China Observations – Drainage Oil
Friday, April 23rd, 2010 in: Current Events, Travel
The other day I was on my own in Wuhan and decided to go take advantage of the Pizza Hut evening tea time. When I stepped out of the restaurant, the crowds had dissipated, leaving the streets eerily empty. It wasn’t even 11, so I was left wondering where everyone had gone off to. Most of the people still out and about were working. Just in front of the the Pizza Hut and the KFC next door, there was a couple of guys with a cart full of barrels standing over an open manhole, scooping some slop out out of the sewer. I didn’t know what was going on, so I made a mental note and stepped past them.
Back at the hotel, I started looking for websites in China to give me some more insight into the country in which I find myself, and stumbled across China Hush. I didn’t intend to find an explanation for the guys at the manhole, but there it was. They were collecting waste oil from the restaurants, and there’s more: that slop doesn’t isn’t just collected to clean the sewers, it’s recycled.
But recycling is good, right? Well, a lot of it is recycled back into the food supply, making its way back into the fryers and pans of street vendors and restaurants alike. Recycled drainage oil looks like regular oil, and it’s a third the cost, so there’s little stopping less scrupulous food vendors from choosing it over clean oil. Keep this in mind the next time you think about buying something fried on the street…
I might not mind so much if there weren’t oil in everything… now I can’t help but wonder what’s in my food, and where it’s been.
Yikes! I’d never heard of anything like that. The idea of recycling the oil isn’t too bizarre, but the fact that it’s going back into cooking pots…well, grosses me out. x(
I think it’s also that their method for “recycling” the oil is pretty low-tech: throw it into a pot, boil it off, throw in some chemicals and skim the surface. Imagine the kind of place, materials and tools used for this purpose over and over and over, boiling off used oil scooped out of the sewer so it can be rebottled and resold.
Yeeeah, gross.
Bleh, didn’t know about this one. China Hush is a very good website for finding “stuff” and is usually fairly reliable. So I’d trust it for the most part on this.
Oh, and if you are interested in relatively modern overviews of China from an academic standpoint, look into China: Fragile Super Power by Susan Shirk… if you can get it. You can get it off gigapedia’s book pdfs I believe.
You betcha that’s gross. x___x Man…if there’s ever been a case of “ignorance is bliss,” it’s gotta be this.