๐ Seed oil arrives at your table already damaged, and every stage between the field and your fork makes it worse.
A rapeseed is the size of a pinhead. No human arm is getting oil out of that, so the seed is cracked, flaked, cooked and washed in hexane, a petroleum solvent.
What comes out is dark, sour and inedible. Everything after this exists to disguise that.
Phosphoric acid strips the gums. Caustic soda turns the free fatty acids into soap, and the soap is skimmed off and sold, so the first saleable product of the process is soap.
Activated clay bleaches out the color, along with the vitamin E the plant built to stop its own fat spoiling. Removed at the bleaching stage, sold back in a capsule at the front of the store.
Two hundred and fifty degrees under vacuum, for hours. Trans fat forms in the vessel before anybody has cooked anything, and so do glycidyl esters, which Europe classes as releasing a genotoxic carcinogen in your gut. Europe set a legal maximum, governing how much of it you may be sold rather than whether it gets made.
The same step strips the smell. Every fat a human has ever eaten came with an alarm attached, a nose that detects rancidity at parts per billion.
They remove the alarm at the factory.
Then it sits in clear plastic under supermarket lighting for weeks, and light gets at those double bonds faster than air does. Olive goes in dark glass. Fish oil goes in an opaque capsule, in an amber bottle, in a box. This goes see-through at eye level, because clear sells.
At home it lives in the warm cupboard, half empty, oxidising twice as fast for every ten degrees.
The fryer finishes it. Two hours at temperature and soybean oil is producing an aldehyde that cross-links proteins and damages DNA. At two hours the oil is not changed. It is topped up, and the next batch inherits everything in the old one.
The fries absorbs all of it. You eat the oil in the state the fryer left it, and you pay for the fries.
Linoleic acid loads into your cell membranes and your fat stores on a turnover of about two years, so you are built out of what you ate two summers ago. An LDL particle armoured in it oxidises, gets swallowed by a macrophage, and becomes the plaque. Cut that plaque out of a dead man and the fat inside it is overwhelmingly linoleic acid.
In Western breast milk it has gone from around six per cent of the fat to twelve and sixteen, tracking the oil supply exactly.
Nothing on that journey improved the substance. Every step made it worse, and every step was somebody's idea, approved, costed and installed.
They industrialised a lubricant crop, deleted its warning system, fed it to the country for seventy years, and the first generation raised on it from the breast is currently in its forties.
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