It is almost never that I get to dodge a political bullet these days, not being in the upper 1% of wealthy Americans or anywhere even near that margin. But I am dodging this latest madness of Donald Trump’s with great ease. Trump is starting a cooking oil war with China (no, you’re not hallucinating) and I don’t use cooking oil. If you go into my kitchen you will find a gallon of extra virgin olive oil and a fancy bottle with a spout like a barroom spout on it, that I fill up with the gallon bottle. I go first class with my oil and that’s all I cook with. So I suggest that you, too, switch to the big time and buy EVOO in bulk because you’re going to be paying the same amount for liquid Crisco before long. Sigh. And if liquid Crisco goes to $30 a gallon or more, French fries are going to be in the same category as caviar.
First there was the Opium Wars. Now we have the Cooking Oil War. pic.twitter.com/y2EMr1RgM2
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 14, 2025
The US does already produce it. The contracts were for the excess soybeans that America produces. Worth $13bn in contracts to China but trump evaporated them with his tariff trade wars. He’s an idiot. Farmers are going bankrupt again because he doesn’t know how tariffs work
— Ant (@anthony_carroll) October 14, 2025
They are belly laughing in Beijing for two reasons. 1. Trump doesn’t know how foreign trade works at all, he just makes it up on the fly to have a soundbite for the MAGA rubes; and 2. The Chinese play a long game. They are noted for that. And Trump is playing right into their hands. God only knows what the global economy will look like in 2028 after Trump is done monkeying with it and fragmenting it.
What about "drill, baby, drill?" Oh, that's not for "cooking" oil? Scuse me. I thought Trump had all the answers.
— Ursula Faw (@ursulafaw56) October 14, 2025
I want to drill for cooking oil. Who is with me on this? I say it can be done. If nothing else, we go to Paris and get into the sewers and use a jackhammer to breach Paris’ markets and fine restaurants. Listen, if this is nuttier than anything else Trump has come up with, please let me know.
A very quick search on the subject seems to indicate that Drumpf doesn’t even understand what he’s doing here.
This has NOTHING to do with “cooking oil” but “USED cooking oil”–that’s used for BIOFUELS. Stuff that’s been touted as a way of making the US *less* dependent on fossil fuels. China, over the past couple of years (according to the USDA’s own website–which currently sports a top-of-the-page banner blaming Democrats for the shutdown which keeps the page from being updated), has more than doubled its exports of *used* cooking oil–the stuff that restaurants sell after they’ve finished cooking foods in.
Basically, here’s what’s happening: China buys its soybeans from Argentina (because #DimwitDonnie decided to stop selling US soybeans to China). China processes those soybeans for many uses–direct consumption, processing into cooking oils, etc. The ones that have been processed into cooking oil wind up in the (easily) millions of Chinese restaurants and food stands across the country. One presumes that the restaurants and food stands take their USED oil to some official dumpsite from which the government then processes out some of the unwanted stuff that may have made it from the restaurant. Finally, some of the USED oil would presumably be used by local fuel companies for their own energy uses and the excess would be sold to foreign countries and companies–including the US.
Good time to learn the dominant language in China. As they assume the pinnacle of global power…we’ll become a third world country. No safety net. The upper crust lives behind razor wire. Add in 400 million guns. Recipe for revolution.