Talk:List of vegetable oils

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Waitak (talk • contribs • email)

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[edit] Drying agent

Dammar oil is a drying agent, not a dessicant. A dessicant works by removing moisture, while a drying oil like dammar oil works by pulling oxygen out of the air and using it in autoxidation.

The problem was a link to an ill-considered redirect, which was quite reasonably replaced with direct link. I've replaced the Drying agent redirection with a disambiguation page. ClairSamoht 04:28, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

My apologies for that. I started the article drying agent not long ago, as a basic list of laboratory drying agents. I found a similar article, desiccant, and decided to merge the info there to prevent duplication, even though I very much prefer the term "drying agent". I didn't know the context for dammar oil was different. --Rifleman 82 06:18, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
Hey, no reason for apologies. I should be thanking you instead. Thanks. "Many hands make for light work." Or, in this case, better work. I'm sure there are many people who think the reason you would use a drying oil instead of, say, alcohol, as a drying agent in paint is that alcohols tend to evaporate and oils don't. The result is that we got the Drying agent page, which otherwise I never would have thought to create. ClairSamoht 14:59, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Essential oils

I would have thought that essential oils would rate a subsection in this article.--Peta 00:31, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

List of essential oils started as a subsection of this article. I moved it to its own article for three reasons:
  • The article was already getting very long
  • Essential oils and vegetable fat oils are different enough that it made sense to give each their own article
  • There were a lot of essential oils that don't have an article, and I didn't want to have to write all of them to apply for featured list status
Nothing against them at all! --Waitak 00:54, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Now I see, I missed the mention in the lead. It might be a good idea to include the link to the list again in the see also section.--Peta

[edit] mergefrom Saturated fat (section) to List of vegetable oils

The folks over at Saturated fat have come up with a table listing fat composition of (mostly) vegetable oils. This isn't well placed right at Saturated fat because this is more general information about oils, with mono- and poly-unsaturated values as well. However the information is useful and would complement this list, particularly if the list were to be reformatted as a table. -- cmhTC 14:04, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for thinking of us! I'm wondering if this wouldn't be a better fit in Vegetable fats and oils, though. It doesn't seem that it fits in a list article as well as it would in a general article on the subject. Maybe it could even be an article on its own? Or perhaps a template so that it can be reused in more than one place? Thoughts, anybody? Waitak 15:49, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
I will agree that it doesn't fit in this list article, but a third of the list consists of animal fats, and it doesn't belong in the Vegetable fats and oils article, either.
You know, the problem is that all this stuff doesn't fit neatly. It makes sense to discuss mineral oils, organic oils, and triglycerides separately, because the chemistry is different. It makes sense to discuss macerated oils separately, too, because it's not the oil that matters so much as the chemicals that are "polluting" the oil.
But from the standpoint of a chemist/chemical_engineer, animal/vegetable and fat/oil are distinctions that are pretty artificial. You've got three fatty acids clinging to glycerine, and it doesn't really matter where the fatty acids came from, just which fatty acids they are, and in what order they are connected. Now, when you saturate an oil, you tend to preferentially saturate the fatty acids on the end of the chain, because the middle one is "protected" by the other two, but still, you can find molecules that *accidently* have that arrangement in nature, and you can fractionate the oil to get *only* those molecules....
And then you get adjectives like "edible", "industrial", "drying", "salad", "cooking", etc., that are also essentially meaningless. I mean, if you want to buy a rail car of margarine oil, that's a useful distinction, as is telling the guy at the car dealership that you want a "muscle car" or an "econobox", but the folks down at the bureau of motor vehicles don't recognize those distinctions.
And if we were starting from scratch, and didn't have all these hours of manpower invested in the existing articles, it'd surely make sense to organize the articles differently.
Oops. Did it again. I gotta get more sleep, so I don't pop off so much. As Emily Litella would say, "Excuse me." The rest of you will find an suitable solution, and I'll live with it. ClairSamoht 16:30, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
Okay, so what we usually do in situations like this is:
  • Somebody (hopefully you) makes some concrete suggestions about what would be a better structure for all of these articles.
  • Somebody else (maybe me, who the heck knows?) fleshes it out into something that could actually be built.
  • Anybody who's interested takes a crack at it, including the person who made the suggestion in the first place, until we're all pretty much convinced that it's (a) better and (b) worth the trouble.
  • We get to work and start writing the darned thing.
As a person who's probably invested more than the average editor in the whole shebang, I'll state for the record that I feel pretty unproprietary about what's said where. I'd hate to see List of vegetable oils eviscerated, but I'm up for pretty much anything else.
As for spouting off... we eventually ended up with a featured list one of the last times you did that, so I wouldn't be too hard on m'self, were I you.
Your volley. Go on, you know you want to. :-) Waitak 10:55, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Back to the {{mergesection}} question: I've put a different version of the table into Fatty acid. It doesn't have quite as many fats, but it has more information on each (includes vitamin E composition). It's also scaled in g/100g, rather than g/Tbsp. Would this be a satisfactory solution to the nice people from Saturated fat who moved the table here in the first place? cmh? AndreasJS? If you don't like it -- or don't like it there -- please feel free to, y'know, be bold.... Waitak 11:47, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

I just found the table on Saturated fat and felt it didn't quite fit the article. My thought was that this list could do more than just enumerate and describe the oils, it could provide some technical data like this as well. However, I'm not wedded to that idea. -- cmhTC 17:59, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Algal oil

The article credits Isaac Berzin as having invented algal oils for biofuels. I am fairly sure this is inaccurate. The idea of using oil from Algae for fuel has been around at least since the 1970's US Government "Aquatic Species Program", if not before. Please fix. —preceding unsigned comment by Bobkeyes (talk • contribs)

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