Why Sugarcane “Cultured Oil” Isn’t the Ancestral Upgrade You Think

This post comes from a question raised by someone in our Ancestral Table community:

“What do you think of sugarcane oil (cultured oil)?”

It’s a great question - because on the surface, this oil looks like the next “clean” innovation in fat production. But when we dig deeper, we find it’s anything but ancestral.

While it’s marketed as sustainable, neutral, and even “fermented,” sugarcane oil represents a new level of ultra-processing - the kind of industrial manipulation that separates us further from real food.

What Sugarcane Oil Actually Is

Sugarcane doesn’t naturally contain oil. The fat in this product is manufactured through a process that starts with cane sugar. Microbes—typically yeast-like organisms that have been selected or engineered - are fed the sugar under tightly controlled lab conditions.

When the microbes are deprived of nitrogen (their normal growth nutrient), they begin to store fat inside their cells as a survival mechanism. In other words, they are intentionally made obese. Once the microbes have fattened up, they are destroyed, and the fat is extracted, refined, bleached, deodorized, and filtered into a neutral, shelf-stable oil.

On paper, the oil’s composition looks appealing: mostly monounsaturated fat (like olive oil), minimal polyunsaturated fats, and a high smoke point. The companies producing it highlight environmental benefits and the absence of seed oil toxins. But that’s where the similarities to ancestral fats end.

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Ultra-Processing vs. Processing

Here’s the distinction that matters most: processing food is essential - it’s what humans have done for millions of years to make foods safe, digestible, and nourishing.

Ultra-processing, however, crosses the line.

Traditional processing mirrors natural biological processes. Fermentation, soaking, sprouting, and rendering are not artificial interventions; they’re extensions of nature’s design.

Consider the traditional pathways for acquiring fat:

• Marrow requires nothing more than a rock to crack open a bone.

• Visceral fat can be accessed with a sharp stone.

• Bone grease is made by gently heating crushed bones with water to release fat.

• Butter begins by allowing cream to naturally separate from milk, ferment slightly, and then be churned to release the fat.

• Ghee is simply butter heated gently to remove water and milk solids.

• Fruit oils like olive, avocado, coconut, and palm fruit oils are produced through low-tech pressing and mild heat.

That’s processing - a partnership between human ingenuity and natural processes.

Ultra-processing, on the other hand, replaces those natural steps with industrial shortcuts. It removes our senses - sight, smell, touch, taste - from the equation and replaces them with machines, synthetic biology, and chemical refinement. Sugarcane oil sits firmly on that side of the line.

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Fermentation or Fabrication?

The manufacturers call this process “fermentation,” but it’s fermentation in name only.

When we ferment foods ancestrally - milk into kefir, cabbage into sauerkraut, dough into sourdough bread - we harness naturally occurring microbial communities to transform food in ways that align with our biology and digestion.

By contrast, the microbes that produce sugarcane oil are grown in sterile bioreactors under precise conditions. They don’t exist in nature. They’ve been cultivated or engineered to perform a metabolic trick: turning sugar into fat.

And that’s really what’s happening here - we’re making microbes fat by feeding them sugar, then harvesting and refining their fat for human consumption.

This isn’t fermentation that mirrors anything natural. It’s industrial metabolism, not ancestral transformation. It doesn’t echo what happens in a cow’s stomach or a cheese cave - it mimics what happens in a factory.

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Why It Doesn’t Fit Human Logic

Even if this “cultured oil” is technically a fat, it fails the test of ancestral plausibility. For millions of years, the fats that sustained humans were saturated and stable from animals. They were easy to obtain, naturally preserved, and deeply nourishing.

Sugarcane oil, by contrast, is a man-made monounsaturated oil, produced through layers of microbial engineering, heat, and extraction. We don’t know how it behaves in the human body long term, how it interacts with our gut microbiome, or how it oxidizes under real cooking conditions.

It’s a bold experiment being marketed as progress. But we’ve seen this before.

At the end of the 19th century, cottonseed oil - a byproduct of the textile industry—was chemically refined and sold as food. Industry promised it was safe. Consumers replaced butter, lard, and tallow with this industrial oil. A century later, we’re still paying the price in chronic disease and metabolic dysfunction.

What’s happening now with sugarcane oil is eerily similar - only this time, the factory floor is a stainless-steel bioreactor.

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What We Already Have

The truth is, we don’t need another laboratory fat.

We already have everything we need—fats that align with both human biology and ecological integrity:

• Rendered animal fats like lard, tallow, schmaltz, and suet—stable, delicious, and nutrient-rich.

• Butter and ghee, made from cream that naturally ferments and separates before gentle heat releases pure fat.

• Pressed fruit oils like olive, coconut, avocado, and palm fruit oils—extracted through simple mechanical means.

These fats don’t require labs or engineered microbes. They require care, patience, and connection—qualities that make food deeply human.

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The Takeaway

Sugarcane oil may be a marvel of engineering, but it’s not food in the ancestral sense. It doesn’t replicate nature - it replaces it.

Processing is good. Ultra-processing is not.

Real food is built through connection: between humans, animals, plants, microbes, and the environment. The more we replace that connection with synthetic substitutes, the further we drift from the biological wisdom that nourished us for millions of years.

In an age obsessed with “innovation,” maybe real progress means going back - cracking bones, churning cream, and gently rendering fat - and remembering that the most nourishing foods on earth were never made in a lab.

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