08/11/2026
89% of the products on an American supermarket shelf that list avocado oil as their only oil are cut with something cheaper, and one of them turned out to contain essentially no avocado at all.
UC Davis bought fifty-four of them and put them through a laboratory. The results were published on 21 July. Mostly soybean oil doing the filling, and paying more bought no protection whatsoever, because price did not predict purity. The lead author explained why she went looking in one sentence: she did not believe there was that much avocado oil in the world.
None of this is new. It is the oldest trade in food, and it has been running continuously since your great-great-grandmother's kitchen.
Cottonseed was rubbish. Two pounds of it come off the gin for every pound of lint, and for most of the nineteenth century it rotted in stinking heaps outside the mills, got dumped into rivers, and was too foul to burn. Then somebody pressed it. The oil came out pale and nearly tasteless. Useless as a food, perfect as a liar.
The 1870s: shipped to Europe by the ton, blended into olive oil, sold as olive oil, undetectable, which was the entire proposition. Italian growers worked it out and got a tariff imposed around 1881 that killed the trade.
So it came home and went into the lard, and the way it was caught is the best line in the story. Armour and Company noticed that more lard was arriving at its doors than every hog alive in the United States could physically have produced. Congress investigated. The result was not a ban, it was a phrase. Lard compound. The practice carried on with a word in front of it.
By 1887 they stopped pretending. Cottolene went on sale, four fifths cottonseed oil and one fifth beef fat, in a pail the shape of a lard pail. Crisco followed in 1911 with no animal in it at all. Inside one lifetime, a substance nobody could give away had replaced the fat it was invented to imitate.
Madrid, 1981. Industrial rapeseed denatured with aniline, made for factories, deodorised and poured into unmarked five litre cans and sold round the suburbs as olive oil. 20,096 people poisoned. 356 dead, most of them women. Survivors are still being tested today for the nerve damage.
Three continents, a hundred and forty years, four different oils, one identical business model. Take the cheapest liquid on the site and sell it under the most expensive name on the shelf.
The label was never the product. Every regulator in this story arrived decades late and issued a new word instead of a prosecution.
So buy the fat off the animal. Suet from a butcher who can name the farm, tallow you rendered yourself, butter from a dairy that answers its phone.
Nobody has ever cut a block of beef fat with soybean oil while you stood there watching them trim it. Eric Reynolds
