On the Quality of the Chips in Matlock Bath

Lunch with Mother

So when I was home, I drove my Mum to Matlock Bath, famous haunt and graveyard of bikers, which she remembered fondly as a nice place when she was a girl.

We had a nice day, which I will not describe (although I notice that if you drive there in a car it is not nearly as much fun as going there on a motorbike!)

But we went into a chip shop, because it had nice tables outside by the river, to get coffee.

And the minute I walked in I was hit by the smell of frying fish and chips and vinegar, always a favourite of mine pre-renunciation of PUFA, and suddenly I was starving.

And I thought: "Don't be a psycho, a tray of chips won't hurt you."

When I got my chips, I noticed that they did seem a bit grayer than usual.

And they tasted great at first, but about halfway through, the taste of vegetable oil became rather unpleasant.

I stupidly finished them, drowned as usual in vinegar, which made the nasty vegetable oil taste bearable.

And for the rest of the afternoon, and all the drive home, I couldn't get this foul taste out of my mouth.

It was like my mouth and throat were coated with some foul-tasting varnish. I felt really sick all the way home, and drinking water didn't get rid of it.

I finally got shot of the taste by brushing my teeth with yoghurt (thinking it might be oil-soluble). But I didn’t feel terribly well that evening. Mainly a bit nauseous.

Now it may well be that that particular chip shop is not terribly good at changing its fryer oil. And vegetable oil that has been kept hot for a while turns into a nasty combination of things that you really wouldn't want to eat.

But I can see why, if you run a chip shop, you might have an incentive to not change all that expensive-to-dispose of oil that frequently.

And even if you're squeaky-clean, and a real altruist, and change it every couple of weeks, by the end of those couple of weeks it's going to contain quite a lot of unpleasantness.

Aldehydes, for instance. You've heard of the aldehydes.

Formaldehyde is a poison, used for preserving corpses because it kills almost everything.

Acetaldehyde is a carcinogen, that causes nausea, headache and vomiting. It's what makes hangovers so bad. Luckily your body is very good at neutralizing it quickly, which tells me that it's bad news while it's still un-neutralized.

Now, neither of these is going to be found in burnt-out fryer oil, but there are going to be lots of long-chain cousins in there, about whose safety for human consumption we know squat. But I know which way to bet, and you can be pretty sure your ancestors never ate them.

Did you know that an old recipe for varnish is to take a seed oil and heat it for a couple of days until it turns into something you really shouldn't eat but which is good for covering wood in something that *will not rot*.

I.E. There are no living things that can metabolise it.

And I am thinking, what the hell have we been doing to ourselves all these years, since the health-twats declared that animal fats were bad for predators?