Quick/definitive ways to avoid seed oils at restaurants

Not just a list of places but a cheat sheet: cuisines, clean dishes... so you can eat normally with other people

The author’s parka at Peter Luger Steak House during service (photo by Sami Reiss)

I just got back from France where food legislation is a trip and eating very well is frictionless. Because of the EU legislation (watch this video; CBS News, not exactly a radical health source) everything in even the most beat grocery stores is helpful and severely organic. You buy fresh fruits there and your pores close up… you get a steak for $14 at any restaurant on any corner and it smokes most everywhere here. I had one of the best steaks of my life at my friend Will Taylor’s wedding—that just doesn’t happen in this country. The red Cokes are made from beet sugar… almost everything in Euro works. Food there is better chemically. At restaurants and outside them in Euro you don’t see big drums of vegetable oil with carting instructions on street corners like you do here:

Yellow oil in the window, padlocked used oil to be carted away in foreground

About this oil: it is a seed oil… a term thrown around quite a bit the past couple years. It is an ingredient that is the defining feature of our nutritional system. A seed oil is a cooking oil that is produced, industrially, from seeds. There are eight kinds: canola (aka “rapeseed”… invented in Canada), corn, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, rice bran. They were invented about 100 years ago; they never existed before. Chemically… these oils are polyunsaturated, which is a fatty acid that is considered unstable. And refined: heated, and made in a factory. Refined, unstable… can’t be tossed down the drain (legally; look up “fatberg”) and restaurants here need grease interceptors and to dispose of them with a third-party carter. The health detriments from seed oils are hard to read about anywhere... they are probably bad for gut health and inflammation, at their worst they are maybe carcinogenic (kind of alluded to in the CBS piece), and at their best they are just… not at all beneficial?

Which is anywhere between annoying to aggravating. This stuff is probably not food, but it is in food. Almost all of it. Happy to write a post about the intellectual fallacy around seed oils (and nutrition, and language… it is a thorny subject), but as a normal person just trying to eat decent, it’s not controversial, I think, to want to avoid them completely or as much as possible.

Thank you @Liana Satenstein for the photo here it breaks my heart to go against Carbone

Putting this into practice, though, is the difference between here and France. I keep seeing, now that I’m back, giant drums of oil with disposal instructions around my apartment. The pic a couple pics up is outside a nice Levantine restaurant that is well-reviewed and rated, and whose decor is not bad. On Thursday I saw a big cube truck for “oil carting solutions” drive by as I walked to the chin-up bar park by my house off the highway. Catsup here has a dozen ingredients.

So, what to do? The dark nutrition sickos who saw this early exempted themselves from our nutritional system, and stopped eating out, and only do red meat now and peaches off cutting boards for their dinner. But while they’re right and I do this sometimes (off a plate) it doesn’t work for a normal person with a life who lives in New York. This extremity could reasonably be applied to a grocery list—post in the works—but the real pressure point, if avoidance is a priority to you, is eating out, since that involves other people. Maybe it’s someone’s birthday… maybe you want to leave the house… maybe you are sick of eating red meat off one of your cutting boards, maybe you don’t want people to know you buy your raw milk at the pet food store…

Raw Milk (the post): What it is, what it does, how to buy, how to start

And so the brutal this isn’t France reminder that comes up every day here is that if you’re sitting down at a restaurant—even one as subtle and timeless as Carbone—then you will be ingesting some seed oils. That is unless you follow some rules.

There are a few ways to do this. The app above (I pay for it) yields a nice list of cosigned restaurants and fast casual chains. There is asking questions yourself to the spot ahead of time, or to the waiter (actually don’t do this), which is the way I used to do things, in 1999, when I was vegan: What is the food is cooked in… what oil do you use… etc. This makes you a difficult person. There is also the other difficult person tact which is to not eat out at restaurants anymore and to live like this:

paulsaladinomd

A post shared by @paulsaladinomd

Which I leave up to the reader. To me he is both right and it’s a little bit much. And so… here… I want to highlight a normal path… a way to do this and not be a psycho. A way of avoiding seed oils through actual knowledge. This can be done. It is possible. There is a way to do this. You can be 99% less uptight than this influencer (he has a medical degree and has recently grown out his siete) or the raw milk girl who speaks in a whisper and get 90% of the results.

You can eat out once in a while, or decently regularly, and can get nice and far from the stuff you don’t want. To be sure, if you want to 100% avoid seed oils, well, you will in time repeat yourself. But if you want to nearly completely limit them, then you don’t have to eat tupperware burgers at the airport. And if you don’t have them in the house then you will be doing very good. I would say I am very strict about seed oils (have been for a while; this isn’t new to me) and only now and then say no to a restaurant. This is because there are a number of places to eat in the real world that don’t use seed oils, and there are plenty of dishes you can get at a bunch of restaurants that allow you to remain a normal social person. Nothing staggering, and not exactly all of New York, but there are infinitely more options than there were as a vegan in the 1990s.

Again, the non-tightass truth is there are a nonzero number of restaurants and dishes that you can reasonably take part in and effectively and outright avoid seed oils.

Below’s what I do. It’s a set of rules… based on cuisines that naturally don’t use these ingredients, dishes that don’t require frying, places that don’t touch the stuff, helpful rubrics when you’re not sure what’s what… plus a list of restaurants as well, if you’re in a pinch (good ones) and even tips on what to do if you have eaten seed oils. These methods and reminders have allowed me luck eating out at normal restaurants and avoiding seed oils, and living a less difficult life.