It means that will use either interchangeably depending upon current market price.

It means our food system is literally that broken. That they couldn't even tell you in a life or death situation how much of which oil is in the product. And people think this stuff is edible?!

My favorite is cottonseed oil. Great idea. We have warehouses of agricultural waste, what should we do with it? Let's put it in food for humans!

It's also a marketing ploy. Despite what the paleo folks understand, many people still think canola is healthy. But, it's more expensive than some of the others. So, when they put "canola, soybean, and/or cottonseed oil" on the label, our brains go "Oh canola! That's good for me!" and buy it, when realistically, it's probably soy or cottonseed.

It means they use multiple factories/processing centers, and they vary in the way they process things, but these guys want to save $0.005 per label by using a more generic label.

Sometimes you'll see something labeled "May Contain Almonds" on say, chocolate bars. The ones that say Almond have the almonds, the ones that don't, don't. This is also a cost savings measure on the label.

Isn't it remarkable, how most of us are raised with the idea of Food as a dependable constant, so much so that we don't think about it except in terms of foods we "like" or "don't like," only to find out, as life unfolds, that the sense of constancy is an illusion and we need to make choices using criteria nobody - not Mom, not Dad, not Grandma - ever mentioned.

Yes, either/or clearly indicates the food system is broken. Let's face it: the food system wasn't created with optimal human performance in mind, though its purveyors are often keen to use that sort of language. The simplest thing to bear in mind, as someone other than me first pointed out, is that the center aisles of the grocery are filled with packaged, processed foods we do well largely to avoid, while the outer aisles are stocked with items our ancestors would have recognized as real food: meats, seafood, veggies, fruit.

The fact that we come to a place like PH to ask questions and seek information is because we are engaged in thinking for ourselves about food choices. For me this continues to drive home the craziness of the default food contexts we encounter daily - for instance, at "convenience" stores where one many of folks manage to find "foods" to constitute "meals" on a regular basis.

Onward...