Back to the Fat That Works: A Brief History of Tallow

Discover the history of beef tallow and why it’s making a comeback at The Ends, a seed oil free restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona. Learn why tallow was replaced by seed oils, and why we’re bringing it back.

BEEF TALLOW

The Tallow Fat History Before the Fog

Long before “vegetable oil” lined grocery shelves, kitchens ran on animal fats. Beef tallow, lard, butter. It wasn’t exotic. It wasn’t niche. It was just food. The same fat your grandmother fried potatoes in, the same fat fast food chains used before focus groups and lobbyists convinced everyone otherwise.

Tallow is rendered beef fat. Simple. Heat-stable. Rich in oleic, palmitic, and stearic acids. It doesn’t smoke out your kitchen at 375°F, and it doesn’t break down into chemical soup the way seed oils do. It was the backbone of cooking for centuries — until it wasn’t.

How Seed Oils Took Over Tallow

The shift wasn’t an accident. It was marketing.

1911: Procter & Gamble launches Crisco, the first hydrogenated vegetable shortening. They sold it as modern, clean, even “scientific.” Americans bought it by the tub.

1980: The Dietary Guidelines for Americans drop, and suddenly saturated fat is the villain. Never mind that the science was messy and often contradictory. What mattered was optics.

1990: McDonald’s switches its fries from beef tallow to vegetable oil after public pressure campaigns. The result? Fries that looked the same, tasted worse, and left you feeling like you’d just eaten a paper bag.

2006: New York City bans artificial trans fats (partially hydrogenated oils). The FDA follows in 2015, declaring PHOs “not generally recognized as safe.” By then, the entire industry had moved on to refined seed oils — soybean, canola, sunflower — cheap, easy, and unstable.

Here’s the truth: no law ever banned tallow. We just lost the plot.

The Case for Tallow Now

Seed oils are high in polyunsaturated fats that oxidize fast under heat, creating compounds your body doesn’t exactly thank you for. Tallow, by contrast, holds steady. It was designed by nature for fire. Fry in it, sear in it, roast in it. It doesn’t fold.

And it tastes like something. It has weight. It makes a potato sing instead of collapse.

That’s why places like Steak ’n Shake are quietly bringing tallow back. Why chefs are rediscovering it. Why voices like RFK Jr. are putting it back into the cultural fight. It’s not nostalgia. It’s common sense.

Why The Ends Cooks in Tallow

We’re not chasing trends. We’re not trying to be contrarian. We just believe food should fuel you, not flatten you.

At The Ends in Scottsdale, we cook exclusively in beef tallow. No seed oils. Ever. Because ingredients matter. Because history matters. Because you deserve food that doesn’t leave you drained.

Every dish here carries that principle forward. Built on travel, memory, and the best fats we can find.

The Energy Never Dies

When you eat food that respects your body, you feel it. You stay sharp. You leave the table awake, not wrecked. That’s why we say: the energy never dies.

It’s not just a tagline. It’s our ethos. From the kitchen, to the table, to the people who work here we’re building something that lasts.