Your Chemistry Teacher Was Trying to Tell You Something
Published on HivePostify by @gentleshaid · Fri Sep 04 2026
I've been teaching Chemistry for more than 5 years now, and it amazes me how people don't see many subjects beyond the classroom and passing exams. Just a couple of days ago, I was teaching a student about separation techniques, and the way she looked surprised when I linked filtration to one of the processes that lead to the production of "ogi", a locally made corn starch meal in Nigeria.
Recently, on the popular platform known as X, there has been an outpouring of complaints about fake palm oil circulating in the country. According to many of the claims, these palm oils are unusually red and give off a rather unnatural scent. In short, something else has been added to improve the aesthetics of the oils; a typical chronic capitalism's move.
For something as natural as palm oil, there are two basic pieces of Chemistry knowledge that can be used to identify its adulterated versions. The first is solubility, and the second is density.
Palm oil is immiscible with water. In other words, from now till eternity and under standard conditions, palm oil will not dissolve in water. An immiscible mixture of palm oil and water can be separated using a separating funnel. Enhancing the aesthetic appearance of palm oil will most likely require colouring additives that are mostly soluble in water. Hence, mixing an adulterated palm oil with water may end up producing coloured water due to the dissolution of the colouring additives in the water.
By Minette Lontsie - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63986402
Palm oil is less dense than water under standard conditions. This can also be a useful tool in detecting adulterated palm oil. When two liquids are immiscible and differ in density, the less-dense one will float on the denser one. Thus, under natural conditions, pure palm oil will float on water. Once your own palm oil sinks in water, you've got yourself a modified palm oil.
A warning note, though. The above tests are not foolproof ways of determining the authenticity of palm oil. While it is almost impossible for authentic palm oil to fail the two tests, passing them is not a guarantee that such palm oil is genuine or unadulterated. In other words, palm oil can be adulterated with substances that are oil-soluble but water-insoluble, while not all adulterated palm oil will be denser than water.
And this is where the whole thing becomes bigger than palm oil.
We live in a world where diseases of unknown origins, sources, and cures keep proliferating in our environment. We live in a world where cancer is now a dozen for a penny. We are in a society where wealth is celebrated without questioning its origin. Worse still, we live in a world where the skills acquired in classes are refused to be applied in real life.
What is the point of teaching a child solubility, density, filtration, distillation, chromatography, and all the other "things in the syllabus" if they cannot recognise those principles when they encounter them outside the classroom?
Perhaps we have been teaching too much for examinations and too little for life.
The knowledge we acquire in school should not end with the last examination paper. It should follow us into the kitchen, the market, the laboratory, the workplace, and every other place where life presents us with problems to solve.
Education becomes truly useful when we stop asking, "Will this come out in the exam?" and start asking, "Where can I use this in real life?"
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