Last November, regulators in southern China raided several workshops for turning discarded waste — possibly even sewage — into cooking oil.
There are fatbergs – giant lumps caused by disposable wipes, cooking fat and sewage coalescing and congealing – everywhere.
A stomach-churning report Tuesday in The China Daily pointed to the difficulty of identifying the illegal oil as well as some of the reasons why it could harm Chinese consumers and embarrass restaurants: Gutter oil, or illegally recycled cooking oil, is often scooped up from sewage drains and gutters behind cooking establishments and then sold to small restaurants.
Precarious floor: soil; Precarious walls: cane, palm or trunk; Precarious source of water for cooking: river, lake, pump or water tank car; Precarious sewage system: to the surface or to a septic tank.
Energy is needed for food refrigeration, cooking, climate control, lighting, home security and often water and sewage pumps.
On the other end of the cycle, Raleigh, North Carolina, has announced plans to ban garbage disposals in new residential construction, citing improper dumping of cooking oil as a contributing factor to the dangerous decay of the city's sewage system.
The conditions of cooking in rural areas (representing about 80% of the country's population) are poor, with women generally cooking indoors in non-ventilated areas, with generally poor living conditions, no access to clean water, electricity or sewage and living, cooking and sleeping in the same space.
Rome's famous paved streets, water supply, and sewage system, however, should not be overestimated; even after the reforms of Nero, large numbers of the urban inhabitants continued to live in expensive, poorly built, overcrowded, and unheated slums without water or cooking facilities.
