Chip shop in the north. Sign in the window: fried in beef dripping since 1946. Customer: "Is that sign for real? You fry the chips in beef fat?" Owner: "Beef dripping. Off the block, same as my grandad used." Customer: "I thought every chippy went over to vegetable oil years ago." Owner: "Most of them did. End of the eighties. There was a lot of pressure on about saturated fat." Customer: "And you ignored it." Owner: "I tried it, to be honest with you. 1991. A rep talked me into a month on vegetable oil." Customer: "What happened?" Owner: "Takings were down a third by the second Friday." Woman in the queue: "They tasted of nothing. I told him so at this counter, in front of everybody." Owner: "She did. I ordered the dripping back on the Monday." Customer: "Is it just the taste, or is there more to it?" Owner: "The oil doesn't last. Goes dark on you, goes sticky, gets on the tiles and the extractor. Dripping sits in that fryer a fortnight and comes out clean." Customer: "It must cost more." Owner: "It costs more than the oil and less than losing the shop." Customer: "Are the chips vegetarian?" Owner: "No. Nothing in here is. It's on the board so nobody gets a shock." Customer: "Do people ask about the dripping much now?" Owner: "Every week. Young lads mostly. They've read something on their phones about seed oils." Customer: "After all that time being told you were behind." Owner: "Forty years of being the daft old fella who wouldn't move with the times. Same fat. They just changed their minds round it." Woman in the queue: "He's not changed a thing. Everything else did."