structural:summarization
Culinary

Many vegetable oils are consumed directly, or indirectly as ingredients in food – a role that they share with some animal fats, including butter, ghee, lard, and schmaltz. The oils serve a number of purposes in this role:

Oils can be heated to temperatures significantly higher than the boiling point of water, 100 °C (212 °F), and used to fry foods. Oils for this purpose must have a high flash point. Such oils include both the major cooking oils – soybean, rapeseed, canola, sunflower, safflower, peanut, cottonseed, etc. – and tropical oils, such as coconut, palm, and rice bran. The latter are particularly valued in Asian cultures for high-temperature cooking, because of their unusually high flash points.