs they need to change their fry oil"... and that was only 4 days old!
@@dan339dan the GM said that people didn’t taste it. Before I worked there I used to eat steak biscuits. My dad would stop by get breakfast and the steak biscuit was my go to. Then I noticed that yeah they started tasting bad and when I worked there years later I found out why. They had a Cajun steak biscuit for a bit. I thought it was that that made me nauseous because they smelled bad.
I'm sorry but if you're alluding that old and reused oil is the same as gutter oil. That's just false equivalency.
Sure it's disgusting. But not as disgusting as oil in sewers.
What the actual fuck, that's actually going to give someone cancer, how the fuck did anyone eat that and enjoy it.
As an American, this makes a lot more sense to me than grainy stock-footage of vaguely Southeastern-Asian looking people moving buckets of anomalous liquids from street-hatches to trucks with an overly dramatic voiceover whining nonsense about "gutter oil IN CHINA".
Wdym? Its proven that this is and was in fsct happening. Restaurants getting the gutter oil and using it to cook with it. Its a fact. The thing that is the question is how often does thst happen and thats what the video talking about esdentially. Your comment makes it seem like you think its just completely made up thst restsjrants used it
@@Ahayeahishere The problem is the channel owner's "clarification" in his list.. his firstt few points sorta say it is untrue and people don't read beyond and jump in to go "
AH HAH it's fake!"
@@darrencheong2231 yeah thats true, you got 100%
@@Ahayeahishereamerimutts made it up lmao, yall amerimutts put roaches in your burgers btw, all beyond meats and fast foods do it as filling
People use it for fuel you fools
I’ve never heard of ‘gutter oil’ but this was super engaging, really well reasoned and researched and I would welcome more of this type of content from you.
I really appreciate when you guys do these kinds of videos.
Much like when you did the stuff on wet markets years ago; as an outsider it's hard to know what the truth is when these narratives spin up.
great comment! true!
can you please link the said wet market video?
@@eddephlinks in comments get deleted. You should just put “wer markets chinese cooking demystified” in the search bar
@@eddeph I guess it's this ua-cam.com/video/whbyuy2nHBg/v-deo.htmlsi=_HOe6ASoV2hg8Zr2
A really good rule of thumb is if something gets you immediately riled up, it's probably false and designed to get you riled up. Like if something seems like it lacks nuance, then it lacks nuance 😄 If you want actual information you need nuance.
Honestly this is so refreshing, possibly the most nuanced take on like… ANYTHING I’ve seen lately
I have been watching your videos for years. Not one time did I think you weren't a Chinese dude. Like, I never questioned it.
lol my face shows up every now and then
Basically just don’t want people to get the impression that this is “that expat white dude’s channel”, when Steph’s by far the more important part of the whole operation. Like, this whole channel is very much the product of the weird mind-meld the two of us have going on, but I’m definitely the more replaceable of the two brain hemispheres
@@ChineseCookingDemystifiedwe still love you both!! ❤
his chinese is quite american accented
@@ChineseCookingDemystified Nice! Love the attitude, love the channel! Oddly enough, I've seen her before, but not you. Keep up the good work!
@@MrNoipe Neat! I don't speak Chinese, but maybe some day.
This video actually made me ponder the entire seed oil meme going on right now. If the Chinese eat so much oil (likely seed oils) and don't seem to have the claimed adverse health affects, then it seems like it's overblown.
its been downhill ever since american fast food chains have been introduced and well established actually, u cant really make the comparison when country a barely consumes real food and country b does, plus processed sugar context and big differences in whats considered breakfast and dessert. 😂
@@jeannetitor right but sugar and being fat arent the fault of seed oils specifically, which is my point
@@swatson9042 they will be when combined and which is what's happening, which is my point
@@jeannetitor coping, bad shit is bad
@@swatson9042Adam Ragusea has really informative videos on sugar, fats, and seed oil if you're interested in deep dives on the topics.
Idk if this is still an issue but there was a study showing some brands olive and avacado oils consisted of rancid old oils or cut with cheaper vegetable oils. Companies cutting corners to increase profits is just a human thing not unique to any specific country or ethnicity.
Wasn't this a huge scandal a few years back in Italy? There was counterfeit olive oil being exported out of the country by the mafia.
Italian olive oil is particularly bad for this vs other origins, but it does happen elsewhere.
I had never even heard of this whole "gutter oil" fiasco going on until this video title, and just based on the thumbnail I got a pretty good guess. I didn't work for a restaurant, but I did work for a factory that made cured meats, some of which were larded, or encased in lard. The lard after using a few times would then be liquefied and stored in barrels to dispose of with our biohazard pickup company. I just assumed that this is what's going on, and the casual observer has no idea how this all works and assumes malicious intent.
I think the person in the original video was witnessing oil theft like you suggest. I worked in a fast food restaurant that was part of a truck stop type complex off a major US interstate in the 90's. We had people steal our fryer oil fairly often. When I first stared working there I thought the lock on the fryer oil container was to keep pests out, but I was told later it was mostly to deter the casual theif. From what I understand someone would come by in the middle of the night with a pump truck, cut the lock, empty everything out, and then hop on the highway before anyone could stop them. It was such a bummer since we sold our oil to a local person who made biodiesel. Any waste product that has even a little value like used fry oil, scrap metal, aluminum cans, and bottles will have shady gleaners and not-so-legit recyclers.
The bit about old oil had me thinking about how theres a place in my american city that uses about century old grease to deep-fry its burgers and brags about it...
Whaaaaaaat
US is the most loosely regulated country ever and your regulators are so ridiculously under-staffed is genuinely distressing 😄 Like if there was even e-coli found in food, nevermind anyone dying from it, where I live it would be major fucking deal and big news. I think it's been years if not a decade since I heard about an incident. Oh and we eradicated salmonella from our chicken stock in co-operation with our neighbouring countries, it's safe to use raw eggs here.
That's a good bit different though. Much of the oil used in China in restaurants is used for Hot Pot, a style of eating where flame-heated chili oil is placed in the center of the table for people to cook their own meats and food in. The problem is that it can lead to contamination from the people over and over dipping a piece of meat, taking a bite, maybe redipping it, over and over thus becoming contaminated with human pathogens, germs, ect. Presumably reused oil at a restaurant that is used ONLY for cooking will not be host to the same sorts of pathogenic contamination.
@@pbjandahighfive BREAKING NEWS: High temperature, BOILING SHIT at that, now no longer kills pathogens because pbjandahighfive said so.
ridiculous point.
@@pbjandahighfive ? hot pot is with broth, not oil. there might be a layer of oil floating at the top of the broth.
Thank you for explaining this phenomenon. When I was studying in Shanghai, way back in 2010, this was something that we were warned about at orientation, but no one ever gave an explanation as to why this was potentially an issue. For the record, I don’t remember anyone getting sick from the street vendors around campus. The only thing that seemed to afflict students were hangovers 😅
If there's one uniting thread through the videos in this channel, it's the dedication to opposing a sense of alienation. Whether that is helping westerners substitute ingredients they may not be able to find locally, or revealing that actually public health and infrastructure systems can be misunderstood anywhere in the world, or being compassionate when people in poverty are alienated from society everywhere, this channel always does a good job.
+1
I like your podcast style content.
Obviously the cooking is the fun stuff but you just sitting there and explaining things is pretty nice too.
26:40 I've worked in Mcdonald's and the oil is used for minimum 2 weeks, albeit it's always fresh, quality (genuinely) oil used from the start point.
that opening video was really uncomfortable. I never knew about gutter oil, but you're absolutely right. It's better to mind my own business than to be ignorant about someone else's business. Thank you for this great video.
I've known way too many of these people. Like, I get it, dude is steeped in the same ignorance as 99 % of reddit or YT comments, but at some point, yelling at random couples you don't have the slightest clue about seems like the dumb thing to do. People just don't care about the truth when "sewage outrage oil" is a much better sell - viral salaciousness, as it were.
@@minhuang8848 Fr, as soon as I heard him call them inhuman dog monkeys that deserve to die the next day I was like 'well there's no way this person isn't a total piece of shit'.
Personally, if something like this happens in my neighbourhood I wouldn't mind my own business. I'm that person who reports unattended luggage and calls the emergency number when I hear someone shouting "Help!"
However, I would probably watch these guys, maybe take a picture or video so I can ask other people what they're doing, and also ask them what they're doing. I wouldn't start swearing at them, that's unnecessary.
@@julesverneinoz That's because food safety has become the number 1 (non-economic related) issues in China. Counterfeit baby formula, chemically bleached food, counterfeit alcoholic drinks, counterfeit food products... the list is endless, and news and rumors spread like wildfire about a new scandal every month, the latest being cooking oiling being transported by trucks used to move chemicals without being cleaned in between. To simply put, Chinese people don't trust the food industry, they don't trust the government regulators who kept promising food safety and they don't trust the Chinese media to report honestly. So they're taking matters into their own hands in whichever way the system allows them to.
@@julesverneinozNot only was he yelling at them, he was dehumanizing them, calling them names that imply they're not human. This looks especially bad coming from a non-chinese person. Even if these people are operating illegally, it's absolutely inappropriate to treat them that way for doing something discreetly that doesn't directly harm anyone.
Another issue with non-cooks not understanding why frying oil is dark is they don't realize even with a relatively fresh batch of oil, it oxidized quickly depending on what it's fried in, and whether what's being fried involves liberal use of salt, or some batter, nevermind different seed oils used and their natural color vs oxidization rates. It's about as ridiculous as saying brown sugar/jaggery/kokuto is "nastier" than refined white sugar.
But high oil oxidization directly impacts your health (oxidative stress, right?), whereas brown sugar isn't more oxidized or anything; so I don't think this is a good comparison because people are accurately using pattern recognition to avoid unhealthy stuff in one example and the other is totally arbitrary.
Oil discoloration is largely a matter of small burned particles in suspension. Burned matter is carcinogenic.
@@BooBooKeyshehe it was never a matter of actual science, but people's incorrect assumptions based on color as an indication of "purity" (in many senses of the word).
also, sugar is bleached with bone char or other substances, and has nothing to do with “burn”. and by your logic, unrefined sugars have more anti-oxidants and trace minerals. lol.
Thanks for doing this. I'd seen a few videos claiming that gutter oil was a thing, but the channels that had them had a pretty strong anti-China vibe. Definitely set off my BS detector. But there's usually some grain of truth behind these things but I never expected to find out what it was.
So it's really great to have a sane explainer.
Keep up the awesome work!
There’s a certain inherent risk in letting someone else prepare your food, no matter where you are in the world. I wish more people in general were conscious of that, because I feel like it’d challenge more of their own biases with stories like this.
The problem with this is that the person you are buying food from might be trustworthy and being lied to. This is about how trustworthy the people trusted by the people you trust are.
It's crazy how many things westerners fear about China are happening in their own backyards (or worse) and they just never think about it because it was never sensationalized to them. You're making faces about five day oil, and I worked at a joint that changed their oil every seven days when I was in college. Health and safety violations happen everywhere all the time! That's our race to the bottom economic system at work! And we don't even know the context in that video! Since when are angry drunks good, level-headed information sources?
Just like you say, you can jump to whatever conclusion you want, but you don't have to share it on the internet. Too much ignorance and hearsay out there already.
I don't think it's a fear also it's not just China. If anyone even saw people in their own country taking oil out of the gutter to cook with they would be upset. They are upset that people eat that stuff without knowing. Yes all over the world people are using 5 day old oil, most fast food places change their oil every 4 or 5 days they are neve daily. Also China is definitely not the only places that has the few to use gutter oil. You will always have they few who don't care and just need to make money without a thought about others.
I worked for environmental consulting companies for several years, and grease traps are a vital part of managing the waste stream of restaurants. They stink like hell and require occasional pumping to stay functional and keep wastewater systems from getting clogged. The trucks that pump the grease out have to put it somewhere, and indeed that usually means biofuel or lubricant reprocessing. It's not great to have that stuff in landfills.
as a film buff i really appreciate the clips from the Zha Zhanke films
Every restaurant in the US where I have worked has a smaller grease interceptor inside, usually under or near the dishwashing machine or sink. Depending on how oily the rinse is, we can often get away with using a digestor enzyme, but that stuff is only so effective. At the BBQ place I worked, I had to personally empty the thing a few times a month, and it was the foulest smell I have ever experienced. Also, here on the west coast a pretty sizeable part of the population rides around on "salvaged" bikes collecting cans. The trash bin outside my apartment gets picked over a dozen times a day. As long as they don't make a mess, I much prefer the can collecting over the catalytic converter and bike theft that also occurs with some regularity.
This exactly. But I was speaking with someone who moved here from the UK, and they mentioned seeing this as something crazy that you only see late night. So I guess it's less common in some cities, and seeing laws against it makes some sense as to why.
I drive my diesel car with HVO100, which is hydro-treated vegetable oil, so the basis for my fuel is exactly the stuff that is being collected here.
I loved the video (and always love to see your handsome mug)!
LOL, didn't know about this, if these oil can be treated to become fuel, I am sure they will be sold for more, than selling back to restaurants.
@kusazero we actually do have similar done in small and large operations. Bio-diesel is oil which has been treated to remove glycerine and break down fatty chains into shorter, more readily combustible hydrocarbons. Most fuel producers will have it make up about 10% of your diesel, because it does a fantastic job of replacing sulfur as the main lubricant inside diesel engines. Alternatively, if you make it yourself, you can run most diesel engines with 100% bio-diesel with no problems
@@jacobbrown7367 I am an urban Asian, can’t do shit with my hands, hahahha, but thanks for the explanation, I am now more prepared for the apocalypse
@@kusazero there are some videos you can look up that show the process on small scale. It may not be doable for you, or maybe you will find it's easier to do than you thought.
Fuel aside, you can make a lot of glycerine as well, a key ingredient in many soaps and moisturizers.
I worked in a restaurant in north Canada 25 years ago. It wasn't even connected to sewers. They had a huge septic tank that was cleaned regularly.
The frying oil was changed once a week but it was strained and the deep frier cleaned every night. If the cook thought the oil was too off they would change it early.
There was no oil recycling companies. The oil was sealed in a bucket and put in the dumpster. So stretching oil as long as it would last was a necessity.
This was just my understanding of cooking oil. Fried food joints will go through it faster than a place just making some fries a few times. I've even heard that older oil (not broken/off/rancid, just not first use I guess) is better for flavour.
@@a_trauma_llama2991 well if burnt oil is a flavour you like then sure. But I always found the deep fried food there tasted better the fresher the oil was. It was a typical greasy spoon diner so they had lots of deep fried food like mozzarella sticks, chicken fingers, zucchini sticks, etc, etc.
I am a Hawaiian speeding jaywalker that is happy to see your face for the first time after all these years of watching your videos. I have to say that UA-cam watchers need this video. Period.
"We live on an internet that is completely inundated with bullshit, and there's no valor in adding to the pile." Fantastically put.
Who knew 2024's most sane English-language take on China-West cultural relations was going to come from cooking youtube! In our era where the most respected US and European newspapers struggle to summon more than a zero-research hitpiece, this was refreshingly reasonable. I learned stuff and had fun. If you ever have the mental resources to wade into additional morasses for future videos, we will appreciate it.
Right with you until the ending sum up to not worry about a problem until it's your problem. I can think of a number of times where that thinking bit us in the ass. There are definitely some categories of things that thinking should not be applied to.
You're taking the ending in a pretty pessimistic way. From the framing of the video, gutter oil seems to be a non issue that is being weaponized as propaganda. Why feed into misinformation when you aren't educated on the topic? Yes, everyone's entitled to their opinion but engaging with the content only feeds into more misinformation.
Man, this is just the best cooking channel on youtube.
Right!? Between the in-depth research of the different dishes, to seeing the background of issues like this.
This and Adam Ragusea really elevate cooking content beyond just recipes.
This is the first time I’m not hungry after watching you videos
I don't care what anyone says. You are a thoughtful and honest person, and unlike tourists you understand how local infrastructure works. In much of the rest of the world grease and oil is handled at a water treatment facility, so the practice of cleaning the sewage grease trap is generally unknown.
Food safety in china is a problem, no matter how you want to sugar coat. Most recent scandals is the cooking oil tanker trucks and Goji Berry. I am glad my ancestors left China long ago.
Well then you should not be eating at McDonalds or any fast food franchise with teens running the operation. I used to work there as a teenager...we have these big buckets of pickles and some of the teens prank/dare including pissing into the bucket of pickles because pickle juice is yellow and you can't really tell since it's mostly vinegar, but occasionally some coworker would warn you so and so did it on their shift, so don't order hamburgers with pickle for your meal today.
Hey, Western restaurants can also have disgusting practices sometimes. It’s the equivalent of watching some Kitchen Nightmares and saying all Western dining establishments are terrible and unhygienic.
You guys talking about some restaurants and some kids, China is entire industry national wide. Including baby milk powder in the past. Don't have to defend China little pinks, feel free to eat whatever you want. Its your health not mine.🤣
ua-cam.com/video/2Ct1VnLoAeA/v-deo.html
@@elmerloh mate, the baby milk power poisoning thing was from power made by Nestle. you know, that western company which has piles upon piles of health and worker's rights violation scandals
Here in Jakarta (Indonesia), we have 'Pemulung', doing basically the same thing with plastic/cardboard trash + used electronics and furniture. They're a lot more open with what they do though. In the past, they'd buy your trash for the price of some pot ash (to clean the underside of your pot/woks) and resell it to a recycler for tiny marginal profit compared to the hard work
Pemulung are different though, people generally respect them more as they function more as a proto-recycling company. They don’t work with consumables like cooking oil. As someone who loves to cook the Indonesian way, a more similar concept would be to stretch out the minyak jelantah (reused oil) until longer than usually advised
As a regular viewer who is familiar with your style, my jaw still dropped when I heard the phrase "epistemologically uncertain". Well done!
They're both bright, clearly well-educated and most importantly have inquisitive minds. It's what makes their approach to recipes so good. They put things in context all the time where food is related; no surprise they're capable of doing it on other topics as well.
When I scowled at the security guard who wanted to check my bag as I went into Gilbert Jeune, he said, "Don't hold it against me. It's the deontology of my job."
Such a level headed, well argued piece. And it's not like most of these issues (using old oil in the kitchen, food hygene, etc.) are not common place in the EU or UK.
26:15 every former/current mcdonalds employee knows and understands this - and honestly 5 days would be generous to mcdonalds.
Great video! As someone who has only seen the most context-less, rage bait-y videos on the subject, this was very informative and helpful. Much like your “wet market” segment of yesteryear :)
I do find your wording of the “don’t worry about things that don’t affect you” sentiment somewhat off-putting in the grander scheme, but it makes sense in this specific context, given the people you’re politely referring to
Thank you Mr pig dog for the informative video
Your materialist approach is admirable, I really enjoyed this video .
dang, beautiful. i hope you guys keep videoing for a long long time.
I generally agree with what you are saying. But I would also point out (not necessarily applicable in this case) that marginalized groups often need to rely on people without "skin in the game" to have an opinion and care about the issues affecting them.
I was always skeptical of reusing gutter oil because of how hard it is to get rid of bad stench from used oil, it's just impossible.
So I always thought that they must be using the oil for something else that's not food. Now this video explained everything I didn't know, thank you.
I've never heard of this phenomenon of "gutter oil", and I've been running kitchens in the US for twenty-five years now. I will say, though, that this is a really great breakdown of it with very realistic points across the the board. This is a really awesome video, and very much appreciated by me. Thank you.
1:58 insane transition
It was really great to see an informed and considerate take on the whole affair. I've only seen one sort of pseudo-documentary video on gutter oil street vendors, and I'm sure it's very easy to manipulate footage and subtitles to create a narrative. And even with the example you brought up - good intentions or no, the speaker was putting his own ideas onto what was going on. I had no other context. It's far better to understand what could be happening so I can actively think for myself.
I know it's not your usual video but don't feel bad for making it. This is an interesting topic that touches on that fuzzy area where business and culture intersect. I learned a lot and I'm always excited by anything eco-friendly and love knowing that used oil can be recycled for industry use, used in biodiesel and even partially composted - all better than mere trash.
I remember, as a foreigner with a chinese face in ~2013, being in Beijing and being told by local students all about the gutter oil scandal. it was understandably a topic of great interest to a lot of people, but unfortunately some other foreigners took it to be a "chinese" thing rather than a "dang, we had a problem and are addressing it now" sort of thing. essentializing any country is wacky but people definitely took it and ran with it as something that people widely knew and accepted, rather than something that was seen as messed up and scandalous.
Thanks for this work. I was scared of that stuff and in the same time I can't live without chinese kitchen. ❤ Un saluto dall' Italia.
Chris. This is next level. Possibly your magnum opus. (At least to date.)
I can only hope it reaches some of the people who could stand to learn from it.
Thank you for not pivoting from media literacy into an ad read!!
psychologically it's hard for me to deep fry anything because i'm so used to just putting a spoonful of oil into a pan and using that. the thought of dumping a most of a bottle of oil (even if i plan to save the oil in a container in the fridge) just feels so...extravagant...though recently i've gotten used to pouring oil a little more freely (like olive oil...where i tell myself the oil is actually a large part of the sauce (like oil/garlic pasta). and similarly with salad dressing i have to use more than a spoonful of oil all at once..
There's a reason I love watching you and Steph. Thank you for being so fair to China. Much love from Texas, y'all.
My view on China and what rules and morality means there was based to a great degree on my presumed knowledge of gutter oil. This content changed my view on gutter oil completely, so it will probably change my view on China in a way, that only time can tell, as such a process takes time and new thoughts have to be thought to rewire my brain. I'm looking forward for this re--exploration and thankful for you re-opening my eyes. We need more quality content like this.
I find it difficult to believe that with economic conditions, the push for food in China to be as cheap as possible (razor thin profits), and the prevalence of oil in Chinese cooking, that restaurants are not HIGHLY incentivized to grab the cheapest cooking oil they can get.
I am not saying lots of restaurants actively choose dangerous oil to realize a profit, but there is a fantastic amount of seize-the-opportunity activity in China and I would be entirely surprised if some group(s) of individuals did not process gutter oil on the cheap and pass it off as cooking oil at a lower price point. Processing it doesn't make it safe for consumption, and since this is an illegal activity they are not going to be regulated.
Also, didn't China just recently have a huge scandal, in July of 2024 ,with cooking oil and being transported in liquids trucks that were not cleaned out, resulting in the contamination of massive amounts of cooking oil? If something like this is happening to save a buck along the supply chain, impacting hundreds of millions of people for who knows how long and where major corporations repeatedly lied and obscured activities to the public, then why is it even unlikely that somebody else is processing gutter oil for human consumption?
Well, the condition you speak of can be applied broadly as well. Pretty sure every restaurants are incentivised to lower their cost. However , for china if you are caught serving gutter oil it's a death penalty so this is already a deterrent on what the government to reduce such occurrence compared to the past .
As a guy that grew up working as a 15 year old in a kitchen just to have an "under the table" cash job, there's nothing worse than the smell of a backed up grease trap. Good lord, opening that during business hours was guaranteed to clear out the back of the restaurant.
This video didn't tell me much I didn't know about the subject, but it's just refreshing to see an educated, level-headed take on a contested topic that isn't so emotionally charged on either side of the debate that it feels the need to push the scales the other way. Usually people will react to this sensational outrage culture by treating it like a myth, or just a bygone reality.
It's a shame that the same qualities I just praised are exactly why videos like this won't end the debate and result in cooler heads. People only want to see other people getting angry at the same things they are.
Far from a shill my man. An ambassador for Asian food.
I think my main throughline is "Does this hurt anyone?" followed by, "if everyone did this, would it violate the categorical imperative?" Where the first test is testing for harms to other people, followed by a second prong about the harm to the social contract, if it harms the first it automatically fails the second; but if it only fails the second, to what extent is it deleterious to the social fabric?
30:24 incredibly powerful ideology that I 100% agree with: "be very careful accepting arguments if you don't personally have skin in the game one way or the other"
Wise words
I disagree, you would be dismissing opinions and be making them invalid just bc it doesn't affect you
If someone does something "wrong" but I'm not personally affected why am I not allowed to voice my opinion? Are we not allowed to make our own judgements?
I think the key idea should be that we should try to be more educated on topics and don't jump to hasty conclusions since misinformation is everywhere.. but just my two cents
@@-Undine-"be very careful" is different from "disengage completely".
The whole idea is that if you are not knowledgeable about the subject, and are not willing to engage with the subject on a deeper level beyond the first thought piece you hear about the subject, then you will simply do more harm than good by having an unpolished opinion on it. He never said you can't have an opinion, just that you shouldn't be so haphazard with them
I think, that was actually a very weak point in an overwhelmingly strong video. There is a reason why victims are never judges. People having skin in the game are biased.
@@RamirezGold I agree. I like this channel to learn about delicious Chinese food. I don't live in China, and it is not the food of my heritage, but I have opinions about why I like it. The video today teaches many interesting things and then leaves me feeling like I don't have a right to an opinion about what I learned! Maybe too, I don't have a right to have an opinion about Chinese food except to eat it, and keep my mouth shut. I wish he had ended the video on a more hopeful message.
Lots of American restaurant owners chiming in as to how normal this kind of stuff is here when it's done legit and I just want to add: I've worked at plenty of small scale places with cheapskate owners who would stretch oil and do all kinds of stuff your average American consumer would puke over. Regardless of how restaurants are regulated, if there's poverty you will have restaurant owners trying to cut corners regardless of safety. Your Asian village street vendor is no different than your McDonalds in a town of 1k people
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I saw the grease videos and was very worried because I will travel to China next year. This does give me some peace of mind, but your overall philosophy is good too. I also love the cooking videos too. So keep it up.
I wouldn't compare it to jaywalking, and no, speeding is dangerous and people shouldn't do it 18:40 . I think maybe it would be a good idea for the locals to continue to stigmatize taking oil out of the drainage trap in sketchy ways and at sketchy times. Even if it's a bit more expensive, it should be done the right way, because who knows where that oil ends up.
Idk. The "It was a developing country" line just doesn't cut it for me. I'm from Italy and 100 years ago it was also pretty poor, but something like gutter oil would NEVER have been deemed acceptable. That's so nasty. The only thing that oil should be used for is turned into diesel fuel.
Haven't you heard of olive oil mafia?
Yes. They are:
1) criminals
2) not using oil that went down a sewer first.
Did they have recycling plants 100 years ago?
Had me at "serve safe certified 😂 great video showing both sides of the coin and shedding light to this
As huge Evangelion fan, The phrase "The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away" sounded thematically similar to NERV's motto, "God's in his Heaven, All is right with the world."
This was very good! I'm glad you made it. Very wise words at the end (even if they were a bit vulgar). I lived in China for about 14 years. It was an incredible experience. I learned a lot about food and cooking. I did always have that "gutter oil" in the back of my head when I went out eating but it never stopped me from enjoying the food.
Thank you, Chris. This is why I subscribe and donate to this channel.
NGL, my first thought on the video was that they were collecting the oil to sell to recyclers. Side hustles like that are so common nowadays. I gotta respect folks who are doing what they gotta do in order to provide for their families.
17:51 there's a saying in North America; if you see a mother stealing diapers, you didn't see anything.
Thanks for the youtube essay, I learned a lot and I appreciate the edutainment.
Also, "If you see someone stealing food, no you didn't."
That's what they say about teenagers stealing condoms as well.
Actually, never heard that in my life.
More importantly someone gets paid to watch for that, it isn't me, and I don't work for free, so it's not my problem.
I believe I'll be taking my meals at home, thank you very much.
Thank you for making videos like this. Calm, good, balanced reporting that is honest about its biases, as thorough as possible, and approachable is incredibly rare, especially when it comes to presenting issues pertaining to China to an American Audience and vice versa. People like you maintain my faith in online journalism.
The dude called Serpentza a Grifter. Serpentza, is an ACTUAL JOURNALIST. This dude is merely a Shill... shilling for China. Wake up. This Dude didnt even mention the RECENT discovery... of tanker trucks that carried chemicals / fuels... were also being filled with cooking oils, without washing them out first.
(because it was cheaper, and easier)
Online journalism isn’t dead. You just have to sift through mountains of crap to go get to the gold
Thank you for bringing some sanity to this topic. Excellent research and presentation.
From some of the horror stories here, I guess I work at proper places that follow regulations in Singapore. When I was in McDonald's, we change the oil daily even as an establishment that runs 24/7. At a Japanese restaurant that did some deepfrying, we still change it every day. How the food tasted changed quite a lot from the fresh oil to end of day oil so I cannot imagine some of your cases of week old oil
There are other deep fried fastfood chains in Singapore that use oil filter, and do not replace "old" oil. Why will there be "old" oil when the deep fried food soak up all the "old" oil and the deep fryers have to be constantly top up with fresh oil.
@@Jeff79z hope you are not in F&B