What is oil, why do we cook with it, and why do things taste so much better with it?
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An oil is essentially a long string (or series of connected strings) of carbon and hydrogen. They are poly-mers where each “mer” is a carbon link in a chain of carbons. They are extremely energy dense, and our body is capable of extracting energy from a couple varieties of them. Our body is not capable of digesting some others, (like the ones you find in the ground). Most plants and animals also use fat as a sort of energy storage chemical.
Anyway, our taste buds like the ones that we are capable of eating, because they are a nice extremely rich source of calories. More than that, most plants and animals store useful things in fats: micronutrients like vitamin A D and K are all primarily found in fats. So generally they’re a nice find. So we, generally speaking, evolved to really like how they taste so that we’d have a desire to eat them. Us cooking with it these days is mostly an exploit, of sorts, of our evolutionary urges.
Also fat just happens to be a really convenient way to transfer heat more gently and evenly to food so that it all cooks evenly (less wasted food because the surface doesn’t burn, and the interior gets more cooked and safer to eat). This is a nice added bonus more than anything, and kindof a coincidence. This also adds more fat to food, which our tastebuds happen to already like a lot.
Another added bonus is that oil is really useful for producing the texture of certain baked and fried goods, generally keeping thinga soft enough for our relatively fragile teeth from wearing down.
Bottom line, oil is good stuff that we had a lot of evolutionary and historical reasons to like
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