Xu Ayi cooks for us twice a
week, which is wonderful for two main reasons: I don’t have to prepare two
meals a week, and we get to eat authentic home style Chinese cooking on a
regular basis.
(Side
note: her relationship with the oven is worthy of an entirely separate
post. For now, I’ll just say that
she believes its primary purpose is as an insulated cupboard to store used oil.)
Matt and I later discussed
the merits of saving what is perhaps a half-cup of used cooking oil, which
brought us to the conversation of gutter
oil. It’s lovely stuff. Enterprising gangs have created a
booming illegal business that deals in the reprocessing and trade of recycled
cooking oil. They dive into sewers where street runoff accumulates and skim the used oil -- plus whatever sticks to it -- that has risen to the surface. After similarly collecting oil
from restaurant garbage bins, animal fat from slaughterhouse waste,
and plenty of delicious toxins along the way, they “clean” it through a series of
dubious science experiments, and sell it as cooking oil to street vendors and
hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Yummy!
The Chinese government is
attempting to crack down on this obviously harmful activity; just last week,
they arrested over one hundred people involved in the gutter oil operation.* It’s interesting as a foreigner
witnessing this collision of entrepreneurialism, industrialization, and
desperation. Rapid economic growth
begets a rapidly expanding chasm between the haves and have-nots, and the
result is this strange world of swindlers whose creativity might be celebrated if it wasn’t so
utterly disgusting.
In a country where people
are slogging through gutters, skimming used cooking oil off the top of sewage,
and reselling it for a small profit, our little half-cup of oil in the oven is
looking pretty darn delicious.
* Here’s a WSJ article with
the story of the gutter oil arrests
Wow. Just... wow.
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