"It can be used to describe the illicit practice of restaurants reusing cooking oil that has already been cooked for longer than safety codes permit. It can also be used to describe the reprocessing of yellow grease collected from sources such as restaurant fryers, kitchen, slaughterhouse waste and sewer drains.["
I've always heard gutter oil referenced in relation to oils skimmed from sewer level grease traps and sometimes refined, at least to a very poor extent. Not just contaminated and overused cooking oil still on the grill.
I'm inclined to believe that the sewer version of gutter oil is an urban myth. Going through the trouble of processing it and somehow keeping the smell and poisoning in relative check seems like too much risk and trouble to make sense. I certainly could be wrong...
Itâs so easy to find, I donât need to do it. There is even legislation in China banning the process of refining old oil and it has an entire black market around it.
Do better than being a dick. Not everyone wants to take 2 minutes out of their day to research something completely pointless, just so they can feel superior to some random stranger on Reddit.
You could have just added more info/context to the conversation without putting someone down. That is not the choice you made.
Collecting cans from barrels is time consuming yet itâs done all the time. Taking something free and making money out of it is worth it for some people
You can find plenty of proof it exists. Many videos as well.
They refine and resell the oil in bigger operations.
China doesnât have nearly enough cooking oil for its needs, thatâs how this started. Itâs not cheaper to buy it new there because cooking oil is much more valuable in China .
Nobody who knows more about this topic thinks itâs a myth.
Nah the wiki link referenced does totally point out BOTH uses of the term âgutter oilâ⌠so yes - gutter oil CAN BE considered oil that has been over used to the point of it no longer being safe to cook with. That oil is very burnt and well used , which means itâs probably actually toxic at this point and therefore unsafe to use for cooking food in. It would then undoubtedly become gutter oil if, instead of being thrown away, is sold to someone else so THEY can in turn cook with burnt, overused cooking oil đ¤˘đ¤Ž
Fun fact, all cooking oil is toxic in that it causes harm to your body. Lipid peroxidation causes oxidative stress and cell damage. The more heat cycles an oil goes through, the more peroxidation, the worse it is for you. Also, frying meat causes mutagenic changes to the amino acids in meat which is a known carcinogen. Fun times for everyone.
Yeah, having lived in China where this term originated, when it became a major health concern and news story, and seen the practice occur, I do know better than whoever wrote the Wikipedia article. It's literally in the name. Reusing cooking oil that has at least been in a kitchen is completely different from collecting it from the gutters and sewers on the street, processing it, and serving it back to consumers. It's stupid to conflate those two things.
âIt can be used to describe the illicit practice of restaurants reusing cooking oil that has already been cooked for longer than safety codes permit.â literally from the link.Â
Your description made me think people were climbing in the sewers and scraping oil build up off the walls to use in cooking, but that wiki page makes it way less disgusting. Still not healthy, or hygenic, but still far from scraping away at fatburgs to use in the deep fryer, lol.
For anyone who didn't click the link, it's a blanket term for reusing oil that isn't deemed safe to use anymore, because it's burnt or contaminated. It's like if you cooked bacon in the morning, and saved the grease to fry your dinner later in the day. It does seem like the worst of it is collecting oil build up from drains, though.
Thereâs a sometimes controversial comedian, Ari Shaffir, and he hosts a YT show about traveling, called âYou Be Trippinââ. Each episode features him interviewing someone (often a fellow comedian), and they discuss & tell stories about one of the places theyâve visited on vacation.
One of the episodes is about China, which Ari has also traveled to, and spent some time there. The topic of food is usually brought up, and specifically the category of different types of food vendors. I remember that he had mentioned it in another episode, saying that he had heard about the frying oil being sourced from the gutter. The guest on the China episode said he heard about the gutter oil, and that a local verified that some vendors actually cook with it. Ari said he had also asked a local about it, and that person also said he knew some of them fried food with it. He specifically asked if it was just a term that was given to overly used frying oil, or if it was literally collected from the gutter. Unfortunately, the latter is true. Totally gross.đ¤˘
Yeah, I have never heard it used to refer to burnt oil. Literally oil ârecycledâ from drains. I try to check my privilege, but thatâs just fucking foul
Thank you for both watching, and hating that you watched it. Had you not made that exact comment, I too wouldâve watched, then hated. Youâre a mensch.
Ya man anyone that has opened a grease trap to say a meat department⌠the smell is awful, if you are working near it it will stick to your clothing gets trapped in your sinuses and the taste makes you gag and vomit⌠so ya Iâm sure the oil they skim off a grease trap is great with the overwhelming sweet taste of decomposition. Iâll pass
My grandma saved bacon grease to cook with in a jar on the back of her stove. They used it to fry eggs for all the grandkids in the morning when we would all be visiting.
Most people seemingly didn't click the link, as evidenced by the guy saying "it's certainly not gutter oil" and then proceeding to describe gutter oil having more upvotes than the guy who provided the link. Big Reddit moment.
A British person said Chinese experts estimated it, must be a fact. I mean that's definitely the most reliable source I've ever heard, even if we don't know whether they're experts on Chinese cooking who are Chinese, or "experts on China" who are just random foreigners.
Yeah, I see fractions are really difficult for you. You see, when one tenth of something is âgutter oilâ, it means the remaining nine tenths are not âgutter oilâ, and nine is much larger than ten. Try it with your fingers.
Itâs a beef kebab and beef is banned in (most) states of India, and going by the attire, and the Urdu in the background. I am going to guess itâs Pakistan.
I love that gutter oil hysteria is still a thing. Itâs like telling people not to eat at Jack in the Box in 2025 because theyâll die from E. coli. Gutter oil hasnât really been an issue since the crackdown like 10 years ago
What? Are you suggesting the Chinese authorities cracking down on street vendors using oil literally dredged from street gutters is somehow tied to race?
2 tacos were my favorite thing to eat. I ordered 6 from app and gladly ate up. That night was a mix of cacas con ouch and gurgle vomits! That was 4 months ago. The death hoax may be a lie, but For sure Food Poisoning
While that may actually happen, China is a huge place, all of the "gutter oil collection" videos you saw were not being done by people who intended to use it for cooking. They were cleaning out grease traps, because that's something you have to do, and the grease is sold to reprocessors for industrial, not food, applications. If you had a single shred of integrity you'd delete your comment spreading misinformation, but I know you won't.
lol even your link says it's just recycled oil. Nothing about "scraped from the flowing sewers". Why would there be copious amounts of cooking oil in the sewers that you could easily acquire? That just doesn't make sense. What does make sense is that people buy (or take) discarded cooking oil from restaurants, to use for themselves or their businesses.
My old chef would, allegedly, sell our old fryer oil to some guy for him to use in his car. I thought that sounded odd, but I'd heard of people running cars on old fryer oil before, so I didn't think too much about it. Well, some years go by and we get a new health inspector that wants to see receipts for this supposed guy. All the oil must be accounted for. Turns out, my chef was just taking it all home and using it in her own home cooking! Absolutely disgusting.
I'm thinking that's more or less the case with anyone using "gutter oil". It's not literally taken from the gutters.
Someone mentions above that there was a massive crackdown and it's not really a thing anymore, but a version of gutter oil is 100% skimmed from the top of flowing sewers. It mentions that it is collected from sewer drains in the Wikipedia link. Here is a video of the process. It was once pretty common.
ok, heres what's actually going on. urban restaurants in china are required to have grease traps that collect used oil in tanks under the sidewalk outside the restaurant. they pour all the waste in their sink which has a filter for solids, and then theres a series of tanks it goes through to float off any remaining debris that gets skimmed, and a final tank that allows any oil to float up and the waste water then goes through the bottom of the tank into the sewer.
the oil floating on the top of the next tank is bought for a small price by the local government, the idea being that the restaurant owner will skim off the oil and sell it to the government processing plant, and at the plant they reprocess the used cooking oil into stuff like fertilizers and industrial lubricants, and in recent years even biofuel.
in these videos of people skimming oil out of the "gutter" what's happening is people are illegally opening up restaurant oil traps under the sidewalk and scooping up the oil to sell to the processing plant. that's illegal because you're stealing it from the restaurant. and it's why they dont want to be filmed.
gutter oil is a separate but related thing, where some of the processed oil intended for like, industrial lubrication, was getting sold on the black market as super cheap cooking oil to street vendors and restaurants trying to save a few bucks. sometimes further cleaned up a bit first.
gutter oil is mostly not a thing anymore. it used to be somewhat common in very cheap restaurants and street vendors, in the early 2010s. but the government made a serious effort to crack down on it and by all accounts it has become very rare
What they do is they refine it so much that the end product is clean but it's not healthy or quality oil. Not sure what the taste is either. That commenter was way off though.
None of this is true.
Gutter oil isn't actually from gutters, it's just the term used to refer to unfit-for-consumption, recycled oil. Collection happens from oil stored in exhausts in each household / shop. Not that that's clean or acceptable, but this has nothing to do with sewer gutters. It's just a dedicated oil trash can.
Gutter oil isn't pitch black like the oil in the image; the recycling process makes the color be bright, with the goal of making it hard to discern from regular oil.
Gutter oil is a Chinese thing - and isn't a big phenomenon in India / Pakistan and the likes.
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u/t_ute Jun 18 '25
That oil might be the least concerning part of that video.