You decided to avoid seed oils. You're cooking with butter and tallow. You're reading labels carefully. You feel confident. Then you check the ingredient list on your bread: soybean oil. Your salad dressing: canola oil. Your mayonnaise: sunflower oil. Your rotisserie chicken: coated in vegetable oil. Your "healthy" granola: made with sunflower oil. Your protein bar: contains palm kernel oil and soy lecithin. Seed oils aren't just cooking oils. They're stabilizers, emulsifiers, preservatives, texture enhancers. They're in virtually everything processed because they're cheap, shelf-stable, and functionally versatile. Baked goods use them to extend shelf life. The unsaturated fats remain liquid at room temperature, keeping products soft longer. Your supermarket muffin stays fresh for weeks because it's saturated with soybean oil. Salad dressings need emulsifiers. Traditional vinaigrettes separate and need shaking. Modern dressings use seed oils and emulsifiers to stay blended indefinitely. Convenience at the cost of consuming inflammatory oils with your vegetables. Even foods marketed as healthy are saturated with them. "Heart-healthy" cereal bars. "Natural" nut butters with added oils. "Organic" crackers made with sunflower oil. The health halo means nothing when the base ingredient is industrial seed extract. Restaurant food is worse. That grilled chicken breast? Probably brushed with soybean oil before cooking. The vegetables? Sautéed in canola oil. The bread? Made with vegetable shortening. You ordered "healthy" grilled protein and vegetables. You consumed seed oils at every component. Even foods that seem oil-free often contain them. Pre-shredded cheese includes anti-caking agents made with seed oils. Dried fruit is often coated with oil to prevent sticking. Spice mixes contain seed oils as carriers. You're consuming them without knowing they're there. The food industry discovered that adding cheap oils improves texture, shelf life, and profit margins. Then they discovered that hiding these oils in ingredient lists keeps health-conscious consumers buying. "Vegetable oil" sounds benign. "Highly refined industrial soybean extract" would sound concerning. This is why avoiding seed oils requires cooking from scratch. Whole ingredients. Basic preparation. The moment you buy anything in a package, seed oils are likely involved. The modern food supply is constructed around them. Grocery shopping becomes archeology. Reading every ingredient list. Discovering that 80% of products contain oils you're trying to avoid. Realizing that "whole foods" sections still stock products made with canola oil. Understanding that avoiding seed oils means avoiding most of the supermarket. You can't partially avoid them. You're either vigilant to the point of obsession or you're consuming them daily without realizing. There's no middle ground in a food system built on cheap industrial fats. The invisibility is intentional. If consumers understood how ubiquitous seed oils are, some might question why they're in everything. Easier to hide them in plain sight with innocuous names. Your grandmother didn't need to check ingredient lists because her food didn't have ingredients lists. Everything was made from recognizable components. Now you need a biochemistry degree to understand what you're eating. Seed oils won the food system. They're not an ingredient. They're infrastructure.