{"id":597727,"date":"2026-04-11T20:31:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T20:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/597727\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T20:31:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T20:31:17","slug":"its-the-biggest-culinary-mystery-in-america-i-spent-a-week-trying-to-crack-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/597727\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the biggest culinary mystery in America. I spent a week trying to crack it."},"content":{"rendered":"

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To make beef tallow, one must first acquire some suet, a butcher\u2019s term for the opaque white fat that surrounds the kidneys in grazing animals like cattle and sheep. The suet is trimmed of any bloody splotches or grody connective tissue before being diced down to small, flaky hunks. Roast the gristle, on low heat, until it liquefies into a pool of lucent grease. Take it off the burner, strain off any charred impurities, and transfer the congealment to a Mason jar, where\u2014in the chill of the refrigerator\u2014it solidifies into a glossy brick of fat. Voil\u00e0. Beef tallow.
Ready to be eaten, for better or worse.<\/p>\n

My blood pressure has always run a little high. I\u2019ve been trying to reduce my cholesterol for as long as I\u2019ve possessed the wherewithal to worry about it. So there was, indeed, a pang of apprehension, in the muddy throes of early March, when I spaded off a crescent of the stuff and watched it sizzle at the bottom of my cast-iron skillet. I was frying eggs absent the assistance of my typical implements\u2014no canola, olive, or vegetable oils; not even a knob of butter. No, for the next week or so, I wanted to do my cooking with tallow, because some of the most powerful people in America had assured me that I\u2019d be much healthier if I did.<\/p>\n

In January, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, unveiled an updated version of the Food Guide Pyramid, which was originally introduced to public schools in 1992<\/a>. If you\u2019re familiar with Kennedy, and the \u201cMake America Healthy Again\u201d line of thinking, you won\u2019t be surprised by his revisions: Kennedy implored us to eat more meat\u2014especially red meat\u2014at every meal. Fruits and vegetables are encouraged, as are lots of cheese, yogurt, and whole milk by the gallon. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Kennedy wants Americans to abstain from bread, grain, and processed foods, specifically those that come wrapped in plastic. Crackers are out; rib-eye, with thick bands of marbling, is in. All told, it wasn\u2019t the worst advice Kennedy has ever doled out, but printed in a subclause, toward the bottom of the pyramid, hid one of the more heterodox directives the federal government has ever issued. The topic at hand was cooking fats, and what we ought to use to brown our meat. \u201cPrioritize oils with essential fatty acids,\u201d read the decree<\/a>. \u201cOther options can include butter or beef tallow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ah, yes, beef tallow\u2014a culinary lubricant that has largely fallen out of favor in America due to some well-documented nutritional shortcomings. Beef tallow is high in saturated fat, containing 6.4 grams per tablespoon<\/a>, significantly more than canola oil, which has just 1 gram, in comparison<\/a>. Dietary science has long maintained that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol levels, narrowing arteries and shortening lifespans by increasing the risk of a coronary catastrophe. (These risks are particularly pertinent in a nation like the United States, where heart disease is the leading cause of adult death<\/a>.) One review paper<\/a>, published in 2020 by researchers at the University of East Anglia and University College London, found that in long-term trials, study subjects experienced a 21 percent decrease in \u201ccombined cardiovascular events\u201d by reducing saturated fat intake. That finding fit with a consensus that had already rendered beef tallow anathema in the eyes of medical policymakers. In 1980, the Department of Agriculture issued guidelines<\/a> recommending Americans \u201climit their intake\u201d of fatty animal products, encouraging nutrition from \u201cstarches\u201d and \u201ccarbohydrates\u201d instead. A decade later, spurred on by the fat-free craze that resulted from those regulations, McDonald\u2019s announced<\/a> the company would no longer crisp its fries in tallow. (To this day, its potatoes are instead submerged in a blend of three<\/a> vegetable oils.)<\/p>\n

But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his coalition of wellness contrarians\u2014wielding dissenting studies about the harmlessness of saturated fat<\/a>\u2014believe that the science is wrong, and they\u2019ve held that position for quite some time. Two years prior to reinventing the pyramid, Kennedy posted a video of himself <\/a>on Thanksgiving morning gingerly lowering a whole turkey into a vat of superheated beef tallow. \u201cThis is how we cook the MAHA way,\u201d he said, relishing the mahogany lacquer applied to the bird\u2019s skin. Kennedy took a much more conspiratorial posture a month earlier, just before the decisive Donald Trump victory that would enshrine him as the nation\u2019s top health official. In a post on X, Kennedy dressed down McDonald\u2019s and other fast-food chains for their use of seed oils. He claimed that those restaurants were \u201cunknowingly poisoning\u201d their clientele\u2014going so far as to argue that those oils were the \u201cdriving cause\u201d of the obesity epidemic. \u201cIt\u2019s time to Make Frying Oil Tallow Again,\u201d he wrote, punctuated with two emojis, a cheeseburger and the American flag.<\/p>\n

These days, with the federal health apparatus at his feet, Kennedy has sounded increasingly triumphant. \u201cWe are ending the war on saturated fats,\u201d he proclaimed back in January<\/a>, heralding his new pyramid and a glorious age of meat. It\u2019s a war Kennedy appears to be winning, or at least making headway in. Under his influence, the conventional wisdom about nutrition has been upheaved into cacophony. Warnings about beef tallow, lard, or any other animal fat were once innate in the American lifestyle. A flash of subdermal guilt pulses through my body whenever a scoop of butter bubbles into a tawny fizz on my stovetop\u2014I know I\u2019m not the only one. And yet, people from across the political strata are beginning to hear Kennedy out. Whole Foods reported that its beef tallow sales increased by an eye-popping 96 percent<\/a> in 2025 compared with the previous year. (The grocer also listed tallow at the top of its \u201cTop Food Trends<\/a>\u201d list for 2026.) Steak \u2018n Shake, the MAGA-aligned burger joint, unspooled its timeline, and is now cooking all of its fries in tallow<\/a>. (The considerably more liberal-coded fast-casual salad chain Sweetgreen took a half step; as of 2025 its kitchens are seed oil\u2013free<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

It gets much weirder on TikTok, and in the milieu of beauty influencers who swear by the supernatural regenerative powers of tallow\u2014smearing the calcified beef fat on their cheeks, examining the greasy sheen under the gauze of the ring light. It is an articulation of our era\u2019s destabilization; the unmooring of received wisdom. Not only is beef tallow suddenly good for your heart, it\u2019s also good for every other part of your body.<\/p>\n

\u201cDermatologists don\u2019t want you to know about it,\u201d says a poreless young blonde<\/a>, holding a jar of gelatinized tallow. She flicks off a dollop and places it on her tongue. \u201cIt\u2019s so clean that you can eat it.\u201d (Scientists maintain that there isn\u2019t sufficient evidence that tallow is good for skin health<\/a>, and if anything, the fat might increase the likelihood of breakouts<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

How you feel about all this will likely depend on your own biases. Is the beef tallow renaissance evidence of a societal crackup? The terminus of an ossified medical status quo? The prying back open of long-established health paradigms with medieval thinking? These are the questions we must contend with in this confused era, and that\u2019s why a plastic container of coagulated kidney grease has lingered in my refrigerator all month long. If this was indeed the beginning of a vibe shift, if the war against saturated fats was truly over, then I wanted to dine like my fellow Americans. Would I understand them better? I wasn\u2019t sure, but if nothing else, I was curious to learn where our paths diverged, and how, exactly, consensus was shattered.<\/p>\n

The eggs, for the record, were delicious. The tallow imbued the soft scramble with viscous fat, which scraped off of my cast-iron seamlessly, leaving no yellow speckles of stubborn burned yolk behind. I loaded the breakfast onto a pink Ikea plate and crouched down to eye level, adjacent to my countertop, trying to clock any subtle aesthetic or olfactory incongruities from the way my eggs typically turn out. (I often make them with an aerosolized blast of PAM Cooking Spray, an implement I imagine Kennedy might find demonic.) Did the color look a little richer? More flush? Was that a pungent, carnivore-ish scent in the air? Maybe. It was hard to tell. Cooking fats, on principle, exist to be ignored. All I knew for sure was that the eggs tasted good\u2014rich and robust, like they were mounted by a more savory version of butter. Most importantly, my heart was still beating.<\/p>\n

Neither the fancy grocery store down the street nor the more proletariat option next to my apartment building carried beef tallow. Instead, I purchased my dose from Prospect Butcher Co., a meatery in central Brooklyn, for six bucks. The store\u2019s co-founder, Greg Brockman, told me he\u2019s been retailing a variety of rendered animal fats since long before any of them took on a political valence. (Prospect Butcher Co. is locally famous for its outrageously decadent chocolate chip cookies, which are fortified with what must be a small mountain of lard.) I asked Brockman if anything felt different, or even icky, about selling tallow at the same moment the product has become synonymous with Kennedy, and all of his vaccine skepticism and reactionary macho posturing. \u201cListen, we\u2019re a worker-owned butcher shop in New York City,\u201d he told me. \u201cThat kind of signals a lot about where we stand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brockman cooks with beef tallow all the time in his personal life, and recommends it for anything that needs to get done in the kitchen. (Steak, saut\u00e9ed vegetables, pork chops, you name it.) The specifics of his advocacy are strictly utilitarian. Tallow has a ludicrously high smoke point<\/a>\u2014about 400 degrees Fahrenheit\u2014which is ideal for the hair-trigger fire alarms of urban dwelling, allowing him to sear a porterhouse to a ruby medium-rare in dulcet peace.
(Asked about the nutritional properties of tallow, Brockman demurred. \u201cI\u2019m not a fucking doctor,\u201d he said.) His lack of squeamishness about the fat is rooted in his own principles as a whole-animal butcher, which has informed everything else about his culinary philosophy. After breaking down the flanks, brisket, loins, and round of a recently slain cow\u2014dissecting out the liver, cleaving off the shanks\u2014he is left with a bounty of sinewy gristle that, in prudish hands, would go to waste. So Brockman turns it into tallow, which he considers to be the only ethical thing to do.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re taking the lives of these animals to feed yourself,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd these animals have all of these different parts of them that have useful applications.\u201d Brockman understands that his appreciation for tallow is operating at a considerably different frequency than some of the loonier voices on the right\u2014who stand by the idea that beef fat enriches the body in ways that seed oils can\u2019t. But he\u2019ll happily co-sign the sustainability they\u2019re advocating for, regardless of whether they realize it or not.<\/p>\n

Ironically, Brockman\u2019s laissez-faire approach is mirrored on the reverse end of the ideological echelon at Butterworth\u2019s, a French bistro in Washington, D.C., which has become the central haunt<\/a> for the town\u2019s MAGA-aligned intelligentsia. (Steve Bannon is a regular<\/a>. He holds court at a private table in the rococo dining room.) Unsurprisingly, the dishes that emerge from Butterworth\u2019s kitchen\u2014the pork Milanese, the Amish half chicken, the crispy cauliflower and miso caramel\u2014are often slathered in beef tallow. Head chef Bart Hutchins didn\u2019t know the cooking fat had become en vogue within MAGA world until he was given marching orders by his business partner, the right-wing gadfly Raheem Kassam, to advertise it as such on the menu. \u201cIt was like, \u2018Hey man, instead of saying french fries, we should be saying \u2018tallow fries,\u2019 \u201d said Hutchins. (Those fries are now Butterworth\u2019s signature item.)<\/p>\n

Hutchins does not identify as a MAGA die-hard, or even much of a partisan. Like Brockman, he has a background in nose-to-tail cooking, and before Butterworth\u2019s, he worked at a New American restaurant called Beuchert\u2019s Saloon\u2014which sourced its menu from farms around the Chesapeake hinterlands. (This is where he became fluent in the art of animal fat.) In those days, he described his customers as a mix of tie-dyed Deadheads and urbane, Anthony Bourdain\u2013worshipping millennials; the two demographics most closely associated with the organic food movement in the 2000s and 2010s. \u201cNow I\u2019ve got right-wing staffers asking for the same things that they did,\u201d continued Hutchins. \u201cThat\u2019s the difference after 10 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

I do think Hutchins is on to something there. My own journey into food consciousness overlaps entirely with my experience as an Obama-voting millennial Democrat. I watched the factory-farming documentary Food, Inc. in an indie movie theater, I dined at vegan caf\u00e9s and farm-to-table restaurants, I stocked my shopping cart with free-range eggs and non-GMO produce, and along the way, I was enculturated with the idea that the food supply chain was laden with bad actors and nefarious intentions\u2014because to be a liberal was to always be a little bit crunchy. That remains true, but surprisingly, in 2026, conservatives have grown crunchier than ever.<\/p>\n

Jos\u00e9e Johnston, a sociologist who studies food culture at the University of Toronto, has a couple of different theories for why that is. She gestures toward the rise of meat alternatives\u2014things like plant-based protein, or even lab-grown meat, which has been deemed safe to consume by the Food and Drug Administration<\/a>, but remains epistemologically related to liberal society, and as it tends to go with these things, is strikingly unpopular among conservatives. (According to one poll<\/a>, 75 percent of Republicans refuse to include lab-grown meat in their diets, and lawmakers like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have moved to ban its production<\/a> outright.) Johnston thinks that hesitancy is a microcosm of the American temperament. In a morass of contrasting information\u2014with MAHA interlocutors muddying the waters\u2014she said people tend to rely on their \u201cinstincts and bodily experiences,\u201d rather than the counsel of experts.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople enjoy eating meat. And they\u2019re looking for ways to make meat-eating feel ethically and emotionally acceptable,\u201d she continued. \u201cTallow fits that impulse. It evokes traditional cooking. It connects with people\u2019s desire to have a palatable narrative, that they\u2019re not doing something horrible. It\u2019s how we fried our french fries in the olden days, and by most accounts, those fries were delicious.\u201d<\/p>\n

For what it\u2019s worth, Hutchins uses beef tallow because it is abundant, cheap, and, yes, because it leaves an auburn char on matchsticked potatoes. But, characteristic of his customers, Hutchins is also open to the idea that seed oils, made of canola, corn, and soy, are bad for our health\u2014or at least that there are enough unknowns to raise concerns\u2014and, therefore, that the championing of animal fats, led by Kennedy, might be a positive course correction. Hutchins didn\u2019t cite any empirical reasonings for his thinking. It\u2019s more of a gut feeling.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe steps we take to process those oils are so far removed from anything natural,\u201d said Hutchins. \u201cIt just sets off my bullshit detector.\u201d<\/p>\n

I can understand why someone like Hutchins, and the rest of the MAHA-curious fleet, might be scandalized by the mammoth industrialization effort, and miscellaneous chemical agents, required to squeeze the bitter tonic from canola seeds. But whether their suspicions hold up to scrutiny is another story. Seed-oil truthers often gesture toward the high concentration of omega-6 fatty acids in the product, which they argue increase inflammation throughout the body. But that\u2019s a misunderstanding <\/a>of the science<\/a>: Omega-6 acids aren\u2019t pro-inflammatory, they just don\u2019t have the same anti-inflammatory effects as the omega-3 acids found in other foodstuffs. Kennedy has also employed the notion that seed oils have engineered the obesity crisis, which doesn\u2019t hold much water. The epidemic is simply far too complex and multifaceted<\/a>\u2014intersecting with sedentary living, the proliferation of ultraprocessed food, and countless other factors\u2014to villainize a single culprit like canola. Others weave conspiracies about the American Heart Association, which has long dictated coronary prudence to the United States public. The claim is that the AHA took a compromising bribe from Procter & Gamble\u2014manufacturers of the vegetable shortening Crisco\u2014and was therefore influenced to push dietary conventions away from animal products. This, again, is a bit of a misinterpretation. The American Heart Association did accept a $1.5 million donation from Procter & Gamble, but it came from a crowdfunded radio promotion<\/a>, sponsored by the company, in 1948, long before any semblance of cardiac health unanimity had been established.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, even if forbidden secrets about seed oils came to light\u2014if refined canola or soy was unmasked as an opiating agent of chaos or, barring that, was simply proven to be less innocuous than previously thought\u2014it\u2019s hard to generate a sound reason for why beef tallow would make for a suitable replacement. The MAHA crowd often cites a current of scientific research indicating that saturated fat isn\u2019t as destructive as once established: Some clinical trials have found that a high-fat diet<\/a> might have a negligible effect on cardiovascular health among those who aren\u2019t already at high risk for stroke or heart attack, and other vectors of evidence suggest that certain foodstuffs rich with saturated fat, like full-fat dairy, are broadly healthy<\/a>. But these data points are shadowed by some long-term trends in heart health. Deaths from cardiovascular disease have declined by 75 percent since the middle of the 20th century<\/a>, which neatly fits the timeline of America\u2019s gradual dispossession of beef tallow and other saturated fats.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoing back to the 1950s, when diets were packed with animal fats and heart disease was rampant, doesn\u2019t make a whole lot of sense,\u201d said Marion Nestle, the venerable nutritionist who has published 16 books about food policy, and\u2014throughout her career\u2014has campaigned against the corporate food lobby\u2019s influence over American dietary guidelines.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m fond of saying that dietary advice for chronic disease prevention hasn\u2019t really changed between the late 1950s and now,\u201d continued Nestle. \u201cIt\u2019s always been to balance calories. Eat more plant foods, eat less sugars, saturated fat, sodium, and alcohol. To do this, you need to eat less red meat, and processed meat. This last admonition is the one changed by this administration. Now it\u2019s to eat all the meat you want, at every meal, and to choose full-fat dairy, and butter and beef tallow. That\u2019s a big change, and not one well supported by research.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nestle is right; she is outlining conventional wisdom, and I put that premise to Hutchins. Does he worry about how much beef tallow he eats? Hutchins isn\u2019t quite sure one way or the other, but he knows what he knows. \u201cNine times out of 10, I\u2019ve known the cows I buy since they were calves,\u201d he said. He watched them graze in the pastures, he witnessed the tenderness of the farmers. And when the animals arrive at his kitchen, so that Hutchins may reduce them into steaks with his breaking knife, he pauses at the kidneys to carve out the suet\u200d\u2014so it may be rendered into cooking fat. Everything he puts in his mouth has passed through his hands. Hutchins doesn\u2019t trust much in this world, but he does trust that.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf all of a sudden I have health issues in my 60s, then I was wrong,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it is what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was astonished by how much heat the tallow could take as it roiled to life on my stainless-steel skillet. Four chicken thighs, dressed with salt and pepper, were earmarked for the corners of the pan. The fat absorbed the scalding blue flames, mingling with the chicken grease, until both sides of the poultry were a crackling golden brown. I loaded the thighs into a sandwich dressed with lettuce, tomato, and a dab of sriracha mayo, and didn\u2019t tell my wife they were made with tallow until she took her first bite. I asked her if anything tasted different. Nothing immediate came to mind. Maybe, she said, the chicken seemed a little crispier than normal? I informed her about the kidney grease, which, ever so briefly, made her face go ashen. But both of us finished our sandwiches. They were too good to go to waste.<\/p>\n

It went on like this all week long. I seared a jagged crust onto flank steaks for briny Caesar salads, I reduced onions to a gummy pulp, and I cranked up my burners to their nuclear apogees, all with my trusty jar of beef tallow. The flavor signifiers were minor to the point of being effectively immaterial\u2014like Brockman said, by far the most useful thing about tallow is how it never seems to incinerate on the stovetop\u2014but the particularities of my bodily integrity remain hidden. Are the ventricle arteries in my heart damming up as I type this? I probably won\u2019t know until it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Talib Visram
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<\/a><\/p>\n

All of this was on my mind toward the end of my experiment, on a Friday afternoon, when I savored a ritual that\u2019s just as deleterious to my health as all the beef fat I had ingested. A friend of mine joined me at an empty sports bar to watch the first weekend of March Madness, and, as evening crept on the horizon, we both tore through the laminated happy hour menu. Tart lagers filled the table in front of us. Shoestring fries\u2014torched in canola, I\u2019m sure\u2014crowded red baskets lined with parchment paper. We talked about the tallow; the smell, the consistency, the pallid, off-white color, and before long, the conversation took on a texture I didn\u2019t expect. I told my friend that I felt like something had changed inside me, a shift that predated these bizarre few days on the RFK diet, but was nonetheless accentuated by it. The feeling was subtle, but impossible to ignore. Even worse, it was difficult to articulate out loud without sounding stupid or generally unwell. In essence, I told my friend that I had found within myself more doubts about mainstream empirical consensus than I ever had before. Or, perhaps more precisely, that I\u2019m increasingly willing to believe that things I\u2019ve long thought to be true are, in fact, wrong. I wasn\u2019t sure how to resolve that feeling, and I suppose that makes me complicit in the great American crackup.<\/p>\n

The feeling was subtle, but impossible to ignore. Even worse, it was difficult to articulate out loud without sounding stupid or generally unwell. In essence, I told my friend that I had found within myself more doubts about mainstream empirical consensus than I ever had before. Or, perhaps more precisely, that I\u2019m increasingly willing to believe that things I\u2019ve long thought to be true are, in fact, wrong. I wasn\u2019t sure how to resolve that feeling, and I suppose that makes me complicit in the great American crackup.<\/p>\n

This shift in my disposition had nothing to do with the beef tallow. Or the canola oil, for that matter. Instead, during the early days of the pandemic, when I sheltered in a dingy one-bedroom, I have a vivid memory of turning on the television and hearing the nation\u2019s top health officials dissuading Americans from masking in public. We were told those masks should be rationed for front-line medical workers<\/a>, and that they weren\u2019t all that effective<\/a>, anyway. The mandate flipped in the weeks afterward. Everyone started masking, under the encouragement of those same officials, but a kernel of that confusion stuck with me in the years afterward. I didn\u2019t construct any conspiracy theories, or buy into the psychedelic right-wing paranoia. Instead, it simply became apparent to me that what I thought of as science\u2014a stoic discipline of objective truth\u2014was, in reality, mediated by a collection of agencies and organizations that were interpreting the facts of the crisis in real time. We were flying dark, more dark than I ever realized. We probably had been for a long time.<\/p>\n


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An Old Fashioned Ingredient Has Divided America. I Spent a Week Eating It to Find Out Why.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

I think of the vast number of Americans who are reckoning with their own scar tissue from the pandemic. All of that trauma has yet to heal. It reverberates across this strange decade. Public trust has swooned to abyssal lows; it has become acceptable to believe that, in the absence of much research otherwise, beef tallow can rejuvenate body and soul. This isn\u2019t evidence of a healthy society. But I can relate. To some extent, I think we all can.<\/p>\n

I carved off one last puck of tallow for a pot roast. A few of my wife\u2019s friends were coming over, and I was on the hook for dinner. A huge chunk of beef round hit the pan, blistering with heat, until all sides fissured with amber cracks. It mellowed in the oven, releasing its juices, permeating the kitchen with a life-affirming aroma. I portioned out four plates, piled high with smashed potatoes, letting the umbral gravy of the beef sink deep into the crevices. We laughed, we drank, we let the tender muscle fibers melt on our tongues. We tugged the midnight of our mortality infinitesimally closer, and resolved to face the music on another day. If loving beef tallow is wrong\u2014and it almost certainly is\u2014I can understand why some people don\u2019t want to be right.<\/p>\n

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