July 11, 2018

Let Us All Unite in Praise of Better French Fries

Reporters via ZUMA

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Longtime readers may remember my unhappiness about modern french fries cooked in vegetable oil. Back in the day, fries were cooked in beef tallow or something similar, and they tasted great! Today everybody is afraid a bit of cow fat is going to kill them, so fries are universally cooked in corn oil or some other vegetable shortening. But since you’re eating the damn things with a hamburger, why get bent out of shape about the fries being cooked in saturated fat in the first place?

That’s America for you, I guess. But now someone is fighting back. Coast Packing, “the number one supplier of animal fat shortenings in the Western United States,” has announced that Friday is #NationalBeefTallowDay. It is also #FRYdayThe13th. Plus there’s this:

Coast has put out a call for the public’s most poetic/ecstatic/witty/tasty tweets, proclaiming their hunger for beef tallow fries, in the first-ever #BeefTallowFrenchFries “Tweet-to-Win” Contest….The contest’s expert judge is blogger/columnist/beef tallow fries lover Kevin Drum. “Nobody makes fries the old way anymore,” Drum lamented in Mother Jones a few years back. “They used to be so good. These days—phhht. There’s no taste at all… Fries made in beef tallow are unquestionably better.”

I’ve finally made the big time! Details here, winner to be announced on July 27. And if you’re an Orange County local, come on out to the fair on Friday to hear chef Ernie Miller talk about the science of french fries and then sample some fries cooked in both peanut oil and beef tallow. What better way to spend a Friday evening?

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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