Fast-Food Fat Redeemed: On the Road With Biodiesel
Today’s Dietitian
By Kate Jackson
Vol. 6 No. 2 p. 32

Fast-food fat is healthy.

That’s a sentence you probably never expected to read—especially not in the pages of Today’s Dietitian. Sure, eating too much of it may put a person on a perilous path to a cardiac care unit, but using it to power a car or heat a home will steer the nation to self-reliance and contribute to the health of the planet. Just ask Joshua Tickell, an extraordinary young man who preaches the gospel of biodiesel fuel every day, whether he’s driving his Veggie Van in his hometown of New Orleans, cruising in it throughout the country, or traveling the world to research and speak about sustainable energy resources.

Like many 28-year-olds, Tickell appreciates french fries and fast cars. Unlike most other men his age, however, he’s combined his favorite things and driven his passion almost literally around the world on a mission to get Americans to look at the problem of the world’s vanishing oil reserves and its reliance on foreign oil.

When Tickell takes a spin around town, he drives a red sports car. Not just any sports car, but a Datsun Z powered by vegetable oil. Educator, film director, author of From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank: The Complete Guide to Using Vegetable Oil as an Alternative Fuel, and founder of the Veggie Van Foundation, Tickell takes every opportunity to enlighten people about the potential of biodiesel fuel—an energy source produced from renewable resources including vegetable oils and animal fats that can be used in any diesel engine, whether a car, bus, truck, boat, generator, or furnace. Biodiesel can be derived from beef tallow, hemp, fish oil, and a variety of oils such as canola, coconut, sunflower, and soy.

It sounds like the perfect solution to a modern problem, but the idea for biodiesel, in fact, is more than 100 years old. Rudolph Diesel, the father of the diesel engine, designed the engine to be powered by vegetable oil. Biodiesel fuel is completely renewable and nontoxic. It emits fewer hazardous exhaust emissions of particulate matter and cancer-causing compounds. It reduces carbon monoxide by nearly one-half, greatly decreases emissions that contribute to smog and ozone, and does virtually nothing to increase global warming. Thus, it’s healthier for the planet and less toxic to the human body than petroleum diesel.

According to the National Biodiesel Board, approximately 300 major transportation fleets use biodiesel nationwide, and the fuel is available to the public at roughly 100 retail pumps.

How did an engaging, thoughtful, and highly articulate advocate of renewable resources come under the spell of biodiesel? The story goes back 20 years to a time when Tickell, who’s one-half Australian and one-half Cajun, was 9 years old. His mother brought the family back from Tamworth, Australia, to Louisiana because her mother was dying of cancer. Much later, Tickell found out that a lot of the Cajun elders were to have the same fate as a result, he says, of the oil industry there that for years polluted the bayous and swamps unchecked. “After coming to the realization that my life has been so drastically altered by oil and that the oil industry was altering the lives of many people, I just thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way—there’s got to be a solution that doesn’t involve destroying people and cultures for us to get our energy.’”

He went to college intent on studying agriculture and sustainable living practices. “That’s obviously the basis of how we exist. If we feed ourselves and do that sustainably, then everything else is sustainable,” Tickell says. So, he started to study sustainable agriculture and from there made the connection between agriculture and economics, agriculture and energy, and energy and economics. “That triangle became very clear to me. There was no way to get food away from energy or energy away from money or money away from food. Those three things are inextricably connected, and the more I looked at that, the more I was compelled to look at all different agricultural models,” he says.

It was while he was working on a small organic farm in Europe that he first came upon biodiesel fuel and found the solution he’d been looking for. “They were growing their own fuel as part of a sustainable cycle, and I thought, ‘This is so simple—why has nobody ever done this on a larger scale?’” But that wasn’t his first thought. “I actually thought the farmers were crazy. They were pouring this yellow liquid into their tractors and explaining it to me, and I thought, ‘Well, you guys are obviously nuts. There’s no way this is possible because if it were possible, it would be a huge thing.’” In this instance, he says, he realized the potential. “If they weren’t nuts, then what I was looking at had some potential to change everything.”

His excitement was rooted in the most basic realization that agriculture and food are the basis for existence. “The root of agriculture—what the word really means—is community.

“So, when we look at energy production as more of a community activity than a national or international activity that we hand over to corporations, then we begin to restructure the entire model of economics that we’re working under. It’s wonderful because we bring jobs back into local communities and we bring money back, and we certainly bring an understanding of what our land means in terms not just of providing food, but providing fuel.” It furthermore fosters respect for the notion that each piece of land has to be taken care of “because in the end, it is everything that sustains us. We can’t just go willy nilly off to other countries and use their land for whatever we see fit. It’ll work for a long time, but it will not work indefinitely,” he says.

There are definite political forces that have kept biodiesel from being used in a wider capacity, as well as economic reasons, Tickell concludes. “Certainly, fossil fuel has been extremely cheap for a long time. We have ensured that it’s cheap through the use of different systems. Currently in the United States, we import a little more than 50% of our fossil oil. Of that, 35% of the oil we import comes from the Middle East, and another 38% or so comes from Canada and Mexico,” he says. He continues: “We get a lot of it from our neighbors, but we also get a lot from far away, with obvious ramifications. That system has been in place and it has propelled the idea that fuel has to be produced rather than grown. And, because those systems are so big and there’s so much momentum and such a large industry behind it, it’s very difficult for something that may be a wonderful idea to just change everything overnight.”

Still, Tickell set out to kickstart that change, catalyzed by the certainty that the world’s oil reserves will be depleted in fewer than 50 years. He returned to the United States and began to study oil. He bought a diesel van and declared his project to his professors: He would drive around the country on fast-food frying oil. In the brightly painted van, he pulled up to fast-food chains such as Long John Silver’s and used a contraption that he called the “green grease machine,” which sucked the used oil out of fast-food fryers. He mixed the oil with a wood alcohol (methanol) and lye (sodium hydroxide) to make sodium methoxide and let it settle overnight. The following morning, he’d take off in the van burning fuel that smelled like french fries. His odyssey, which took 21/2 years and covered 25,000 miles, captured the attention of CNN, the Discovery Channel, and the Today Show, not to mention the thousands of passersby on the country’s highways who couldn’t help but notice the Veggie Van’s sunflower motif or its sign declaring, “This van gets 1,300 miles per acre.”

Tickell then created the Veggie Van Organization “to create positive social change through action-oriented education about biodiesel fuel” and authored From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank: The Complete Guide to Using Vegetable Oil as an Alternative Fuel. He also created a film, The Veggie Van Voyage, that describes his effort to derail the country’s reliance on foreign oil forever. His foundation is exploring the economic and social impediments to what some now call the biodiesel revolution in a new feature-length documentary film titled Fields of Fuel.

Tickell describes the project as an epic journey around the world in which he talks to all of the people who are involved in biodiesel and a lot of people who are involved in the oil industry.

Every day is an opportunity to promote biodiesel. Tickell drives his Veggie Van everywhere. “That’s my daily driver—it’s what I take to the grocery story. I’ll be at a stoplight and attract attention. Anywhere I go, I have to budget extra time for all the people who want to talk to me.”

He’s tired of answering the first and most commonly asked question: How fast does the Veggie Van go? “Now I just say, ‘Get in and put on your seat belts.’” The funniest response, he says, comes from guys in Camaros and pickup trucks who sit at the stoplights and rev their engines. When they glance over and he explains that the car really runs on vegetable oil, the looks he gets, he says, are incredible. “I have definitely been called a tree hugger and a granola cruncher, especially in my earlier days working on this, driving around in the hippie van.” But, the enthusiastic supporters of biodiesel aren’t just environmentalists who, says Tickell, support it for obvious reasons. “They’re also the corporate sector, which is quickly realizing the economic benefits of biodiesel fuel.”

After inquiring about the speed, observers typically want to know what it takes to convert a vehicle to use biodiesel fuel. “The magic of biodiesel lies in the fact that it’s a solution that’s tailored for our situation. Unlike a lot of other solution-oriented fuels, biodiesel works in any diesel engine without requiring engine modification,” explains Tickell. Although he expects to see a resurgence in diesel automobiles on the market that can run on biodiesel fuel, the real market, he says, is for large transit fleets. “That’s of underestimated importance in our society when you consider that everything that you’re touching—down to your underwear—is transported by diesel vehicles and that items made in foreign countries may even be made with diesel-generated power.” Furthermore, he observes, “We move 100% of our food around the country with diesel. We grow the food with diesel, and it goes one layer deeper than that. Fifty percent of our power in this country is generated with coal, and in order to bring the coal to the power plant, you need diesel.” When this is taken into consideration, he concludes, “diesel fuels our existence and survival.”

It’s fairly weighty conversation for a man not many years beyond college. Early on, Tickell’s youth was an obstacle to be hurdled when trying to be taken seriously. As a result of his expertise and enthusiasm, however, it’s no longer an issue. “At this stage, I’ve testified for the Arizona Senate Committee, I’ve spoken at universities in the United States and Latin America—in Argentina and Cuba. I’ve presented worldwide by now, and by this point, most people are getting it. This is just something I’m super-passionate about, and where other people might be having a more normal sort of lifestyle for someone who’s almost 30, this is my passion. This is what I do. I wake up at 4:30 am every day, and I do biodiesel until I go to sleep.”

Still, some people may think he’s a bit off center, but as Tickell points out, he thought the German farmers who introduced him to biodiesel were beyond the fringe. “There’s a common fear that I’ll just get wiped out one day—that the little guy who goes around making people happy about biodiesel will just disappear when the Men in Black show up,” he says, laughing. “If it happens, it happens.” In the meantime, Tickell promises to continue his crusade until there’s a biodiesel pump at every service station and information about biodiesel fuel is included in the curriculum in every school across the country. Listen to him for just a few minutes, and you’ll agree it’s a fairly sure bet that he won’t stop there. “Within the next 20 years, I see biodiesel being available just about everywhere in the country and the literacy on biodiesel being very close to 100%.”

For more information, visit the Veggie Van Organization at www.veggievan.org.

— Kate Jackson is a staff writer for Today’s Dietitian.

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