Now even edible oil prices are rising worldwide. Read more on the story below after the jump.

Rising prices for cooking oil are forcing residents of Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai, India, to ration every drop. Bakeries in the United States are fretting over higher shortening costs. And here in Malaysia, brand-new factories built to convert vegetable oil into diesel sit idle, their owners unable to afford the raw material.

This is the other oil shock. From India to Indiana, shortages and soaring prices for palm oil, soybean oil and many other types of vegetable oils are the latest, most striking example of a developing global problem: costly food.

The food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, based on export prices for 60 internationally traded foodstuffs, climbed 37 percent last year. That was on top of a 14 percent increase in 2006, and the trend has accelerated this winter.

In some poor countries, desperation is taking hold. Just in the last week, protests have erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages, and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt has banned rice exports to keep food at home, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs.

According to the F.A.O., food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

“The urban poor, the rural landless and small and marginal farmers stand to lose,” said He Changchui, the agency’s chief representative for Asia and the Pacific.

A startling change is unfolding in the world’s food markets. Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it across the globe. Huge demand for biofuels has created tension between using land to produce fuel and using it for food.

A growing middle class in the developing world is demanding more protein, from pork and hamburgers to chicken and ice cream. And all this is happening even as global climate change may be starting to make it harder to grow food in some of the places best equipped to do so, like Australia.

In the last few years, world demand for crops and meat has been rising sharply. It remains an open question how and when the supply will catch up. For the foreseeable future, that probably means higher prices at the grocery store and fatter paychecks for farmers of major crops like corn, wheat and soybeans.

There may be worse inflation to come. Food experts say steep increases in commodity prices have not fully made their way to street stalls in the developing world or supermarkets in the West.

This lengthy and highly informative article continues. Dare we say, it lends (expensive) food for thought.

It seems that the fast food industry will stop at nothing. We all know the smell of food is very enticing. So does KFC, and according to CNNMoney.com, KFC is unveiling a marketing campaign, literally delivering the scent of their meals to corporate offices. While this may seem like late-night television parody, this is actually happening:

Forget television integrations or corporate naming rights, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s first-ever “scent-focused” pilot program teamed KFC with corporate mail rooms nationwide. Along with carrying inter-office mail, overnight packages and bills, mail carts in Washington, D.C., Chicago and Dallas delivered the aroma of freshly prepared Kentucky Fried Chicken during pre-lunch mail drops…..”

It’s hard to image, Big Mac is 40, and yet, Big Mac is such a cultural icon it is hard to fathom perhaps a time when there was no Big Mac. Big Mac has found its place alongside other iconic foods, such as Coca-Cola or Hostess Twinkies.

In all the various news stories — and there are lots of them — I found this tidbit, from an article in Forbes.com, quite amazing:

A standard Big Mac contains 540 calories, 29 grams of fat, 10 grams of saturated fat, 1,040 milligrams of sodium and 45 grams of carbohydrates. That means Americans consume about 17,582 tons of fat from Big Macs each year, roughly the weight of more than 40 fully loaded Boeing 747 passenger jets.

Sadly, a 540 calorie sandwich is no longer so huge, comparatively speaking. You can find numerous calorie counts here and there of common fast foods, such as this one from AskMen.com. Would you be shocked to know that a chicken burger from Burger King has 710 calories and 43 grams of fat?