The little plastic bottle taunts me. It’s been sitting there for weeks, and the orange-on-white label looks like something experimental or clinical rather than delicious. This is algae cooking oil from the Algae Cooking Club, which I had seen on the social media feeds of food influencers and written about in magazines. I wanted to find out how it was made and why it was being touted as some hot new thing, and to do so, I had to cook with it. When I saw it for sale in San Juan, I knew it was time. I bought the smallest possible bottle, which cost $10 for seven ounces.

But now that I’ve obtained it and it’s here, I don’t actually want to ingest it: If I’m going to fry tofu or sauté broccoli, I want it to taste like I know it to always taste; I don’t want to waste my own meal if this comes out greasy or weird. And will it upset my stomach? Avocado oil upsets my stomach! 

Before there was algae cooking oil, there was a move to make it into a biofuel. “Solazyme Inc., a company founded 12 years ago to make car and truck fuel from algae, is vigorously pushing a new product. But this time it is fuel for the body: cooking oil, based on algae, marketed as healthful for you and the planet,” reported the Wall Street Journal in 2015. A product that was supposed to help reduce fossil fuel usage at scale has now become a niche consumer genre of cooking oil. Without the influencer marketing scheme that Algae Cooking Club was able to concoct, the brand that Solazyme launched, called Thrive, closed in 2020 after five years.

I have to get on with it. I have to do my job. I know that algae cooking oil comes from a process in which algae is fed sugar to fatten up, then there’s fermentation, and then the oil is extracted (thanks to the Wall Street Journal again, which has remained on the beat). The process is done in Brazil by a company from the Netherlands called Corbion, which seems to run the whole business of culinary algae oil and purchased the manufacturing and ingredient lines from Solazyme after they filed for bankruptcy.

These high smoke point cooking oils were and are popular with the anti–seed oil contingent (of which I am not a member), but to get more people on board, it was obvious that Algae Cooking Club would need a chef, the food influencers, and a good label. They followed the Graza model—to what effect, that remains to be seen. Olive oil, being made from olives and having a 5,000-plus-year history with humanity, is a much easier sell. Algae Cooking Club has good branding and the approval of Eleven Madison Park’s chef Daniel Humm, whom the food media believes holds the fate of plant-based foods in his hands for reasons that have eluded me. 

The process of making this oil is straight-forward enough; I’m not necessarily concerned about its nutrition or health effects, beyond the possibility of a sore tummy. I am concerned about it mainly as a curiosity: I don’t think it will really replace the olive or canola or whichever various oils folks keep around for cooking. The containers, for one, are very small and very pricey. It’s sold like a premium, special oil that you use for finishing but its best purpose is high heat frying.

I do think it has been an interesting marketing scheme, as it was for Graza—how easy it has been to be to get attention for this stuff. You send a product; the product is posted, especially if there’s enough momentum from other people posting, thus individuals not wanting to give the appearance of being left out of the hype cycle. Perhaps there is money exchanged for this, perhaps not. The money is almost immaterial, if that is possible, because what’s important here is the narrative of normalization and the creation of an in-crowd. 

At the shop where I purchased the algae oil, I was told that the mushroom version (which is for finishing) is extremely popular. My reluctance to cook with it is obviously a me problem, and I’m sure many would think, She’s jealous that she’s left out of influencer marketing. If only! The sustainability element is the selling point to anyone who isn’t anti–seed oil, but a lot of the commentary about algae oil being less resource intensive is coming from the folks who are selling it; some agriculture and industry experts say the entire fermentation and extraction process requires a lot of energy, others that it does not. It’s hard to parse who’s telling the truth, and it’s personally difficult for me to forget that this is being sold to me to eat because it failed as biofuel.

There was a lot of coverage at the launch of Algae Cooking Club, and another company, Zero Acre, also benefited. It was taken for granted that these companies were honest, that Daniel Humm was the best person to listen to on the matter, that a new cooking oil that costs $20 for 16 ounces is some potential fixer of the future of food. What’s happening here?

If it scales up to the level of, say, canola oil and becomes as cheap, will Humm still be its advocate? We watched Impossible Burgers launch with David Chang, sell for $26 on some fancy restaurant menus, switch to GMO soy when they got into Burger King, and then—a bust. But this marketing tactic works in the beginning, and maybe that’s all it has to do to get some folks the money they need and content farms the slop they feed consumers. (One can search around for very credulous pieces on algae cooking oil, but I don’t want to call out writers doing their jobs; it’s a systemic media issue.)

Ok, I’ve gotten to the point at which I’m going to have to cook with it. I can’t write around that. I go to the kitchen and heat up my stainless steel pan (All-Clad via Home Goods, ages ago). When the water droplets begin to dance, I squeeze in the algae oil only to find that I’ve left the top on and have to remove it immediately. Though the oil is yellowish in the bottle, it looks clear over the hot metal. I crack in a local egg and let it fry, and it does—like it would in any other fat. It tastes the same, too. I’m not convinced, but I guess I’m no longer repelled. Consider me ready for the future, if it ever comes.