For hundreds of years the cooking fat your ancestors used was beef tallow, lard, butter, schmaltz. That's what a "cooking fat" was. It's what your great-grandmother cooked with. It's what diners and drive-ins fried in. It's what McDonald's fried their french fries in until 1990.
Then, industrial seed oils replaced almost all of it. Cheap and profitable at scale. Not because they cooked better — because they cost less. Now beef tallow is making a comeback: people miss the way food used to taste, and more and more studies are pointing out that seed oils may not be doing your body any favors.






