Fast Food is the Opiate of the Masses

I came across something interesting today while perusing a copy of Maxim at work. It's kinda like the excuse for 'reading' Playboy. It's all about the articles, right? This time there was actually an interesting article in there. I was pleasantly surprised. It was about something called Biodiesel. I had never heard about this before. The article was mostly about one man's efforts to convince the country to convert, but it's actually a full-fledged movement that began with Rudolf Diesel's invention of the now well-known Diesel engine. He first showed his engine at the World's Fair in 1900. The original model used peanut oil. He predicted that vegetable oil would eventually become as viable as petroleum products as fuel for engines.

Basically, biodiesel is the use of oils that come from sustainable and renewable sources like peanut oil and soybean oil. This also means that with a little bit of filtering, the oil that's used to fry fast food can be used to fuel your car. From reading some of the articles and press reports on the site biodiesel.org, it sounds like it's gaining ground all over the place. Mostly in corporate fleet vehicles and airplanes, but that's still a big deal. It will be interesting to see where this goes, because it could also mean that in time, when the US has been occupying any random country in the Middle East for ten more years, there will no longer be an excuse. Shit, as it is, most of our oil doesn't even come from the Middle East, it comes from South America and the North Sea. But that's off-topic. Check out biodiesel.org.