Pan-frying and deep-frying have been very popular and ancient methods of food
preparations for more than 4000 years. Pre-fried and fried food products like
potato crisps, fish fingers or French fries have become a main component of our
diet. It is estimated that the total usage of frying fats and oils in restaurants,
commercial frying and households is about 20 million tons a year.
During the last international symposium on Deep Fat Frying in Germany in
March 2000, experts reaffirmed that there are no health concerns associated with
consumption of frying fats and oils that have not been abused during normal
frying conditions. In contrast, used cooking oils, containing high levels of
degradation products, lead to a loss of organoleptic quality and a decrease in the
nutrition value in fried foods, and cause strong foaming. Consumers also
sometimes suffer from gastrointestinal distress after consuming food fried with
such oils. Attempts by some frying establishments to bring about savings in
frying oil costs have resulted in various improper practices such as the over use
of frying oils, frying for too long a time, and recovery and reprocessing of spent
frying oil for use in animal and poultry feeds which led indirectly to the Belgian
catastrophe in which animal feed based on spent frying oil became accidentally
contaminated with industrial transformer oil containing PCBs and dioxin.