Stuart Brioza, a chef and an owner of the acclaimed San Francisco restaurants State Bird Provisions, the Progress and the Anchovy Bar, never imagined that switching kitchen oils could be so political.
Two years ago, he stopped using grapeseed oil in favor of sugar-cane oil, which he thought was less processed and more flavorful, adding a buttery note to vinaigrettes and aiolis.
Mr. Brioza only recently realized that the decision to stop using seed oil aligned him with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, who is known for espousing conspiracy theories about vaccines, fluoride and other public health issues.
Mr. Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again movement have rallied against seed oils, including canola, soybean and corn oils, declaring — without meaningful scientific evidence — that they are harmful for health.
“I have no association with that movement,” said Mr. Brioza, whose restaurant hosted a fund-raiser for Kamala Harris last year, “or anything that has a funny acronym and rhymes with MAGA.”
But, he added, “there are aspects of it that just make sense,” including Mr. Kennedy’s criticism of ultraprocessed foods.
Across the United States, independent restaurants, as well as national chains like Sweetgreen and True Food Kitchen, are betting against seed oils, even if their reasoning — and politics — differ from those of the MAHA agenda.
Restaurateurs are spending significantly more, and in some cases losing money, to make the switch.
Mr. Brioza pays $38 to $42 for a gallon of sugar-cane oil, up from the $29.50 to $32.50 he paid for grapeseed oil. Another alternative, avocado oil, costs more than twice to four times as much as canola oil per pound on average, according to the food distributor Sysco.
Quarterly sales of sugar-cane oil at Zero Acre Farms, which supplies State Bird Provisions, have grown by an average of 435 percent annually since 2023, a company representative said. Zero Acres funded laboratory testing that showed its oil was more stable than seed oils when heated, and less likely to form byproducts that the company says can cause inflammation.
Eric Decker, a professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said there are plenty of healthy seed oils, and little evidence to suggest that alternatives like sugar-cane oil are better for you. “The no-seed-oil craze is not supported by science, and is just another food fad and marketing gimmick,” he said.
Eleven Madison Park, the famed Manhattan fine-dining restaurant that serves only a vegan tasting menu, announced in April that its kitchen would swap most of its seed oils for algae oil. The chef and owner, Daniel Humm, said algae oil requires less water and land to cultivate, and has a clean, neutral flavor. It also costs 30 percent more than canola oil.
He said the seed-oil discourse has invited a lot of confusion and misinformation. “We feel like we have a platform and a voice to shed light on these issues from a sustainability perspective as well as from a cooking perspective,” Mr. Humm said, adding, “It is not a political thing at all.”
For some owners, the switch is primarily a culinary one. Rob Crabtree, an owner of Boat Drinks, a rum and seafood bar in St. Augustine, Fla., started using sugar-cane oil to fry plantains because he was getting “double the life out of the oil in the fryer,” he said.
He was somewhat compelled by the report published by Zero Acre, his oil supplier. “But at the end of the day, the culinary side has to win out for us,” he said.
Seed oils make up 90 percent of restaurant oil sales by the pound in the United States, according to Sysco. Price keeps them at the top despite the criticism, said Victoria Gutierrez, the company’s chief merchandising officer.
But diners are more skeptical of seed oils than ever. Searches for “seed oil” on Yelp increased by 275 percent from March 2024 to March 2025, and searches on the review site for “seed-oil free” rose by 414 percent over that time, a company spokeswoman said.
Restaurateurs used to come to Jeff Nobbs, the chief executive of Zero Acre Farms, because they were curious about alternatives to canola oil. Now they are responding to customer perceptions of seed oils. “We had one restaurant say it was the number one source of customer complaints,” he said.
Eliminating seed oils has drawn about 20 percent more customers to Psomi, a Greek restaurant in Tampa, Fla., said Christina Theofilos, its owner. Seed-oil free messaging is on Psomi’s social media accounts. “It is a huge part of our identity,” Ms. Theofilos said.
The switch to her preferred avocado oil, however, has been costly. The restaurant’s profit margins have fallen by 14 to 18 percent since she made the change two years ago.
Ms. Theofilos believes seed oils cause indigestion and inflammation — she stopped consuming them five years ago — and wants to spread awareness through Psomi. (Studies have not found higher levels of inflammation in people who consume more of the fats common in seed oils.)
“The MAHA movement represents hope,” she said. “Maybe we can educate people, and maybe some stuff gets off the shelves.”
One of the restaurant industry’s most vocal seed-oil detractors is not a chef, but an app. Seed Oil Scout, a database that grades restaurants by their use of seed oils, grew from 100,000 users to 1.5 million last year.
Seed Oil Scout categorizes businesses on the app with labels like “assume the worst” and “dine shamefully,” and has granted 80 restaurants in the United States a “seed-oil safe” badge, which costs $100 to $200 a month after owners complete a lengthy verification survey about the restaurant’s kitchen habits. (Another 756 establishments have applied.) The app does not independently verify information provided in the survey, but diners can submit feedback about restaurants.
“It is less about penalizing restaurants,” said Erica Rozetti, Seed Oil Scout’s head of business development. “I think a lot of it is just bringing transparency.”
Despite identifying as a “MAHA mom,” Ms. Rozetti said the app has declined offers to partner with conservative political action committees. “Pulling ourselves away from that allows for a broader audience to be interested in what we are doing.”
A few restaurant owners whose kitchens have abandoned seed oils for purported health or environmental reasons said that politics had prevented meaningful discussions around the topic.
“The conversation that needs to happen is: Not all seed oils are bad,” said Johanna Hellrigl Wilder, whose Italian restaurant, Ama, in Washington, D.C., has been seed-oil free since it opened in 2022. She finds the refining process of making many seed oils problematic — but she has no issue with, for instance, sesame oil that is cold-pressed.
She is glad people are finally discussing seed oils, but “I also feel like we are missing the point by making it black and white,” she said.
Last year, the dialogue around seed oils persuaded Justin Yu to use sugar-cane oil instead of canola oil at Fat Choy, his vegan Chinese restaurant in Englewood, N.J., even though it was triple the cost. He assumed customers were willing to pay a premium for seed-oil-free food.
But business barely picked up, and his margins suffered. Mr. Yu left Fat Choy at the start of the year, and the restaurant closed in March. “It is hard to run a business with those margins and that oil,” he said.
He also couldn’t substantiate claims made by Zero Acre, his oil supplier, that its product is better for the environment. “Maybe it is all a marketing ploy to sell snake oil,” he said.
He likened the concern about seed oils to the way many consumers used to speak out about the environmental impact of eating meat; today, steakhouses are multiplying, even in progressive cities like New York.
“I don’t think that people care enough to vote with their dollars,” he said.
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Priya Krishna is a reporter in the Food section of The Times.
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