Cooking Oil Considerations

       When one reads about cooking oil shortages around the world, that is an attention gainer to me. We need cooking oil to live and prepare much of our foods. People will riot over shortages and high prices.

            To get cooking oil, we have two choices.

                        1) Buy it

                        2) Make it

            If we buy it, then we potentially have a shelf life problem. As a general rule, one can store it for up to two years in a cool, dark place, though that is problematic. If it goes bad, like rancid, we can usually tell so by the smell. One can keep enough and use it in time, of course, and assume they can get more in the future.

            If it goes bad, or threatens to go bad, we have two choices. One is to donate it, like to a food bank. Second is to burn it in lieu of using "healthy" vegetable oil. Once it goes bad, I don't know of any way to make the oil "healthy" again. Generally speaking the "chemistry" process of going rancid is irreversible.

            If there ever is a candidate for labeling dates on it, then it is stored cooking oil.

            And generally speaking, going rancid usually means oxygen can get to the oil, usually through the plastics and metalized paper that are the usual containers these days.  Now some companies make olive oil in tins with plastic caps, which is better as to shelf life. But in the end, I would suggest making this a forecastable budget item in the case of buying cooking oil.

            Now to make vegetable oil, there are two ways.

                        1)  Use an oil press and oily seeds

                        2) Skim off the oil from some food process, like boiling a carcass.

            I can report that using the oil press method is both hard and messy, but does work. It is best done by two people. And one can use the remaining pulp in a compost pile, for example. Fishing worms just love it.

            The skim off the oil method works, too. Keep in mind most wild game naturally does not have much fat that makes oil. The only exception I know of is from bears. Hence don't expect much oil from some of these wild critters. As to domestic animals, I think cattle have a lot of oil producing fat in them. But in good times, I also think we feed them a lot of corn which helps make them fat, oily, and tasty.

            And depending on what your meal is, there may be enough oily fat in the meal to provide for its own oil.

            And of course one can cook most foods without cooking oil, like Indian pone, but over time that has not been popular. Hence the riots idea.

            Last one can use the oil for cooking, eating, and even bartering.