My question comes from a place seeking less waste while maintaining food-safe ways of reusing appropriate fat types. I am coming from a place of poor food science knowledge, so please be patient!
I hear of southern folk in the states saving bacon grease and cooking with it and I agree it has great flavour, but.
1) Are grandmothers who store bacon fat at room temperature simply exposing themselves to unseen bacteria growth?
2) What about using bacon to season cast iron pans? Does high heat simply “cook off” bacteria on greased surfaces that have been exposed to air a long time?
3) Do animal fat and oils both get trapped in our bodies the same way as subcutaneous fat?
4) And does eating bacon grease of a poorly fed or sick animal affect us in anyway? Or this would all bypass the animal’s (removed) digestive tract and not necessarily be consumed by humans later? Thinking of heavy metals and pesticides, for example.
The internet says seed oils are high in polyunsaturated fats and are can turn toxic at high temperatures. This is supposedly bad for you. A lot of picked Italian products are preserved in oil.
6) When I’m done with a commercial jar [(canola oil for example)](https://images.app.goo.gl/FizK1wQwodKNJttY7), is it a safe idea to re-use the oil for cooking?
7) Does the presence of previously preserved food remnants start a bacteria growth process and this jar of used (but uncooked) oil should be discarded?
Olive oil is touted as the healthiest oil to cook with…
8) Is this a marketing gimmick? Chefs advise to avoided cooking with olive oil at high temperatures, but it seems like an oxymoron to me as you would think to use high temperature to kill bacteria on chicken etc.
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There are lots of differences chemically speaking the bonds are structured differently for the different oils and some are flexible, some are rigid some have many bonds and some have few. This changes the way they behave. Rigid bonded fats are solid at room temperature and generally are worse for you because anything solid can calcify in your body for example and its harder or impossible to remove and deal with solids.
Animals of poor health will be less nutritious and contain more toxins but as long as we are not eating too many toxins and enough nutrients our body does well with toxins. Not heavy metals our bodies do not do well with that but it would take heavy metals in the food already there they would not just manifest or it would be very very rare they do in livestock without them eating the heavy metals initially before we eat them.
Olive oil is liquid at room temp so we can ASSUME it is more healthy but there are tons and tons of situations in which olive oil could be less healthy. Depending on temperatures, other diet, exercise certain oils can be better or worse for you. You can look into the actual structure of fats in chemistry and the biology of how we break them down at websites like Kahns academy.
Bacteria is in the billions everywhere around you so for sure bacon has a bacterial profile that alters yours but that is to be expected with anything that enters your mouth.
Bacterial growth depends on the type of bacteria, and the nutrients and ambient temp/ light situations so it just depends on the situation but preservatives usually mean less bacteria but more toxins. Sometimes bacteria is good depending on what they are, all animals use bacteria to digest food.
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