No seed oils: what BetterWorld actually cooks with

If you’ve spent any time reading about seed oils lately, you’ve probably landed on Seed Oil Scout at some point — the site that maps out restaurants and products that skip canola, soybean, sunflower, safflower and the rest of the industrial seed oil lineup. We didn’t build our kitchen around a website. We built it before the conversation went mainstream. But it’s a useful place to send people who want the full case, because we’re not going to relitigate the biochemistry here — we’re just going to tell you what’s actually in our kitchen.

No canola. No soybean oil. No vegetable oil blends. Nothing that requires an industrial solvent to extract.

What we use instead

Butter, olive oil, and avocado oil, depending on what we’re baking. Nothing exotic, nothing that needs explaining on a menu. The honest tradeoff is cost — these all cost more than a jug of canola. We’ve made peace with that in order to feel good about what you end up eating.

The caveat we’ll give you straight

The science on seed oils is not as damning as the passion to avoid them may suggest. The prevailing understanding is that a general health decline and increased inflammation in the western world correlates with the introduction of seed oils into our diets, but so does a lack of sunlight and increased sugar and processed food consumption. We genuinely don’t know what the long term effect of seed oils is on the body, empirically. But at BetterWorld, we take a cautious approach and never want to take a risk on anyone’s health, so if we don’t know its good for you, we don’t want it.

That said, cutting seed oils out of your own kitchen at home is a bigger ask than swapping which café you visit. If you’re eating out elsewhere in town, or buying packaged food anywhere, seed oils are very likely in it — that’s the whole reason a site like Seed Oil Scout exists. We’re one café getting it right on our own menu. We’re not pretending that solves the wider problem.

And we’ll say plainly: we’re not doctors, and we’re not going to tell you seed oils are making you sick. What we can tell you is what’s in our kitchen, and let you make up your own mind about why that matters to you.

Why we bothered

Partly to avoid GMO ingredients. Partly to deliver greater nutrition. Partly because it’s consistent with everything else on the shelf — we’ve never been the kind of place that stocks the cheapest version of anything if a more honest version exists. The gluten-free options, the organic coffee, the wooden toys instead of plastic — it’s the same instinct, applied to what leaves the kitchen.

Come taste the difference

We’re at 320-322 Broad Street, open 8am to 6pm every day.