The Oil Stuff - Besides the Viral Salaciousness

Beyond the sensationalized aspects of the scandal, there is a political dimension to consider. One of the core bedrocks of Western political thought is the importance of free speech and independent journalism. The original scandal was broken by Nandu, and the 1990s were indeed the high watermark of investigative journalism in China. Caijing, Nanfangxi - these were titans, and in the 00s and even more so in the 10s, these institutions were reigning in and their independence was significantly dialed back. So, for many viewers watching this video, the natural Western train of thought would be "how can I believe you, Mr. YouTuber, how can you even know what's going without the same sort of ecosystem?" And while it is a fair point - how can one know what sources to trust, and to what degree - these are basic questions that educated people in China have to ask themselves all the time.

But it's akin to Pascal's wager - just because some things are unknowable doesn't mean it's reasonable to just believe random stuff in their place. And so, in the West, I've seen a lot of grifters out there in the "random shit dealing" business. Because if you believe something wildly off about China, if you're sitting there in your basement in America - it's costless. You don't have to weigh the deliciousness of hotpot against the probability of crummy oil. It doesn't matter if you wrongly believe that there's some giant social credit system; it doesn't affect you. You don't live there, you don't have any skin in the game.

So, to circle back to that original drunk influencer, what I will give him is this - he at least has or had some skin in the game. In light of a lot of things we discussed in this video, I think we'd all agree that he doesn't exactly come across as... great. But he is in China, presumably also plugged into the English language internet, so from his perspective, these people weren't breaking a minor law; they were poisoning people, his friends, his neighbors, they were killing people. I'm sure he got some backlash, his Douyin account's gone, and I'd guess his life's worse off now than when it started... but I also can't help but actually kinda feel for the dude.

Because he just believed what a lot of you watching this video right now believed and maybe even helped spread on social media. So, in light of all that, if I can leave you with one idea, one rule of thumb that I try to follow, it's this: while our modern fragmented social media-driven information landscape isn't quite as epistemologically uncertain as something state-dominated like China's, I think in some ways the situations can actually rhyme. So be very careful accepting arguments if you don't personally have skin in the game one way or the other.

If something does not affect your life, there is no imperative need for you to develop an opinion. Cede the space to people whose lives are actually affected. Because we live on an internet inundated with bullshit and there's zero valor in adding to the pile. So while I'm sure I've pissed off some of you enough that you're already furiously typing down there how wrong I am, at the very least, as you do so let these words from the wise Bunk from The Wire ring through your head as you're writing your comment:

"It's admittedly a pretty American pathology." We'll be back next week with a proper recipe video.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enSo with the borders back open from COVID, thankfully there’s  a new spate of foreigners back in China, and with this new batch maybe predictably  a new collection of videos showing allegedly the collection of gutter oil.  So what’s going on here – are these people in fact garbage dog monkeys,  as the influencer in this video claims. What we want to do here today is have a calm, grounded,  and hopefully definitive discussion on the facts and fictions of this gutter  oil phenomenon – because, let’s be honest, a lot of this content swirling around the  internet is pretty much gore porn, but it’s also not based on nothing.Now in case you don’t know me I guess I should probably be upfront about my personal background  and biases. Because whenever you try do have a fact-based discussion on China related issues on  this platform, it’s practically a guarantee that 40% of the comments will call me an  American imperialist dog, and the remaining will label me a CCP Communist Shill Pig.What you’re watching here is a Chinese cooking channel. I like Chinese food,  I like Chinese restaurants, our friends are in the industry, and this will bias  my thinking in certain directions. So do feel free to take what I say with a grain of salt,  but at the very least I can be upfront, teach you the context of what you’re seeing,  the basic history of food regulation in China as it pertains to oil,  and what waste oil management in restaurants looks like today in both ideal and non-ideal conditions.In the 1990s, a scandal broke out in the Chinese F&B industry. The Nanfang Dushibao broke open  a story that unscrupulous producers had been collecting waste oil from hotels in Guangzhou  and transporting it to the urban village of Liede in the Tianhe district for re-processing. They  discovered that this oil was being treated with sulfuric acid to remove the obvious contaminants,  then being refined and deodorized much in the same way you might turn an unrefined  rapeseed into something neutral. They then added chemical compounds to give the oil a  peanut fragrance, re-packaged it as peanut oil and sold it back to restaurants as a  deep frying oil. And I probably don’t have to tell you, consuming that kind  of oil while it’s not instadeath is not exactly something a doctor would advise.And so following that report, there was a slight flurry of follow-ups,  a touch of public outcry and then… nothing.You see, The 90s and 00s were a time when economic growth in China was paramount, regulation was  flexible, corruption was pretty rampant, and the going motto in much of the country was “the  mountains are high and the emperor is far away”. In the follow up of Nandu report I think it’d be  fair to guess that many of these oil repurposing operations became a little less conspicuous,  but in sum this was regulatory regime that could maybe be best described as “don’t ask,  don’t tell”. So using repurposed oil kind of became this open secret in the industry,  it was called “frying oil” as it was usually meant for deep frys,  and by some academic estimates – up to 10% of all oil purchased by restaurants during  that time was gutter oil, though the exact number’s been disputed.But in the face of that, public pressure was slowly mounting. After all, it’s a common  theme in countries experiencing this sort of early stage capitalism, and perhaps no country  early stage capitalism’d harder than China in the 90s and 00s. Once you reach a certain  inflection of development the public begins to take a step back and say “Maybe we can  afford it now. Maybe we don’t want our cities choked in air pollution, maybe we don’t want  industrial waste in the groundwater, and maybe we don’t want rancid deep frying oil”. And so,  by about 2010, there began to be a sea change in how the society thought about the issue.Then on May 5th, 2010, insiders in Taiyuan in the Shanxi province exposed the city’s  industry in a tell-all to the Taiyuan Evening News, helping spark a national conversation,  and the following year a crackdown entitled 打四黑除四害 (dasihei chusihai fighting the  four evils and eliminating the four pests) commenced on August 22nd 2011. And say what  you will about the Chinese government, once it decides to enforce something, it enforces it.September 13th, Xinhua reports on a crackdown in Zhejiang of major gutter oil ring in stretching  into Jiangsu and Shandong. Same day, Meishan Yongjian Livestock and Poultry gets busted in  Yibin. Two days later, Nanchang Huanyu Biodiesel Company. Later that month,  Yufeng Feed oil in Huai’an, Chaoyue feed oil and Shanxi Houma Tiancang. October 2011,  it continues villagers outside of Jinhua turning in an operation repurposing rancid lard. On the  21st a ring is arrested in Zhuzhou, and so on and so on. The initial crackdown reportedly  yielded 60 networks, 700 suspects, and 60,000 tons of oil. But for a political tradition  famed for killing chickens to scare monkeys, they perhaps surprisingly to us there at the  time actually kept their foot on the gas. In 2012, the government clarified the law itself,  which maxxed out at the death penalty, and cases continued coming in through that year  and 2013. And in the wake of that sweep, food safety regulators have been a lot closer.Now, I’m not going to sit here and blow sunshine up your ass and tell  you that China today has zero issues. But anyone with even a cursory understanding of  what the industry was like pre-2012 and post-2012 could tell you the  difference. Gutter oil used to be an open secret. Now, it’d be a scandal.So then how can we make sense of these videos today. To do so, it’s important to  understand that manufacturing gutter oil for human consumption is now very illegal. But collecting,  manufacturing and even selling it to restaurants – isn’t. That all might seem counter intuitive,  but I promise that it makes a bunch of sense.You see, restaurants have an oil problem. Now when I say that I’m sure you’re brain goes immediately  to the fryer, and that’s a thing, but it goes deeper. Like, even washing stuff - when you wash  a dish at home there’s gunna be a smear of oil on the plate, that smear’s gunna go down the drain…  but cooking for yourself, it’s not a problem. But now multiply that by 300. And, further,  in the sake of being honest, Chinese restaurants aren’t exactly famed for their judicious use of  oil. What butter is to France, what sugar is to Thailand, oil is to the Chinese cooking  tradition. As a cooking channel, I’ll always reassure people – listen, you’re not actually  consuming all that oil, it’s more of medium of flavor, a lot of it’ll actually settle at the  bottom of the plate and you won’t eat it – but again, multiply that by 300. So what do you do.Now first I want to outline the system as it exists today in 2024 in its ideal form,  as you might see it practiced in nicer restaurants, chains, hotels,  hospitals and the like, then show a less ideal world and how it can break down.So in a perfect world, a restaurant would have a contraption called a 油水分离器. It’s something  that the government’s really been promoting, what they are are basically these freestanding  grease traps with an interceptor for solids. It separates the waste into liquids, solids, and  oils. Liquids can go down into the sewer, and the oils and solids get sent off to  an F&B waste collection company. This company purifies the oil and the solids,  compacts and decomposes the latter for the fill, and the oil then gets sent to  another company, which re-processes the oil into industrial lubricant, biofuels,  and glycerin for soaps and cosmetics. Now this whole chain also exists in the west as well, the  old oil is referred to as yellow grease, and after purification it produces a product called refined  used cooking oil – it’s not used for cooking, I know the adjectives are a little ambiguous,  like China they’re used for industrial purposes.Anyway, this is stuff that the government’s  promoting, Chef Wang Gang has a nice video over on Bilibili, but it admittedly presents a little bit  of an idealized process. Because I think we all know some of the very best food in China isn’t  in chain restaurants or hotels but deep inside an urban village run by a sweaty dude in a tanktop  smoking a cigarette that’s probably not ServSafe certified. So what are they doing with their oil.Now in addition to those freestanding units, there’s another system – a backup in an ideal  world, primary in a less ideal one - called a grease interceptor. This is  a large tank that’s installed outside of restaurants between their drains and the  sewage system that trap oils so they don’t hit the system. There’s a couple different designs,  but maybe given the admittedly oily nature of Chinese restaurant cooking the most common is  this sort of multi-compartment deal. The first compartment will end up having this sludgey solid  build-up of grease that’s just garbage, then the liquid will flow under a barrier  known as a baffle into a second compartment, there will be liquid oil that floats to the  top of that and that stuff is often pure enough that it can potentially be sold to recyclers.So if you’re a random stall, shirtless dude, urban village, the process would probably look  more like this. Garbage would just go to the bin to get collect by the city, liquids then  strained and go down the drain and get handled by the grease interceptor. Now legally in China it’s  the restaurant’s responsibility to maintain their grease interceptor – because if a bunch of grease  overflows from the interceptor it can really cause backups super fast. It’s also a fire hazard. So,  you’ve got a couple options… you could pay a company or the city with some fancy machinery  to pump it – a lot of restaurants do this – but you can also clear it yourself… and, y’know,  it’s China, you can also call up a couple random dudes in a van to do it for you on the cheap.As to what happens to the oil then is one of three things. First,  the oil can follow the idealized recycling process that we just talked about. Or,  less ideal but also far from unheard of - the oil can be dumped or burned.Now let’s go back to these people in unmarked van in the video – what are we watching here.  There’s a generous way to look at this, and an ungenerous way. The generous theory would  be that these people are actually legitimate – they’re people that the restaurant’s paying to  clear their interceptor. Very possible. But if that was a case, they’d probably be a little  more defiant in the face of a drunk foreigner at 2am, so I think there’s another explanation.If you’ve been around China at all, or Southeast Asia for that matter, you’ve  probably seen this – people that comb through garbage looking for cans and bottles to make  a handful of yuan to recycle. It’s hard work, in my opinion in the public interest,  but… also kinda unseemly, and in some places in China it’s actually been outlawed. But in  a country where a tofu rice can cost you eight kuai, a big pile of bottles, hey, that’s a meal.And if you look at some of these oil recycling companies these days, they advertise that they  will take anything. You’re a YouTuber with some extra deep frying oil? They’ll take it.  So you’re an enterprising couple with a hungry kid. You know that a lot of restaurants don’t  clear their grease interceptors as often as they should. Now it’s totally illegal for a  rando to just pop open a random sewer at 2am to scoop out oil, but like… it’s not *that*  illegal? And with a van you could move pretty fast. You clean out the grease interceptor,  sell it to oil recycling company, you won’t get rich but it could maybe buy you a tofu rice.So then… are these people garbage dog monkey people? I mean,  what they’re doing is probably illegal, so if you’re one of those people that defines  morality based off of adherence to the written letter of the law… it’s not right. But like,  I dunno, you speed, I jaywalk… and from another angle you could actually see this as a public  service. These people are clearing grease out of the sewer system, for free, and they’re sending  it to recyclers so it doesn’t get dumped or burned. I mean, if you got them organized you  could repackage the whole thing as a charity, as an NGO, call Warren Buffet and Bill Gates,  I mean, the grant proposals here write themselves.Now with all of that said, there’s still something  that I think really important to address here. Y’know, it’s 2024, if I was unscrupulous I  could maybe paint this whole thing as like a racist attack against Chinese people. It’s  all orientalist tropes, total myth, you’ve have to be MAGA to believe it. But that would ignore  the fact that in China there’s plenty of talk about gutter oil too – for a couple reasons.First, I think it’s important to be honest that refined used cooking oil is something  that even in the 2020s is often available for restaurants to buy. A distributor will tell you  that it’s not a cooking oil, that it’s not for human consumption – the proper use should be,  I dunno, something like lubricating machinery. Now again, pre-2012, y’know… wink wink,  nudge nudge say no more… but these days the going understanding is that you would be a dick to use  it as a frying oil, and you’d be bringing risk on yourself and your restaurant. Can I guarantee that  there’s definitely no youtiao vendor somewhere out there suburbs of Shaoguan, that’s using it  or cutting their oil with it? Again, it’s a big country. But if you’re a foreigner that  lives in Shanghai, Beijing, if you’re traveling to China… I can practically guarantee that’ve  you’ve never crossed paths with it.Actually though on second thought maybe  I shouldn’t quick there. Because in China there’s different grades of oil depending  on the purity. This stuff, the famous brands that you’re getting for your home kitchen,  that’s category I. But there’s also generic oils that’re a little less pure that’re category II,  still don’t have health risk, but are cheaper and can be seen quite often in restaurants. Now  this’s probably a little above my pay grade, but I could totally imagine some oil producer out there  in the market for category II oil cutting their oil with just enough refined used cooking oil to  stay above the tested regulatory bar. But then… I think it might be worth asking, at that point,  what would even be angry about. It’d just be… recycling, though sure, ick factor’s there.And on the topic of ick factor – we should also be honest that when it comes to the genre of internet  video of ‘influencer getting grossed out at grease traps’, foreigners are far from the only name in  the game - there’s also these practically identical videos taken by Chinese people.But when these videos go viral on Xiaohongshu or whatever, the case isn’t referred to 市场监督局,  it’s referred to the 环境局 – and the restaurant is investigated… for whether they’ve been  responsible enough in clearing out their grease interceptors. Because it’s impossible to prove  that some restaurant’s using gutter oil just from cleaning their gutters,  right? It’s not even suspicious – I cannot emphasize this enough:  it’s a legal requirement. You find gutter oil by testing cooking oil.And lastly, I think the final reason you still see the term digouyou in the public  consciousness is… I dunno, 2012 isn’t that long ago but it also wasn’t exactly  yesterday. It seems like to me especially among the younger generation a lot of people  will use the term ‘digouyou’ interchangeably with ‘laoyou’ or old oil. For the unaware,  some restaurants will re-use and re-purpose their used cooking oil, particularly deep frying oil.  Now this is a practice that you can sometimes find in some restaurants around the world. Now in China there’s regulations on the books since that fateful 2011 governing this stuff  – in Shanghai for example, the oil needs to be either tested regularly or swapped out every one  to three days – but like, it’s regulation. For a lot of business owners out there, the calculus is  that you A see how much compliance would cost you, B, see how high the fine is, and C, estimate  the probability of getting caught. If A is less than B times C, the reality is a certain hunk of  restaurant owners might push the oil a bit if the restaurant’s not too busy. Not everyone, but some.So then you might naturally ask, how can you ever be at ease? How can you know that a restaurant is  on day one of their oil and not day five? Well, you can’t. That’s life. There’s risk. You drive  a car. You cross a street. You drink a beer. What you do is manage the risk – drive slowly,  look both ways, don’t drink a twelver every night. In China there is a cultural understanding that if  you want to eat healthy, you need to cook yourself – like wine or beer restaurant food is great but  every meal makes you an alcoholic.So if you happen to live in China,  I know Meituan’s super convenient but learn to cook – and as an extra tip,  the more serious a restaurant is about their food quality, all things equal,  the more serious they seem to be about their food safety. So you can maybe think  twice about the ghost kitchen, but even then, y’know, day five oil’s still not  the end of the world once every five days… and you can always wash it down with a beer.And for people that live in the west, which I assume is a lot of y’all watching,  I think maybe we can be honest that a lot of this gutter oil stuff – besides the viral salaciousness  of it – has a political dimension. Because one of the core bedrocks of western political thought is  the importance of free speech and independent journalism. The original scandal was broken by  Nandu, and the 1990s were really the high water mark of investigative journalism in  China. Caijing, Nanfangxi – these were titans, and in the 00s and even more so in the 10s  these institutions were reigned in and their independence was significantly dialed back. So I think for a lot of you watching, the natural western train of thought would be  “how can I believe you, Mr. YouTuber, how can you even know what’s going without the same sort  of ecosystem”. And even though I like China as a place, like, it’s a fair point – how can I know,  what sources can I actually trust, and to what degree – these are basic questions  that educated people in China have to ask themselves all the time. But it’s a little  like Pastafarian response to Pascal’s wager – just because some things are unknowable  doesn’t mean that it’s then reasonable to just believe random shit in its place.And so in the west I’ve seen a lot of grifters out there in the random shit dealing business.  Because if you believe something wildly off about China, if you’re sitting there  in your basement in America – it’s costless. You don’t have to weigh the deliciousness of  the hotpot against the probability of crummy oil. It doesn’t matter if you wrongly believe  that there’s some giant social credit system, it doesn’t affect you. You don’t live there,  you don’t have any skin in the game.And so to circle back to that original  drunk influencer, what I will give him is this – he at the very least has or had  some skin in the game. In light of a lot of things we discussed in this video I think we’d  all agree that he doesn’t exactly come across as… great. But he is in China, presumably also plugged  into the English language internet, so… from his perspective these people weren’t breaking a minor  law, they were poisoning people, his friends, his neighbors, they were killing people. I’m sure he  got some backlash, his douyin account’s gone, I’d guess his life’s worse off now than when it  started… but I also can’t help but actually kinda feel for the dude. Because he just believed what a  lot of you watching this video right now believed and maybe even helped spread on social media.So in light of all that, if I can leave you with one idea,  one rule of thumb that I try to follow, it’s this.While our modern fragmented social media driven information landscape  isn’t quite as epistemologically uncertain as something state dominated like China’s,  I think in some ways the situations can actually rhyme. So be very careful  accepting arguments if you don’t personally have skin in the game one way or the other.  If something does not affect your life, there is no imperative need  for you to develop an opinion. Cede the space to people whose lives are actually affected.Because we live on an internet inundated with bullshit and there’s zero valor in adding  to the pile. So while I’m sure I’ve pissed off some of you enough that you’re already  furiously typing down there how wrong I am, at the very least, as you do so let  these words from the wise Bunk from the Wire ring through your head as you’re writing your comment:It's admittedly a pretty American pathology. We’ll be back next week with a proper recipe video.\n"