In the never-ending quest to figure out what we are supposed to eat, a new boogeyman has emerged: seed oils. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pointed to seed oils—a category that includes common varieties such as canola, soybean, and corn—as a major culprit behind America’s chronic-disease problem. Kennedy is far from the only prominent seed-oil critic: On his podcast, Joe Rogan has declared that “seed oils are some of the some of the worst fucking things your body can consume.” These claims about the dangers of seed oils are not based in science; nutritionists believe that they are not only safe but also good for you in moderation. But that hasn’t stopped the charge against them from going mainstream. You can now find products labeled Seed oil safe at Whole Foods and Costco; according to one poll, 28 percent of Americans are actively avoiding seed oils.
So what are people eating instead? Kennedy’s preferred alternative is beef tallow, a nutritionally dubious choice. But most grocery stores don’t have family-size tubs of rendered beef fat sitting next to the extra-virgin olive oil. The obvious seed-oil replacement, then—similarly vegetal, broadly familiar, delicious—is olive oil. Scientists and seed-oil skeptics can agree on this: olive oil, what an oil! Earlier this year, the fast-salad chain Sweetgreen launched a limited-time-only seed-oil-free menu featuring dressings made with olive and avocado oils, chosen for their flavor but also for “their health benefits and alignment with our values.”
But olive oil may soon cost more—potentially a lot more. Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, which he delayed by 90 days yesterday, are coming for the country’s liquid gold. You know what is mostly insulated from the president’s proposed plan? Seed oils. Consider vegetable oil, the most ubiquitous of seed oils: No matter what brand you buy, it’s likely made from American-grown soybeans. “If the goal is to get people away from the seed oil, well, these tariffs are going to drive people into the arms of the seed oils,” William Clifton Ridley, an agricultural-economics professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told me. Seed oils, maligned by both the crunchy left and the MAHA right, may get their revenge.
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The biggest drawback of olive oil, ignoring certain culinary questions (flavor, smoke point), has long been its price. Olive oil is not cheap compared with canola or vegetable oil. But since 2021, the average price of olive oil in the United States has roughly doubled, the result of climate change and rising production costs. Consider Wirecutter’s budget olive-oil pick, Bertolli Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Rich Taste. At Walmart, it currently costs $8.47 for 16.9 fluid ounces (the equivalent of a regular-size Coke bottle). By contrast, 40 ounces of Crisco vegetable oil, equivalent to slightly more than a liter, will run you $4.47.
The gulf is poised to only widen. That’s because nearly all of the olive oil consumed in the U.S. is imported, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As anyone who has gazed upon the bounty of the supermarket olive-oil aisle can tell you, most of that is coming from the European Union, namely Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. These products currently carry a 10 percent tariff; if Trump goes through with the sweeping fees he paused yesterday, that’ll soon jump to 20 percent. Olive oil is also imported from some other countries, but the trouble is that the proposed tariffs are so global. A lot of olive oil comes from Tunisia, for example, which, under the president’s paused plan, would be tariffed at 28 percent.
Trump’s tariffs are nominally intended to boost American manufacturing. “These tariffs are going to give us growth like you haven’t seen before,” the president has promised. Except there is nowhere near enough homegrown American olive oil to go around. California, the rare state with conditions amenable to olive-growing, produces less than 2 percent of the olive oil that Americans consume. “California likes to think it produces olive oil, but not really, not to any great extent,” Dan Sumner, an agricultural economist at UC Davis, told me. It wouldn’t be easy to drastically ramp up domestic olive-oil production: Olive trees can take at least five years to bear fruit. And with Trump repeatedly announcing tariffs and then pausing them, it’s hard to expect American farmers to invest in this undertaking when they might not even recoup the benefits come 2030.
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Should Trump’s more expansive tariffs take effect, olive-oil prices “might go up substantially,” Ridley told me. Expect the sticker price of olive oil to increase somewhere from 10 to 20 percent—enough, he said, to “drive a sizable decrease in olive-oil demand.” Americans almost certainly won’t abandon olive oil en masse. It’s olive oil, a kitchen staple; nobody wants to drizzle their pizza with canola. “But there’s a huge swath of the population that’s not going to be able to afford it,” Phil Lempert, a grocery-industry analyst, told me. “And they’re going to switch.”
And there are other options. Maybe seed-oil skeptics will want to follow RFK Jr.’s lead and sauté their food in beef tallow. But tallow isn’t cheap either, and there isn’t enough of it to go around. Last year, America produced about one pound of beef tallow for every 15 pounds of soybean oil, the most consumed oil in the U.S. by far. Compared with the alternatives, soybean oil will seem even cheaper: It is produced domestically; imports are essentially zero. The same is true of corn oil, only a tiny fraction of which comes from abroad. The majority of canola oil is imported from Canada—meaning that at least for now, it isn’t subject to any new tariffs. You can debate these oils’ relative merits and drawbacks, but you cannot debate the fact that they cost less. Even the more limited 10 percent tariffs that are now in place could lead to a seed-oil resurgence. If the costs are passed down to consumers, Sumner told me, most people will suck it up and pay—but not everyone. Some people will shift to canola or vegetable oil. Restaurants, perennially concerned about margins, may be less likely to follow Sweetgreen’s lead and give up seed oils. Your local Italian restaurant, Lempert pointed out, may already be saving money by blending their olive oil with canola, and that’s before the tariffs.
Although RFK Jr. is wrong about the health effects of seed oils, he’s right about why they’re so common: They’re cheap. “The reason they’re in foods is that they’re heavily subsidized,” he told Fox & Friends, a point about seed oils he has made repeatedly. The federal government indeed pays American farmers to grow lots of corn and soybeans, allowing you to buy a jug of Crisco for less than $5. If the official governmental policy is to drive up prices on the most obvious alternative, seed oils will continue to have a leg up.