The Tallow Tipping Point
What one restaurant’s switch to beef tallow says about the future of food and health in America.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to a restaurant with her family in the Philadelphia suburbs. The food is good, and a lot of it is sourced locally.
Still, like most restaurants in the U.S., I always (rightfully) assumed they were using seed oils to fry and prep their food. But this time was different.
After we were seated, the waitress came over to introduce herself. She mentioned they had a new spring menu and, almost as an afterthought, added that as part of this new menu, everything fried was now cooked in beef tallow. To be honest, she probably didn’t even know what beef tallow was, but that’s OK.
My ears perked up. I was excited to hear that. What most of their patrons probably perceive to be an uninteresting or irrelevant fact was, to me, something much more meaningful.
That passing comment meant more to me than the waitress probably realized. In fact, it was the first time I had ever been told upfront that a restaurant was cooking with tallow.
But that’s the point, most people, even restaurant owners, probably don’t even know what beef tallow is. And this shift, this quiet change in one restaurant’s fryer, is a signal. A small signal, maybe, but one I believe points toward something much bigger that is beginning to unfold in the United States.
For the past several decades, we have been trapped in a food system that treats industrial byproducts as ingredients. Seed oils like canola, soybean, corn, cottonseed, sunflower, and safflower oils were once used to grease machines.
Today, they show up in nearly every packaged food and restaurant kitchen across the country. And while with intentionality, they can be avoided in the home, it is far more challenging to avoid them when dining out.
Why are we eating engine lubricant?
There’s much more to say in future pieces, but for context: in the 1960s and 70s, the American Heart Association and USDA began promoting polyunsaturated fats over saturated fats, wrongly linking animal-based fats like butter, red meat, and tallow to heart disease.
That narrative shaped public perception for decades, including to this day, but more recent research has started to call those claims into question.
In fact more is being published citing there is no clear evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease, and many of the original studies that drove the shift have been criticized for poor methodology, selective reporting, and in some cases, outright compromise.
In one infamous example, internal documents later revealed that the Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard scientists in the 1960s to downplay the dangers of sugar and shift the blame to saturated fat. That research was published in respected journals and went on to shape decades of nutritional advice. It wasn’t just flawed, it was bought and paid for.
This kind of industry-funded science played a significant role in shaping public health policy. It fueled widespread fear of animal fats and accelerated the replacement of traditional fats, such as tallow, lard, and butter, with seed oils.
By the 1990s, seed oils had become the default in restaurants and processed foods alike. McDonald’s, for example, switched from beef tallow to vegetable oil in 1990 under pressure from public health campaigns. Today, nearly every major chain and, unfortunately, most mom and pop restaurants use seed oils.
Part of it is cost, but a big part of it is decades of public misunderstanding and manipulation that led people to believe these industrial oils were somehow healthier.
Fast forward to today. The United States is a cesspool of chronic illness.
Nearly 45 percent of Americans have at least one chronic disease such as heart disease, cancer, or diabetes.
Seven out of ten deaths in this country are attributed to chronic disease.
Obesity rates in children have more than tripled since the 1970s. Today, nearly one in five children in the U.S. is obese.
There are many contributing factors to the widespread degradation of the country’s health, but it is undeniable that the standard American diet is one of the root causes. We eat and cook with substances our great-grandparents would have considered fit for machines, not human consumption. We have normalized sickness in this country.
The Tallow Tipping Point
So why was I so excited about one restaurant’s decision to replace seed oils with beef tallow?
Because it wasn’t just a menu update, it was a signal that something is shifting.
After decades of confusion, misinformation, and manipulation, we’re beginning to come back to our roots. One restaurant will not change the world, but it shows that the narrative is starting to break. People are asking better questions about our food and why this country is so sick.
But before going further, maybe I should pause and explain what beef tallow actually is.
Tallow is rendered beef fat. That’s it. Real fat from a real animal. It’s been used in cooking for centuries, long before Crisco or canola oil ever existed. Back then, tallow was the default for frying. It’s stable, has a high smoke point around 400 degrees and it’s rich in fat-soluble vitamins.
Unlike seed oils, it doesn’t come from industrial processing. It comes from cows.
When I first started learning about seed oils back in 2022, it felt like I had stumbled into a hidden world. It was starting to show up in the health circles I followed online (mostly Twitter), but virtually no one in my real life had heard of it (outside of a few people ‘out there’ like me.)
When I mentioned seed oils to friends or family, it was like speaking a different language. Most had never heard of them, let alone questioned the oils they were cooking with. I got the same reaction when I started using ghee or buying jars of tallow. Even now, when I pile butter onto sourdough or a steak, people look at me with concern, still holding onto the decades-old fear of saturated fat.
We’re early. The misinformation around animal fats runs deep. But the tide is starting to turn. Because here we are in 2025. Sitting at a restaurant. Being told, unprompted, that everything is now fried in tallow.
That is what I call the tallow tipping point.
On a larger scale, we’ve even seen restaurant chains like Steak n Shake transition entirely away from seed oils in favor of tallow and other animal fats in 2025.
That is incredibly exciting. It is not the finish line, but it is the foundation of a societal shift. A sign that health might actually be making a comeback.
The tallow tipping point gives me hope. Not because I think everything will change overnight, but because these signals matter. This small restaurant is proof that the culture is shifting. That we’re slowly moving from processed and poisonous food-like substances back to nourishing and ancestral food.
These things tend to happen gradually, then suddenly.
And I think we’re getting close.
Have you experienced the ‘tallow tipping point’ in your local community? Let me know! And general feedback is welcome too.
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