Actually vegetable oil is naturally occurring in plants like rape, olives, corn, palm etc. It just needs to be extracted from the pulp by pressing. The evil one is palm oil because much rainforest is being destroyed to grow it.
It's consumerism succeeding isn't it? It's not cost. It's hard to lay the blame at the providers when the lazy suck it up so willingly. Who's to blame? That ice cream contents up there ^ ooer. Who would feed their children on chemicals that look and taste a bit like ice cream? Nutters the lot of 'em!
I look at the ingredients and avoid things with palm oil. Aldi are surprisingly good at using sunflower and other vegetable oils compared with some of the other supermarkets, even the 'premium' ones.
Naturally occurring unlikely even Google will be your friend try this article many others available https://frymax.co.uk/frying-oil/how-is-vegetable-oil-made/ in reality it is a refined processed product. Dont be fooled.
Real ice cream is around 10 times the price , and lots of people buy on price alone , I prefer to buy and consume 1/10th the amount, my well educated and well to do wife buys the crappy stuff because (whereas my working class parents wanted to give me what their parents couldn’t afford for them ) she was brought up with parents who’s view of buying their children good food was that it’s wasted on children ( financially and then secondarily quality) they can’t possibly appreciate it , this is a very well to do family , generation before had big house , servants, all went to university in the 1920s, three or 4 generations went to university before that ( one owned a school ) So it’s not just the uneducated “oiks”
One cannot argue with Google, especially when Google said exactly what I said in that oil can be extracted from vegetables by simple pressing. However I take your point that a lot of processes are required to obtain maximum yield of oil from the crop but one cannot escape the fact that the oil was always present in the vegetable to start with. As an example of unrefined oil which we regularly use in the kitchen, check this out: https://hillfarmoils.com/blog/what-is-cold-pressed-rapeseed-oil/
Yes thats a cold press product that retails at £3.25 per half litre. Most people don't understand that the vegetable oil they buy at a £1 a litre has gone through a number of processes including the use of solvents to extract maximum oil from the product. They think vegetable = good healthy product. So we're encouraged not to eat fatty natural products but it is replaced in our diets by use of this processed Marmite.
You've reminded me of similar friends of mine who would feed their kids crap then cook "dinner" for themselves. Ours ate the good stuff with us. I will concede that it takes more time to make a quiche than get one out of a packet, but if all you've ever eaten is the pallid soggy tasteless variety from Tesco you probably think quiche is horrible anyway. Likewise you probably think there should just be some snot in a pie and bacon should shrink to 1/4 it's original size and boil in the scummy water that comes out of it. Bread - what the heck is that? Margarine made of emulsified oil. It's actually really hard to get anything natural to be fair and that's fish, meat, veg and fruit too. All those fruit that are now miraculously sweet before they are ripe and all taste of nectarines. We had strawberries the size of my fist the other day. The world has gone mad. Tell the kids today that grapes used to be full of pips with leather skins they don't believe you!
But those people relying on food parcels wouldn't be buying it even at your reduced price of £3.00 per half litre.