Why Livestock Feed is Laced with Used Cooking Grease 🛢️

The American food system is nothing if not efficient, finding ways to turn garbage, waste, and byproducts into calories. 

Corporations can’t legally feed you used cooking grease (yet) but sadly it is entirely legal for fryer drippings to be added to animal feed, as an ingredient called “yellow grease”.

Yellow grease gate

If you thought cows still grazed freely on pastures and pigs roamed in open pens, think again. The days of green-pasture farming are long gone.

Yellow grease contains a blend of used cooking oils, primarily seed oils, that is collected from restaurants and food processing facilities and repurposed as a cost-effective, calorie-dense, and “sustainable” way for famers to fatten up their livestock.

For farmers and food industries alike, yellow grease is a win-win — it’s both cheap and “good for the environment”. In fact, yellow grease has become so widespread that the North American market for Fats, Oils, and Grease is predicted to grow from $9.5 billion in 2022 to $25.6 billion by 2044.

When you read “sustainability” there is a good chance you are being fed literal garbage or waste, the same is the case with rice bran oil.

Why it matters

While cost effective, the inclusion of yellow grease in animal feed means livestock are consuming diets full of free fatty acids, which are typically referred to as “rancid” fats.

These used oils are also laden with highly toxic by-products like free radicals and aldehydes, which naturally accumulate in the livestock’s fat cells.

Ruminant animals like cows and sheep are generally better at breaking down the garbage we feed them, their 4-chambered stomachs can actually convert unsaturated fats into saturated body fat. However, the free fatty acids were still detectable in the lamb carcasses in the study above.

Pork and chickens have one stomach like us, and directly incorporate PUFA and toxins into their body fat, making them an even more hazardous choice.

The age-old adage “you are what you eat” also applies to animals. Rancid PUFAs in the animal feed = Rancid PUFAs in your meat = Rancid PUFA in YOUR fat stores

How to find seed oil safe meat

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