John Caddell's blog

I listened to a Fresh Air interview with “Omnivore’s Dilemma” author Michael Pollan and couldn’t get this passage out of my head (it comes 14′40″ into the interview):

But it’s very interesting to watch, as the amount of time spent cooking has fallen by about half since the 1960s, you know, obesity has risen dramatically. Now why should that be? Well, there is some very interesting research that correlates the amount of time that a culture spends cooking with its obesity rates, and that when you don’t cook and you rely on corporations to cook for you, you tend to eat more special-occasion food, things like French fries.

I mean, take the French fry. It’s a great example. I mean, the French fry did not become the most popular vegetable in America, which it now is, until corporations relieved us of all the work of preparing them. French fries are a whole lot of trouble to make. You’ve got to wash the potato. You’ve got to peel the potato, slice the potato, fry the potato and then clean up a kitchen that’s going to be a wreck. And, you know, you wouldn’t do that very often, and indeed, people didn’t do it very often.

But now, since corporations are making all the French fries, we can have them two or three times a day, and many of us do. So, you see, when there’s something built into the process of cooking that delays gratification, the work itself makes you think twice before you embark on a cake or French fries or fried chicken. And so as soon as you outsource that work, it becomes possible to indulge in all these special-occasion foods that no longer are special-occasion foods. They’re everyday foods.

And French fries wouldn’t be something we could eat two or three times a day without the Frialator. Rather than pouring oil into a pan, cooking, then discarding the oil, the Frialator allows restaurants to cook many dishes in the same oil, with only occasional filtering of the oil to remove food particles, until the oil is replaced, approximately one to two weeks in some cases.

The Beginnings
In 1918, New Hampshire restaurant equipment manufacturer J.C. Pitman and Sons created a revolutionary high-volume deep fat fryer. In this 1946 letter, company founder J.C. Pitman described the invention as follows:

In 1918 J.C. Pitman and Sons Hotel & Restaurant Equipment Manurfacturers, while attempting to work out a more satisfactory method of frying, made some important discoveries. One was that if the small particles of food which ordinarily settled to the bottom of the French Fry pot (where they collected and burned) could be kept away from the intense heat of that part of the kettle, the quality of fried food could be greatly improved. The Pitco Frialator was invented on this basic principle – and patented. This brought about a complete change in the method of deep fat frying. The fat medium was heated by tubes running through the center of the fat container. This construction permitted all sediment from the food being fried to drip below the heating tubes into a cool zone where it could not carbonize and break down the frying fat.

The importance of this construction is the reduction in fat costs, which exceeds by a wide margin the initial cost of the equipment, its depreciation and upkeep. Thanks to the thousands of Pitco Frialators now in use from coast to coast, deep fat frying has indeed become an art.

The Value Proposition
According to the Proceedings of the American Gas Association, Volume 20 (1938), a gas frialator costing $160 on average saved a restaurant owner $390 per year in oil costs.

Half a million or more in use in US
The National Restaurant Association reported that as of 2009 there were approximately 945,000 restaurants in the US. Estimating that at least 50% of these restaurants use a deep fryer, there are a lot of Frialators out there.

The Impact of “Special Occasion Foods as Everyday Foods”:
McDonald’s French fries have 380 calories per 4.1 oz serving. Eric Schlosser wrote in “Fast Food Nation” that “in 1960 Americans consumed an average of about eighty-one pounds of fresh potatoes and four pounds of frozen french fries. In 2000 they consumed an average of about fifty pounds of fresh potatoes and thirty pounds of frozen fries.” Thirty pounds of French fries equates to about 45,000 calories per person per year, using McDonald’s calorie counts. Meaning 307 million Americans (according to the US Census Population clock) will consume 13.65 trillion calories of French fries in 2009.

Thanks to the Frialator.

Photo: The Pitco Model 1

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