Short answers, pulled from the story.
Vegetable oil is extracted from seeds or from other edible parts of plants, and like animal fats it is a mixture of triglycerides. Seed oils include soybean, canola, grapeseed, and cocoa butter, while olive, palm, and rice bran oils come from other parts of plants.
Vegetable oils have been used for thousands of years, with olive oil dating back to at least 6000 BC. Archaeological evidence shows olives were turned into olive oil between 6000 BC and 4500 BC in present-day Israel.
Canadian researchers developed a low-erucic-acid rapeseed cultivar in the mid-1970s and coined the name canola from Canada Oil low acid. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the canola name in January 1985.
Rudolf Diesel designed his engine to run on vegetable oil, and his first engine ran on peanut oil in Augsburg, Germany on the 10th of August 1893. Biodiesel, produced from oils or fats through transesterification, is now the most common biofuel in Europe, and in France it is blended at a rate of 8 percent into all diesel vehicle fuel.
Oil palm is by far the highest-yielding oil crop, producing about 4 tons of palm oil per hectare per year. Palm oil overtook soybean oil as the main vegetable oil produced in 2006, and between 2000 and 2022 total world vegetable oil production rose 130 percent to 212 million tonnes.
Partially hydrogenated oils contain trans fats and have been linked to an increased risk of death from coronary heart disease, which led to regulations mandating their removal from food. Hydrogenation was introduced by German chemist Wilhelm Normann in 1901.