Traditionally, Indians have cooked with aromatic and strongly flavoured oils like mustard, groundnut, coconut and sesame depending on which part of the country they lived in. The move to foreign vegetable and seed oils like palm and sunflower has possibly something to do with rising urbanisation and cosmopolitanism. These oils are also cheap and makers have sold them as healthier alternatives. "Our cooking oil crisis is partly self-made because of lobbies which have successfully sold imported vegetable oils," says Pritha Sen, a food historian.