Mustard oil and the 'banned in America' story — what it actually means

Every few months the forward goes around again: mustard oil is banned in America. One camp reads it as proof that something is wrong with the oil our grandmothers cooked in. The other reads it as a conspiracy against Indian kitchens. The real story is duller than both — it is a tale about one fatty acid, some 1970s rats and two regulators doing their jobs with different histories. Here it is, straight, from a company that presses mustard oil for a living and would rather you knew the facts than feared the forward.

Is mustard oil actually banned in the United States?

Not in the way the word suggests. Nobody confiscates mustard oil at the airport, and Indian grocery stores across America sell it openly. What is true: the US FDA has never permitted mustard oil to be sold as an edible oil, and imported bottles are required to carry the label "For External Use Only". There is a standing FDA import alert that lets shipments of expressed mustard oil intended as food be detained.

So the accurate sentence is: in the US, mustard oil may be sold, but not as food. The bottles on the shelf are labelled for external use, and everyone in the shop knows what happens to them at home. That legal wink has been running for decades.

What is erucic acid, and is it the pungency?

Erucic acid is a long-chain monounsaturated fatty acid found across the brassica family — mustard, rapeseed and their cousins. In traditional mustard oil it makes up a large share of the fat, commonly around 40 per cent depending on the seed.

It is worth separating two things the forwards constantly blur. Erucic acid is not the pungency. The sharp nose-filling character of kachi ghani mustard oil comes from allyl isothiocyanate, a different compound released from the seed's own precursors during pressing. The fatty acid at the centre of the American story is, by itself, odourless and unremarkable — the debate is purely about how much of it a diet should carry.

Where did the concern come from?

The 1970s. Feeding studies in rats found that diets extremely heavy in erucic acid led to fatty build-up in the heart muscle of the animals. Regulators in several Western countries took the precautionary route: Canada's plant breeders developed rapeseed varieties with under 2 per cent erucic acid — canola, the name itself short for Canadian oil — and erucic acid limits were written into Western food rules. The US, which had no food tradition of mustard oil to weigh on the other side, simply never cleared it for the table.

Two honest footnotes belong on that story. First, later scientific work questioned how well those rat findings map onto people — rats process this particular fat unusually poorly, and the effect seen at those extreme experimental doses has not been demonstrated in humans eating mustard oil as food. Second, mustard oil has been the everyday cooking fat of North India, Bengal, Bangladesh and Nepal for centuries — an enormous, continuous record of ordinary use that any honest reading weighs alongside the rat studies. We state both footnotes as facts, not as a verdict.

What does FSSAI say in India?

In India, mustard oil is a fully lawful, standardised edible oil. FSSAI's food standards define its identity and quality parameters, including a specific kachi ghani grade — the cold-pressed style we make. And since June 2021, FSSAI has prohibited blended mustard oil outright: what is sold as mustard oil in India must be pure mustard oil, not a blend stretched with cheaper oils. That rule exists because blending was the actual scandal in this category, and it is worth knowing your regulator closed it.

So which regulator is right?

Both are behaving rationally with the evidence and the food cultures in front of them. The US had no mustard-oil tradition, so precaution cost American kitchens nothing. India has several centuries of daily use and a cuisine built around the oil, so FSSAI standardised it and polices purity instead. Neither position is a conspiracy, and neither is a verdict on your kitchen.

Our own position is the boring, honest one. If you live under the FDA's rules, the label means what it says — we are not going to advise anyone to wink at their regulator. If you cook in India, you are using a lawful, standardised oil with one of the longest continuous track records any cooking fat has anywhere, and the "banned in America" forward should change nothing about your Sunday sarson ka saag.

What does this mean in your kitchen?

Nothing new — the tradition already had it right. Mustard oil's 250°C / 482°F smoke point makes it the strongest frying oil we press, the first-smoke ritual — heating it once until it just smokes, then letting it calm — remains the classical way to mellow the raw pungency for a tadka, and it is still the only oil an achaar barni respects. Why achaar is always made with kachi ghani mustard oil covers that last part properly.

We press both: Truly Cold Pressed black mustard oil, the loud classic, and Truly Cold Pressed yellow mustard oil for households that want the same oil with a gentler nose. Both are pure, single-seed, wooden-ghani pressed — which, after the blending story above, is the one claim on a mustard oil label worth checking hardest.