Introduction
How much useful fat can you, householder or survivalist, you expect to obtain from animal bodies? The quantity available to harvest would depend on animal and species as well as local husbandry practices. Still, a qualitative assessment could be useful to understand the management of fat collected within the household. Knowing more about fat collecting might lead me to a more reasonable conjecture about the shift of fat collecting and exploitation as its setting became ever-more industrialized.
My original plan was a obtain the offal of the offal from a local slaughterhouse, add to this my carefully hoarded collection of animal fats and boil these inedible parts to see how much animal fat I could collect, how it looked and smelled and whether it could be made into soap.
My plan incorporated the following assumptions:
- This will be a smelly proposition, so out-of-doors is the best place to do it.
- Nourishment is the primary purpose of domesticated animal slaughter, and as fat has a nutritional value it would not be used for manufacturing purposes unless it was not valuable as a foodstuff.
- If I carried out this operation at one of the stationary grills in a certain local park, I might attract the viejo campesinos who hang out there. This might spark discussions of how their abuela did similar things in the old country (central and south America).
- If I were extremely clever, I might be able to use wood or dried vines instead of charcoal, collect the ash and make my own lye, the other critical ingredient in soap.1
The Pause in New York City closed all the barbecue stands in the public park system.
So, I experimented with my experiment. The central question shifted to what I could learn about the harvesting and use of fat from common household operations. I decided to start with fat collected from common cooking processes.
Read about them here.