The Palm Oil Problem Isn’t What You Think. (But Why Is It Everywhere?)

 This is the story of how palm oil conquered your kitchen, your supermarket, and your street food stall—and what that says about how modern food works.

But to understand this, we first need to understand fats—and why they make food so irresistible.

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II. Why fats make food delicious

Fat is powerful. It gives food richness, aroma, and deep satisfaction. At 9 calories per gram, fat carries more than double the energy of protein or carbohydrates—which the brain rewards with pleasure.

But it also does something they can’t: it carries flavour. Many aromatic compounds are fat-soluble, not water-soluble—they dissolve and release in fat. This is why a dish comes alive with even a small amount of fat; it unlocks flavours that would otherwise remain trapped and undetectable.

If you’ve cooked Indian food, you already know this. Nearly every dish begins with a little fat in a hot pan. In the south, curry leaves and mustard seeds are fried in coconut oil. In Bengal, nigella seeds sizzle in mustard oil before anything else is added. In the north, cumin seeds (jeera) are browned in oil to start the dish.

We’ve always known this instinctively: fat brings flavour to life. A little soft butter on bread is transformative. So is a drizzle of fragrant olive oil on a salad.

As chef and author Samin Nosrat writes in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat:

“Without the flavours and textures that fat makes possible, food would be immeasurably less pleasurable to eat.”

We don’t just eat fat. We feel it.

But all fats do not behave the same way.

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III. Solid fats. Liquid fats.

The most important difference to understand—especially for this story—is between fats that are solid and fats that are liquid at room temperature.

Think of solid fats like butter and ghee as structural elements. When you fold butter into pastry dough, it creates separate layers that puff up in the oven. When you cream butter with sugar, it traps tiny air bubbles that expand during baking, making cakes rise. When solid fat in chocolate hardens, it creates that satisfying snap when you break a piece. All of these effects require fat that can hold its shape.

Liquid fats—like mustard, sunflower, or soybean oil—can’t perform these structural roles. They flow rather than fold, mix rather than layer, and won’t solidify to create firm textures. They’re excellent for frying and sautéing, but they simply can’t build the architecture that makes pastries flaky or ice cream creamy.

But there’s a catch: most solid fats come from animals. And they’re expensive. You have to feed the animal, milk it, or slaughter it.

The food industry went on a hunt to find a replacement for solid animal fat. Something with the structure of butter—but cheaper. A solid fat that didn’t spoil quickly, didn’t require refrigeration, and wasn’t tied to animals.

How to find one?

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IV. The hunt for cheap solid fat—and the birth of industrial oils

The answer came from… chemistry.

In 1901, German chemist Wilhelm Normann discovered hydrogenation—a process that transforms liquid oils into solid fats by heating them with hydrogen gas under pressure.

“If you hydrogenate the oil fully, you get fat that’s hard like ice. But if you only partially hydrogenate, you can make any melting profile you like, which makes it possible to produce a fat that’s solid at room temperature but still easy to spread out of the fridge,” author and physician Chris van Tulleken writes in his book Ultra-Processed People.

By 1909, this method was ready for commercial use.

Procter & Gamble, a young soap company, immediately saw potential beyond soap-making. They now just needed the cheapest possible oil source. Their solution? Cottonseed—a worthless byproduct of the cotton industry. When hydrogenated, cottonseed oil became a soft, white substance remarkably similar to butter, but cheaper and with a longer shelf life.

In 1911, P&G launched Crisco—short for “crystallized cottonseed oil”—marketing it as digestible, pure, and convenient. Unlike butter, it didn’t spoil and worked beautifully in baking.

The idea spread quickly. Unilever launched Spry, another vegetable shortening. In India, a similar product appeared as Vanaspati ghee, later rebranded as Dalda in 1937—a cheaper alternative to traditional ghee.

By the 1970s, American families used more margarine than butter, a shift accelerated by health recommendations. In the 1960s, the American Heart Association began advising people to reduce saturated fat intake, based on research linking it to higher cholesterol. By 1980, this became official U.S. government policy.

And then the fat debate took an unexpected turn. In the 1990s, scientists discovered something alarming: the partial hydrogenation process created trans fats, which proved even worse for heart health than the saturated fats they were meant to replace. (The U.S. banned partially-hydrogenated oils in 2015; WHO targets a global phase-out by 2025.)

Step back and see the pattern: the food industry solved one problem (expensive animal fats) only to create another (dangerous trans fats). Now they faced a crisis. They urgently needed another solution: a semi-solid fat that was stable, cheap, and trans fat-free.

That’s when palm oil stepped in. And it was exactly what they needed. Well…they turned it into exactly what they needed.

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V. The rise of palm oil

Palm oil didn’t just arrive. It fit in. Perfectly.

It is naturally semi-solid at room temperature, just like butter. It is stable at high temperatures, perfect for frying. It doesn’t require hydrogenation, so no trans fats. It doesn’t go rancid easily, so it has a longer shelf life than almost any other edible oil.

And it is ridiculously productive: oil palm trees yield about 3 tonnes of oil per hectare, which is 4-10 times more than soy, sunflower, coconut and groundnut.

That makes palm oil absurdly cheap to produce. In 2024, palm oil cost around $800 per tonne, while butter cost more than $8,700 per tonne. Eleven times cheaper.

This offered the food industry what no other fat could: functionality, scale and price. That too, as a “healthier” replacement for hydrogenated vegetable oil because “trans-fat free”.

The switch was quick. Almost overnight, in 1994, Unilever had to swap out 600 blends across 15 countries with palm oil. So did other massive companies: both for food and personal care.

Suddenly, palm oil was everywhere. It replaced cocoa butter in chocolate, milk fat in ice cream, and butter in baked foods.

And the consumer? Barely noticed.

Because industrial palm oil doesn’t announce itself. It’s neutral. Odourless. Tasteless. It doesn’t spoil. It works invisibly—which is exactly what the industry wanted.

And so, the world’s palm oil production exploded: between 1970 and 2020, it increased by about 40 times.

Palm oil solved a lot of problems, and got rid of all the trans fats from our food. So, why does it get a bad rep?

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