grill salutes the guys who deal to the fat in our lives.

Grease is an unpleasant fact of life in the hospitality trade; from the high-end to the dankest deep-fry operation.

In so many shapes and forms, fats, oils and greases (FOG) feature throughout the kitchen system, from the finest infused top-shelf oils to the nastiest of tallow vats that have seen a few too many dogfish fillets. 

At the end of the day, it’s all the same stuff and what isn’t being scrubbed off the walls behind the dish-pit at the end of the night is, in large part, heading down the drain in the direction of the grease trap. The remainder goes almost literally up in smoke. The cooking process releases grease into the air to be sucked up by the extractor and plastered all over the interior of the duct system, rather like cholesterol in an artery. The accumulated layers of oily scum pose a fire hazard and over time develop a distinctively malodorous pungency.

Grease traps have been used since the Victorian era to remove fats from kitchen drains. It was surely discovered the hard way that fats, (which are among the more stable of organic compounds and therefore not easily decomposed by bacteria), have a nasty habit of congealing in the sewer lines and causing unwanted back-ups or even refluxes of waste material. 

These can be extremely expensive and unimaginably unpleasant to clean up. So it is an irrefutable certainty that prevention is better than cure, and a stitch in time saves ghastly drain odours in the long term. Thus, rather than simply settle for a hot hosing of the immediate plumbing once in a while, urban authorities have made it a legislative obligation for restaurants and other industrial kitchens to take responsibility for their greasy waste. 

Luckily, in the present day, a vast array of labour and odour reducing devices are on the market to assist in the ethical disposal of the grease trap’s ghastly contents. And there is an entire industry of gunk guys, specialist contractors whose business it is to save the kitchen staff the wholly unappealing task of dealing with FOG themselves. Besides the gratuitous grossness of the grease trap there is also the air filtration system to be dealt with, extractors to be scraped and ducts to be unclogged.

Thank heaven for outsourced grease management systems! Needless to say, emptying a grease trap or interceptor is dirty and disgusting work, requiring great care and tolerance of some truly rotten odours. Old-school grease traps collect waste fats and essentially ferment them in their own foulness until it’s time to open and empty them. The resulting sludge is highly contaminated and akin in an olfactory sense to a three-week-old rotten chicken. The rancid waste must be disposed of correctly in the interests of health and safety, and is unsuitable for recycling. 

As technology advances and times change, interest in recycled oils as a source of energy has developed numerous schemes for recycling cooking oils that haven’t been allowed to evolve into rancid slop. Grease recovery devices allow filtered grease to be removed from the system and recycled before it goes rancid. Grease can be recycled into such useful commodities as animal feed, ingredients for paint, polymers and synthetic fuels. These systems offer compound benefits; not only does recycling aid in protecting the environment, it will also save the gunk guys from wallowing in rancid filth before lugging it off to the landfill.

Surely this is, a dirty deed and it is all, in all, done dirt cheap. 

— Sarah Habershon