still happening in China in 2024

Foreigner caught a Chinese couple scooping up gutter oil https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1eo2wmy/...

There are 1.4 billion people in China. You’re showing me a couple of people doing who knows what in a clip of unknowable provenance. This is not the hill to die on, my man

Obviously there are way more occurrences than this video. Also, the lady in the video acted like nothing was wrong and admitted no shame, which means there is a culture/common practice of using gutter oil.

Wikipedia says that today this carries the penalty of decades in prison and a suspended death sentence. I very much doubt it’s as prevalent a practice as you suggest. To suggest that this crime is a “normal part” of Chinese culture is simply wrong.

There was no penalty/death sentence for the recent public incident of the oil tank truck that was found transporting both toxic industrial oil and cooking oil, without cleaning in between. Which apparently was a wide-spread practice, as confirmed by netizens. Instead the officials just hand waved and said it's an isolated incident, and they're looking into it. And no news of it since.

Restaurants in china are legally required to use oil traps like that and the oil must be removed. It is usually reprocessed to be used for industrial purposes. The fact that those people were possibly possibly illegally collecting it to sell to a company that reprocesses it does not at all mean that it's going to be used as "gutter oil" in restaurants any more than someone collecting empty cans from a trashcan means they're going to reuse those cans in a restaurant.

Gutter oil used to be a major issue in China but the Chinese government cracked down on it a lot a few years ago.

I recommend watching this video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G43wJ7YyWzM

They said "cultural", you decided to insert "race", presumably to stoke more outrage.