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Really interesting, thanks for the comment. If you'd ever want to explore that in more detail, I think lots of people would be interested, I certainly would.
And...yes, tallow is much more expensive. However at a personal/home level, it can be super cheap. Far cheaper than butter.
How's that? Here's what I do. I buy beef fat trimmings from a local grocery store. I only pay $0.49 a pound, and sometimes they give it away.
I render the fat trimmings into tallow. So overall, with maybe 50 percent waste, I'm paying $1/lb.
Really interesting, thanks for the comment. If you'd ever want to explore that in more detail, I think lots of people would be interested, I certainly would.
My job wasn't that glamorous, basically I was a glorified data-entry person (only tech stuff was I had to extract and normalize the data from CSV sources). I was responsible for getting all the nutritional stats of the various food items (chicken breast = X grams fat, Y grams protein, etc). Basically had to build the equivalent of a cron job that extracted data from CSV sources and regularly updated the database.
There was another data entry group (from university accounting dept) that did same with the cost info.
The program itself acted as a filter. So the university cafeteria system directors would have a budget, which included both a nutritional and money budget. So, if their budget was $10 per student per day, when they entered their breakfast choices, then lunch monetary and nutritional budgets would be debited according to their choices, etc..
In the end the menus are computed as "what can we fit where" (to be clear, they didn't start at breakfast and work down, they usually started with dinner and worked up....so breakfast usually received the least choices).
But it got complicated because in addition to just money + nutrition, they also had to take in account religious / lifestyle choice. So each meal needed to have a "non pork" or "vegetarian" option, these mandates further constrained choice.
I render the fat trimmings into tallow. So overall, with maybe 50 percent waste, I'm paying $1/lb.
WIth the right market incentives (basically more people demanding real butter / tallow), no doubt we could eventually reduce the disparity in cost....as you said lots of it is considered waste.
Also no reason they couldn't have "tallow blends" (beef, poultry, pork) to achieve their price requirements.
Thats a good write-up.
In college (in the 90s) my first real "IT job" was working for the cafeteria system at university. They were just beginning to computerize their entire menu / ordering system.
The FDA guidelines basically ran everything. Meaning, menus were computed from "what percentage of food groups should a student eat in a 24 hr period", then menus were calculated to satisfy that. There was no free-form "maybe we should offer chicken and dumpling on Tuesdays....", tuesdays dinner was computed from what was allowable via guidelines from breakfast/lunch.
I bet this contradiction is based all around the economics....if they changed the actual percentage guidelines, it would likely massively affect the economics (ie. real butter is more expensive than fake butter, tallow is 4x the price of seed oils, etc).
So "real food" guidelines would wind up causing all those school systems to blow out their food budget instantly....