The Red Oil My Aunty Sent From Akure Almost Killed My Whole Flat

My aunty sent me a keg of palm oil from Akure last month. She said it was the real one, straight from the village, the kind that stains your fingers red for two days. I was happy. You know how hard it is to find proper palm oil in Lagos that is not just red dye mixed with groundnut oil.

So I cooked stew with it. My neighbour from the flat below came to eat, my guy from the co-working space came to eat, we finished the whole pot. Two days later my neighbour's face started swelling. Then mine. We were scratching like people with chickenpox. I went online to check and saw the news about dye-laced palm oil and coloured pepper circulating in markets. The exact same thing my aunty swore was village-fresh.

See ehn, the thing that pained me was not the swelling. It was that my aunty genuinely believed she was doing me a favour. She bought it from a woman in her market she has known for years. So where exactly is the safe palm oil in this country? Because if the village one is now poison and the Lagos one is fake, what are we even eating?