An exploration of cooking spray, from its mid-century origins and aerosol technology to its many uses, nutritional quirks, and the question of whether we’re actually getting any olive oil out of that can. There are certain kitchen products that don’t get nearly enough attention. They’re not particularly glamorous, they don’t photograph especially well, and nobody is likely to give you one as a hostess gift unless they’ve seriously misunderstood the assignment. Vegetable oil spray is one of them. It lives somewhere between the olive oil bottle and the miscellaneous drawer containing three vegetable peelers, a corkscrew nobody knows how to