My dad served in the army as a cook in Vietnam. He used gasoline stoves to cook dinner for the troops.

"White gas" used for cooking stoves (think Coleman stoves, laterns, etc) used to be unleaded, additive free gasoline. It's not gasoline now (according to wiki: cyclohexane, nonane, octane, heptane, and pentane.) Naptha also works in those stoves but doesn't last as long. Apparently you can still run the stoves on gasoline if you'd like.

Seed oils that are now widespread as cooking oils were originally used as machine lubricants.

Fascinating and makes sense. I've recently gone down a rabbit hole on the uses of linseed oil pre fossil fuels, but it's too gummy to ever be used as a lubricant. Do you know off hand which seed oils were used for lubricants?

Castor oil was famously used as a lubricant in early WWI-era airplane engines. The fumes would blow in the pilot's face and are also a laxative.

Haha that's amazing! Hopefully the pilots weren't too phased. Thanks for sharing

Did some further digging and it looks like it does have a tendency to gum. From wikipedia, "The viscosity of castor oil at 10 °C is 2,420 centipoise,[28] but it tends to form gums in a short time, so its usefulness is limited to engines that are regularly rebuilt, such as racing engines. Lubricant company Castrol took its name from castor oil."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_oil#Lubrication

So was olive oil, in addition to the use in food.

Yes my point. They still are.

Soybean oil is used in a wide range of lubricant and functional fluids applications:

  Gear oils and lubes
  Chainsaw bar oil
  Compressor oil
  Two-cycle engine oil
  Metalworking oils and
  Wire rope, chain, and cable lubricants
  General purpose and penetrating lubricants
  Transformer and transmission line cooling fluids
  Greases - automotive, machinery, rail curve, track
  Food-grade, industrial, and elevator hydraulic fluids

https://www.stle.org/images/pdf/STLE_ORG/AM2019%20Presentati...

Obviously this is a backwards example (food-grade oil used for non-food applications), and my question was using this plastic oil for food applications.

Certainly, in some settings.

https://www.amazon.com/Gasoline-Stove/s?k=Gasoline+Stove

In china, its common to cook with "gutter oil" which is sewage, filtered and refined. Humans are amazing.

It doesn’t seem to be common, but there seem to have been some scandals around that, and an increase in regulations. Really gross!

It's more common to unsafely reuse oil than pull it from the sewer. This is done everywhere to some extent (bad grease at a fast food joints, etc), but China does it on a bigger scale.

How do people ever consume that without immediately getting sick?

I think people here are confusing "cook with" to mean either "the fuel source to cook" or "the oil in the pan to aid in cooking".

Unfortunately, no. See also, "frying with transformer oil".

Because it's refined oil.

"Gutter oil", digou you is any illegally recycled and refined oil. It's not necessarily from actual gutters: the "gutter" can be figurative. To be clear, does include, rarely and in the most egregious cases, literal sewer skimmings, but is also buying used cooking oil from food vendors (like from deep fat fryers and grill traps) and animal carcass rendering. Then selling that oil for food use rather than as biofuel or other industrial uses. It can even apply simply to just using once-virgin frying oil for longer than regulations allow.

Truffle oil is 2,4-dithiapentane derived from petroleum, so if you like truffle fries you might not mind

How about coffee?

Heres a video of one of the original engineers brewing coffee with "plastic oil". Does not look healthy given that there is so much black smoke.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbonK7vBCZI