hydrogenation

The hydrogenation is there so things don't rot or otherwise degrade in distasteful ways.

The hydrogenation is what keeps the oil from separating.

Even the original margarine (before the invention of hydrogenation) is more processed than the best bread and butter.

Obviously that's apples and oranges -- GMO foods don't do the same thing that food processing, oil hydrogenation, etc.

Should have probably invented a new product name for it though, but modern margarine uses different processes than partial hydrogenation.

Biohydrogenation is a totally different process from the hydrogenation used to make margarine from seed oils.

Hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) is a biofuel made by the hydrocracking or hydrogenation of vegetable oil.

Industrial hydrogenation is done by raising oil to very high temperatures in the presence of a nickel catalyst & then adding hydrogen.

There's a lot of forms of fat - different combos of length of the chain (omega #), amount of saturation, hydrogenation, triglycerides.

It also happens that the hydrogenation produces as a byproduct a small amount of trans fat contamination (this was never the goal, to produce trans fats -- it is a hard to avoid side effect of hydrogenation).

The key step in partial hydrogenation is mixing hydrogen with the oil, [1] while a step in canola refining is mixing hexane with the oil.

The bulk of the emission (10–30 GHz) appears to be associated with 60–80 carbon atoms fulleranes with a degree of hydrogenation of C:H ≈ 3:1.

[Wikipedia] Other processes are hydrogenation, flour bleaching and modification of starch (starches treated with chemicals and/or enzymes), and whatever makes "lemon juice solids" and "yeast extract".