Fort Greene Butcher Selling Meat Fat Candles, Soap
Finally, Brooklyn has produced the perfect gift for the hardcore carnivore or Fight Club enthusiast in your life. Lena Diaz, the head butcher at Fort Greene fine foods emporium Greene Grape Provisions, has been using the excess fat from the shop’s cuts of meat to make soap and candles to sell at the shop’s pop-up market. Waste not, want not, we guess?
Diaz explained to DNA Info that the idea came from all the excess fat that the shop ends up with after trimming meat. “One of the biggest hurdles in the meat industry is what to do with all this fat and there is only so much charcuterie and so much sausage that you can make,” she said. “So we decided to make candles and soap with our fat—which is the revival of an old-school way to make soap and candles.”
Basically, Diaz melts the fat in a pot until it liquefies into tallow, and then add scents to the fat. Then they pour it into molds and let it harden. The shop is now turning about 14 pounds of animal fat a week into soap.
“It feels like soap, it acts like soap,” Diaz said. “Although you will have the squeamish person that is grossed out to find out that they are using animal fat to wash their body.”
Yeah, not really vegetarian friendly. But it is recycling. So…draw?