Don’t really banquet on fast food much, but some FYI here. Growing up I always heard they were cooked in lard and never heard of the beef tallow. The golden arches nixed the beef tallow due to the aforementioned controversy, but replaced it with beef products in the flavoring at the processing plant.
http://rense.com/general7/whyy.htm
"..."Their distinctive taste does not stem from the kind of potatoes that McDonald's buys, the technology that processes them, or the restaurant equipment that fries them: other chains use Russet Burbanks, buy their french fries from the same large processing companies, and have similar fryers in their restaurant kitchens. The taste of a french fry is largely determined by the cooking oil. For decades McDonald's cooked its french fries in a mixture of about seven percent cottonseed oil and 93 percent beef tallow. The mixture gave the fries their unique flavor -- and more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald's hamburger.
In 1990, amid a barrage of criticism over the amount of cholesterol in its fries, McDonald's switched to pure vegetable oil. This presented the company with a challenge: how to make fries that subtly taste like beef without cooking them in beef tallow. A look at the ingredients in McDonald's french fries suggests how the problem was solved. Toward the end of the list is a seemingly innocuous yet oddly mysterious phrase: "natural flavor." That ingredient helps to explain not only why the fries taste so good but also why most fast food -- indeed, most of the food Americans eat today -- tastes the way it does."
Some overseas spuds are in fact vegetarian.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/us/for-hindus-and-vegetarians-surprise-in-mcdonald-s-fries.html?ref=fiji
"...McDonald's, a corporation that prides itself on catering to the culinary requirements of ethnic and religious groups in its restaurants overseas, says it uses no animal extracts in the French fries it sells in India and in Fiji, where nearly half the population is of Indian descent. A test of the French fries by an Indian organization after the rioting confirmed the claims of the company, which says it is going forward with plans to expand in India.
McDonald's says it NEVER said that the French fries sold IN the United States were vegetarian. The marketing campaign proclaiming the switch to vegetable oil in 1990 was ''all about healthy hearts and eliminating cholesterol,'' Walt Riker, a spokesman for McDonald's, said in an interview last week. ''We certainly don't market ourselves as vegetarian.''
He said McDonald's added beef flavoring to the fries before they were flash frozen, and complied with Food and Drug Administration regulations by saying that it included ''natural ingredients,'' without specifying what they were. And although McDonald's may re-evaluate its labeling policies, Mr. Riker said, it does not intend to alter its recipe.
''These are the ways the fries are made in the U.S., and we don't have any plans to change,'' Mr. Riker said.
Burger King and Wendy's restaurants do not use beef products in their French fries, their corporate spokesmen said in interviews on Thursday.
Vegetarian groups had suspected there was beef flavoring in McDonald's French fries and petitioned the company and the Food and Drug Administration for full disclosure of ingredients with no success. Fast-food restaurants are highly secretive about their recipes, and it was only after the lawsuit was filed that McDonald's spokesmen widely acknowledged the beef ingredient.
''They would post these lists of their ingredients in their stores, but nowhere did they ever publicly admit that beef flavoring was used in the fries,'' said James Pizzirusso, who founded the Vegetarian Legal Action Network with other law students at George Washington University."
Fry'em up with duck fat and you won't go back...trust me on this.