Seed Oils And Bad Science

Standing in the Atlanta airport in April 2022, waiting for a flight back to Washington, D.C., I watched as an employee at a sandwich shop tossed upwards of 20 plastic boxes of prepared food into a large garbage bag. The store was closing for the evening, and the bento boxes of hard-boiled eggs and grapes were likely passing the stamped expiration date.

Someone somewhere had given this man his marching orders. But I and the people in line around me were still appalled at the waste. I’m not sure if we would have been more or less appalled to know that this sort of thing is a fairly common occurrence.

We are told that modern agriculture, combined with the virtues of capitalism, has vastly reduced material want. How many people in New York City woke up this morning and bought a coffee? How did the city know to make exactly the right number of cups? The full picture, visible to few beyond those who work in some part of the food supply chain, is more complex.

On the one hand, we have produced vastly more food than in previous eras of world history. Yet on the other, our food waste is in steep excess of that of our parents and grandparents, not to mention ancestors much older.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates Americans waste approximately one pound of food per person per day, amounting to 206 billion pounds of food waste, or between 30 and 40 percent of our food supply, per year, as of the most recent data in 2017. Our national food waste has increased by approximately 50 percent per capita since 1974, according to a study done by the laboratory of biological modeling at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in 2009.

What is canola oil, actually? The word is a sort of acronym of “Canadian Oil, Low Acid,” referring to a genetically modified version of rapeseed oil, once used to lubricate steam engines due to its ability to cling to metal when wet.

In 1956, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned rapeseed from the entire food chain, due to its high concentration of erucic acid, which causes fats to accumulate in the human heart, weakening the muscle and making it susceptible to disease. However, in 1978, a genetically modified version bred at the University of Manitoba boasted safe levels of the acid, and by the mid 80s the oil produced from the seed was already in widespread use. Today, the seed accounts for approximately $6 billion of the Canadian economy, according to the Canola Council of Canada.