Dear listers, Sorry I've been quiet for such a long time. Lots of catch up to do.
Last night Keith and I visited some of the restaurants around here in this suburb near Tokyo to collect some used cooking oil. To our surprise, we found that many of restaurants that smelled of cooking oil had little or no used oil for us. The proprietor of the tofu shop we visited first, who also sells deep-fried tofu and other cooked food, told us: "We don't produce used cooking oil anymore. We bought this nice frying machine which cleans the oil by just adding some water, so we can use it again and again. It cost 1.5 million yen [US$14,000], but we don't have to deal with used cooking oil anymore!" When we left the shop I told Keith: "I will never buy food from this shop, yuk!" Then we visited a Chinese-style restaurant. The chef told us: "We have no cooking oil, we use lard." "Lard is okay," I said. "No," he said, "we use it all up so there isn't any to give away." Another place we won't be eating at! At the third, a Japanese food and Sake restaurant, the chef told us: "We just throw the old oil down the drain so we don't have any." He looked a bit ashamed. We did find a couple of other restaurants that gave us some used cooking oil, and promised us more. But the whole experience discouraged us even more from eating out at restaurants. Quite many "environmentally aware" Japanese recommend that people should use Tempura oil over and over, and then use it up in stir frying to the end. They feel good about not throwing it down the drain, but their bodies surely don't like it. Of course what goes down the drain is never counted when people calculate how much, or how little, biodiesel could be produced to meet a country's needs. Best wishes, Midori Hiraga Handmade Projects Journey to Forever http://journeytoforever.org/jp/ Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Please do NOT send "unsubscribe" messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
