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Concept
Vegetable oil
Summary
Vegetable oils, or vegetable fats, are oils extracted from seeds or from other parts of fruits. Like animal fats, vegetable fats are mixtures of triglycerides. Soybean oil, grape seed oil, and cocoa butter are examples of seed oils, or fats from seeds. Olive oil, palm oil, and rice bran oil are examples of fats from other parts of fruits. In common usage, vegetable oil may refer exclusively to vegetable fats which are liquid at room temperature. Vegetable oils are usually edible.
Such oils have been part of human culture for millennia. Oils such as poppy seed, rapeseed, linseed, almond oil, sesame seed, safflower, and cottonseed were variously used since at least the Bronze Age in the Middle East. Oils extracted from plants have been used since ancient times and in many cultures. Archaeological evidence shows that olives were turned into olive oil by 6000 BCE and 4500 BCE in present-day Israel and Palestine. Babylonian mineral oil was known to be used as fuel, but there are no references to lubrication. Pliny the Elder reported that animal-derived fats such as lard were used to lubricate the axles of carts. In ancient Egypt, oils were also used during the mummification process.
Vegetable oils have been used for lighting fuel for lamps, cooking, medicine and lubrication. Palm oil has long been recognized in West and Central African countries, and European merchants trading with West Africa occasionally purchased palm oil for use as a cooking oil in Europe and it became highly sought-after commodity by British traders for use as an industrial lubricant for machinery during Britain's Industrial Revolution.
Palm oil formed the basis of soap products, such as Lever Brothers' (now Unilever) "Sunlight", and
B. J. Johnson Company's (now Colgate-Palmolive) "Palmolive," and by around 1870, palm oil constituted the primary export of some West African countries.
In 1780, Carl Wilhelm Scheele demonstrated that fats were derived from glycerol. Thirty years later Michel Eugène Chevreul deduced that these fats were esters of fatty acids and glycerol.
Official source
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