As a kid I have a very vivid memory of McDonalds fries being amazing and then turning into flavored garbage one day. I was a small child at the time and I remember it so distinctly because I couldn’t believe anyone would purposely make this change.
I tried looking up when this changeover happened and I get two results: 1990 and 1992 depending on the source. However for either of these to be accurate my memory cannot be. See I was not a kid then. My memory places this event somewhere circa 1983-4.
Was the changeover instant across the country or staggered? Could I have been in an unlucky pocket of trial runs? Was there some other change in the early 80’s I could be thinking of?
Although McDonald’s fries in America went 100% vegetable fat in ?? 1990 ?? , that doesn’t mean that they were “original recipe” before that. They might well have gone to different blend in 1983-84.
I think that the price of Beef Tallow was rising in the 70s, and the internet says that the reason McDonald’s started with a mostly-beef blend was because their supplier couldn’t do hydrogenated vegetable oil.
It’d be a logistics nightmare, but I’d love to see BOTH offered on their menu. Let’s say, for a year. Vegan fries vs. Tallow fries. (Make sure all the keto and paleo folks are made aware.)
I worked at McDonald’s in the summers from 1985 to 1987. I can confirm that the French fries were definitely fried in tallow throughout my employment. They were big blocks of white solid fat wrapped in foil. You added them to the fryer by unwrapping a block of tallow and plopping it into a fry basket, then slowly lowering it into the hot oil to avoid splattering.
Everything other than the fries (including McNuggets, filets, and pies) were fried in a separate fryer using vegetable oil. I recall being told that they had tried to switch the fries to vegetable oil as well on a trial basis, but received too many complaints, so had switched back.
I later heard somewhere that sometime after that (i.e. sometime after 1987), they ultimately did make the switch a few years later.
I’ve heard two stories on the switch: (1) they made the switch, but did it very gradually (i.e. slowly reducing the proportion of tallow over the course of months) so that customers would get used to it, and (2) they added some kind of beef flavoring to the vegetable oil. Maybe they did both. In any event, it was after I worked there.
AFAIK Mc D have always used oil here in the UK. “Tallow” is only used for candles.
If you like chips (fries) cooked in beef fat there are plenty of fish and chip shops using it if you search online. More in the North than the South but they do exist.
I miss so much of the McDonald’s of the 80s. Yes, the fries were so good, now we have flavorless potato sticks. But the two other things that I really really really miss are:
The McDLT. God, that was a tasty burger. Cool side cool, hot side hot. I understand the tree huggers killed that one due to the packaging. Stupid tree huggers.
The original apple pie. If you’ve never had one I can’t even begin to describe how delicious it was. Back then they deep fried it. It was incredible! Now we’re forced to choke down that horrible baked thing that should be thrown in the trash.
To help a little, Hardees still has honest to goodness fried apple pies. Not quite as good as the old McDonald’s ones, but not bad. If you miss the old McDonald’s pies, do yourself a favor and order one at Hardees.
In the 1990s, vegetarians in general—which might include some Sikhs and Hindus, but not all of them—objected to the use of animal-sourced fat for the potatoes.
In the later 1990s-early 2000s, Hindus, specifically objected to “beef flavoring” in the McNuggets. Hindus who are not vegetarians can eat chicken, but not beef.
When I worked at McDonald’s in the 1980s, there weren’t a lot of vegetarian options (including the fries, as we’ve discussed). An item that some people ordered now and again (which often included people who appeared to be Indian in origin) was a “vegetarian Big Mac.” It was simply a Big Mac without the meat.
Perhaps eating elsewhere would solve your problems. McDs has generally been nasty unhealthy food since Day One. Sometimes tasty by the standards of the times, but nasty nevertheless.
McDs was here in the UK in the 80s, and I remember going there as soon as it opened - the fries were quite different to how they are now, which may or may not be due to the oil/fat. Might just be the recipe for the fries themselves.
Googling, the Wikipedia article says that the switch from tallow was due to a campaign against saturated fats, although even after that, there was beef flavoring added.