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July 13, 2026 · 6 min read

Fat of The Land - Part 11 - Pressed, Not Processed

By Raiden DeLuca

Olive oil and avocado oil are good oils, pressed from whole fruit rather than wrung out of seeds, but not every bottle wearing those names is worth buying. The same oil can be a great choice or a waste of money depending on how it was made and how long it has sat on a shelf, and telling them apart comes down to a few things the front label will never tell you.

Pressed versus processed

A real oil is squeezed out of something. Have you ever tasted a good cold-pressed olive oil and noticed how strong it is, that peppery bite at the back of your throat? That sharpness is the antioxidants, the polyphenols still intact, and it is the first thing refining strips away. Cold-pressed and expeller-pressed oils are crushed out mechanically, with little or no heat and no solvents, so they keep the oil's natural color, flavor, and the compounds that came with the fruit. The refined route does the opposite, stripping the oil with high heat and often a chemical solvent, then bleaching and deodorizing it into something pale and flavorless. That is the same process behind the seed oils from the last post, and it comes down to one question about any oil you pick up: was it squeezed out of a whole fruit, or chemically wrung out of a seed and cleaned up afterward?

Olive and avocado are fruit oils, which is why they are the base of a good kitchen. Press a ripe olive or avocado and oil comes out, no factory required. A refined oil is not poison, and a more refined one trades some of the fruit's goodness for a higher smoke point, which is a fair deal when you need real heat, and it is part of why refined avocado oil holds up in a hot pan. But the default should be the least-processed version you can find, the one that still tastes and looks like the thing it came from.

Freshness is half of it

Oil is perishable, and most people treat it like it is not. The delicate compounds that make a cold-pressed oil good, the antioxidants and the flavor, break down with light, heat, and time, so a fresh oil and a year-old one are not the same thing even when the label is identical. A bottle pressed recently, kept in dark glass, and stored somewhere cool holds its quality. One that has sat under store lights in clear plastic for a year is already on its way out.

So buy for freshness. Look for an actual harvest or pressing date rather than just a best-by, choose dark glass over clear, and choose glass over plastic, since oil will slowly pull compounds out of a plastic bottle. Keep it away from the heat of the stove and use it up rather than letting it linger. The oil you buy fresh and finish quickly is worth more than the expensive one you save for a year.

The label is the last thing to trust

The words on the front of an oil bottle are the weakest signal in the whole aisle. Olive oil fraud is real and well-documented, with testing repeatedly finding bottles labeled extra virgin that are cut with cheaper refined oil or do not meet the standard at all. Terms like cold-pressed, pure, and light are loosely policed, so they promise less than they sound like they do. The marketing is built to look trustworthy, which is the reason it cannot be.

What you can trust is harder to fake. A single-origin or single-estate oil, one that comes from one place instead of being blended from a dozen anonymous sources, can be traced, and traceability is the whole point. This is the localization idea again, in the one form it can take for a fruit that does not grow where most of us live. I cannot buy local olive oil in Idaho, but I can buy oil from one named source and know what is in it, which is something you can never say about a commodity bottle labeled simply olive oil. Add organic and a real third-party certification and you have far more to go on than any adjective on the front.

What is in my cupboard

My whole oil-and-fat lineup is short on purpose. For oils I keep two, a single-source organic olive oil in a glass bottle, and an avocado oil spray for the air fryer and higher-heat cooking. Both come from Costco, both are fruit oils, and the olive oil being single-source is the part I care about, because I can trace where it came from in a way you cannot with a generic blend. Alongside those sit the tallow and butter from the last few posts, the stable fats for searing and roasting.

That is the entire list. Olive oil, avocado oil, tallow, and butter cover everything I cook. Ghee belongs on the good list too, and I would reach for it if I wanted a higher-heat dairy fat, I just have not needed to. Past those, I do not see a reason to own anything else, and most of what fills the rest of the aisle is the processed product this series has spent its time warning you about.

How good a job He did

Hold the two processes side by side one more time. One oil is what falls out when you press a ripe fruit, something people have done with a stone and a basket for thousands of years. The other takes solvents, high heat, bleaching, and deodorizing to become something you can stand to eat. The first is a gift you barely have to touch. The second is a problem we engineered and then sold back to ourselves.

That contrast is most of what I want you to carry out of this whole series. God built the fat and the oil we need into animals and fruit, stable, nourishing, and ready to use, and the closer a thing stays to that form the better it tends to be for you. You do not have to be a chemist to eat well. You mostly have to ask one question, how far is this from the way it grew, and let the answer guide your hand.

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