How India’s Relationship With Cooking Oils Changed Over Time

India’s relationship with cooking oils goes back thousands of years. Oils were never just a cooking medium here — they shaped regional cuisines, traditional wellness practices, agriculture, trade, and even small everyday rituals inside homes.

For most of Indian history, oils were local. What people cooked with usually depended on what grew around them. Coconut oil along the coast. Mustard oil in the East and North. Sesame oil across parts of the South. Groundnut oil across large parts of Western and Southern India.

That relationship changed dramatically over the last century with industrial refining, large-scale imports, and changing food habits. And now, interestingly, many households seem to be circling back towards traditional oils again — not necessarily out of nostalgia, but out of curiosity about where food comes from and how it is processed.

Before Packets and Plastic Bottles

Long before supermarket shelves and branded oil pouches existed, oil was usually bought fresh from local presses known regionally as ghani, kolhu, or chekku.

People often carried steel or brass containers to nearby mills and bought oil in smaller quantities. In many places, the oil itself was part of the local identity of food. You could almost tell where someone came from based on what oil they cooked with.

Ancient Ayurvedic literature and regional texts mention oils not only in the context of cooking, but also massage therapies, rituals, and medicinal preparations. Sesame oil especially appears repeatedly in traditional references, while coconut oil became deeply tied to coastal food cultures.

Groundnut oil entered Indian food history later through historical trade routes, but eventually became an everyday cooking staple in many parts of the country.

The Smell of Traditional Oil Mills

One thing that rarely gets talked about in modern food conversations is how strongly oils are connected to smell and memory.

Walk into a working oil mill for the first time and one thing catches you off guard immediately — the aroma.

Fresh groundnut oil during extraction has a slightly sweet, nutty smell with a faint dampness from the extraction process itself. It doesn’t smell neutral. It smells alive.

Traditional mills also have a very distinct atmosphere — machinery running continuously, seed residue, freshly extracted oil everywhere, workers moving around constantly. It is not a polished environment. It smells busy. And oily. Lots of oil extracted and it shows.

Some oils immediately trigger food memories. Groundnut oil especially has that effect. The smell alone can make you think of hot rice, chutney podi sprinkled on top, and groundnut oil drizzled over it just before eating.

That sensory connection is probably one reason traditional oils remained deeply tied to regional cuisines for generations.

Different Regions, Different Oils

Before industrial edible oil systems emerged, India’s oil consumption patterns were deeply regional.

• Sesame oil in Tamil Nadu and parts of Andhra Pradesh
• Mustard oil in Bengal and North India
• Coconut oil across coastal Karnataka and Kerala
• Groundnut oil in Gujarat, Maharashtra, and parts of the Deccan
• Castor oil mainly for medicinal and ritual purposes

These oils were usually seasonal, minimally processed, and consumed relatively close to where they were produced.

Food traditions evolved around them naturally over generations. Groundnut oil, for example, became a preferred medium for frying snacks in many South Indian homes because of both flavour and cooking behaviour.

When Industrial Oils Changed the System

The biggest shift happened during the late colonial and post-industrial periods.

Imported oils started entering Indian markets in larger volumes. Industrial refining and solvent extraction made oils cheaper and easier to scale. Urbanisation also changed the way food was bought and consumed.

Over time, cooking oil slowly changed from something local and identifiable into something industrial and anonymous.

For the newer generation especially, refined oils became normal. In fact, many consumers today grew up entirely on refined oils, which is one reason cold-pressed oils feel unfamiliar to them initially.

Five or six years ago, one of the most common customer questions used to simply be:

“Why is cold-pressed oil so expensive?”

Today the questions are slightly different.

People now ask more about:

• What seed is being used?
• Whether the oil is genuinely cold-pressed
• How the seeds are sourced and stored
• Why one batch smells different from another

That shift in questioning says a lot about how consumer awareness is changing.

What Affects Cold-Pressed Oil Quality

A lot of oil quality depends on things consumers never see directly.

Seed storage, for example, matters enormously. If storage conditions are poor, Free Fatty Acid (FFA) levels can increase, which directly impacts oil quality.

Even the smell of oil changes when it has overheated. People who work regularly around oils can usually identify it immediately — heated oil develops a sharper smell that almost travels to the back of the nose.

Consumers switching from refined oils to cold-pressed oils also tend to notice two things first:

• The aroma
• The viscosity

Many people initially use the same quantity of cold-pressed oil that they would normally use for refined oil, only to realise later that cooking behaviour changes slightly and lesser quantities are often enough.

Why Traditional Oils Are Returning Again

India today is one of the world’s largest edible oil consumers and importers. Global commodity markets now heavily influence local oil prices.

A household in Bengaluru can indirectly feel the effects of weather in Argentina, shipping disruptions in the Red Sea, or conflict near the Black Sea without even realising it.

At the same time, many consumers have started paying closer attention to:

• Ingredient sourcing
• Processing methods
• Food traceability
• Regional food traditions

That has slowly created renewed interest in cold-pressed and wood-pressed oils.

Not because the past was automatically better — industrial oils became popular for very practical reasons too — but because many people now want food systems that feel more understandable and closer to source.

India’s Oil Story Is Still Evolving

India’s relationship with oils has constantly changed with shifts in agriculture, trade, technology, and consumer behaviour.

For decades, cooking oil became just another supermarket product — refined, packaged, standardised, and disconnected from where it came from.

Now, many consumers seem to be looking at oils differently again. Not just as a cooking ingredient, but as something connected to geography, flavour, season, process, and trust.

And in many ways, that curiosity may shape the next phase of India’s edible oil story.

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Explore traditionally processed cold-pressed oils from Woodified Natura.