I recently stumbled upon a drone video showing the effect of palm oil: https://youtu.be/7bTbUOI3qko?t=2397 (around the 40 minute mark), just endless seas of palm trees.
Nutella started as mix of hazelnuts and chocolate (to save on chocolate in Piedmont Italy) now more then 50% of its content is palmoil and sugar. What happend?
I mean it's not really a big mystery, I'm not sure where this discussion is going. A ton of super popular food is ridiculously unhealthy. Coca Cola is basically super-sweet water. Jams don't usually have added fats but they do have a ton of sugar. Cotton Candy is literally only sugar (and some colorant I suppose).
Clearly the incentives here are simple, you want to make a product that people like as much as possible while making it as cheaply as possible. Health is not really a factor, insofar as not too many people don't drop your product because they see it as unhealthy (ads will help with that, all Nutella ads I've seen in France focus on "giving energy to children for their activities" or some bullshit like that).
So that's how you end up with something that's mainly palm oil and sugar. The market has spoken. I'm sure that if they reverted back to their original recipe they'd lose a significant amount of clients.
In America nutella is an obscure condiment generally considered too desserty to be useful for much, sort of like "marshmellow spread". Yet the average European gets approximately 80-90% of their yearly caloric intake from Nutella, from what I've gathered.
Well, to be fair to the parent commenter, Nutella contains about 2/3 the calories of gasoline per unit of weight, so the confusion is understandable. :P
I thought Nutella was famous for two things, neither of them palm oil: Using some crazy percentage of the world's hazelnut supply - a half, a quarter? Not sure. Also for changing the recipe to a new, awful one. Though maybe this added the palm oil.
Palm oil seems to be getting used to substitute other oils and and ingredients in just about everything processed lately.
unfortunately it's being used in a lot of processed food. Nutella is among the most famous but if you carefully read food labels you'll see being used in a lot of more cases (sometimes it might go under a more generic vegetables fats). In Italy there was a big attempt to steer away from palm oil (at least in words) while in other countries it's not something felt at all: for example I live in Germany where you can hardly see any "palm oil free" ribbon on products.
> When the air-gun pellets pierced Hope’s eyes, blinding her, she felt her way up the tree trunks, auburn-furred fingers searching out tropical fruit for sustenance.
> By the end, Hope’s torso was slashed with deep lacerations. Multiple bones were broken. Seventy-four pellets were lodged in her body. Her months-old baby had been ripped away.
This sad story reminds me of this excerpt from the novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn:
“You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.”
We are waging a war on our brothers and sisters. Our collective humanity deteriorate for each and every soul that we trample upon for the sake of economic progress.
To everyone commenting how we should stop using palm oil - please be reminded that just 20 years ago the international community was banding up to urgently encourage switching from other types of vegetable oils to palm oil, as it is the most efficient type of vegetable oil to produce(per hectare of land used). Yes, the situation in those countries sucks and should be stopped - but we have a need for vegetable oils, and they all have a cost associated with them.
I don't remember a concerted push outside industry to switch, more a push by the multinationals. Mainly because it's so cheap. Historically it was usually used in soap and lubricants rather than food as it has the distinctive texture.
I do remember that environmental groups have been complaining of its impact since the 90s - maybe far longer.
Fortunately we have easy solutions to fulfill this need that don't need to distroy climate safety, lose hundred of thousands of rainforest services and products, and to burn a lot of fuel. All just to import palm oil from the other coin of the planet, Indonesia none less.
We can culture in-situ sunflower fields, or olive oil, maize oil, rapeseed oil, Camellia oil, peanut oil, apricot, almond and apple seed oil, carob oil, avocado oil, poppyseed oil, flax, soy... some of those are even byproducts of current activities.
We could save orangutans in zoos, but millions of invisible plants, lichens, insects, frogs and birds aren't so fortunate
It's more of a desire for oils than a need. Humans don't need to eat processed oils at all. We can get all the essential fatty acids we need from regular food -- even without eating fish. Oils are not even healthy, they're just concentrated calories. It's just that they taste good.
As far as for other uses of vegetable oils, I can't really comment.
Hmm, you know what, I've been researching this a bit more and it seems like I was wrong. Apparently many cultures did boil seeds to produce oils for cooking or other purposes. I expect that they probably didn't eat as much oil as we do, given that this would have been more labor intensive than what we can do with modern farming and factories. But it makes sense to try to get your calories any way you can.
I don't know about others, but I don't really care about the taste of oil. My main use of oil is to lubricate so food doesn't stick to pans (non-stick coating doesn't completely eliminate this need) and also to penetrate food and aid in its thorough cooking.
I can live without oil, but, for example, that means I cannot make fried eggs, scrambled eggs, or omelettes. I can only think of making hard-boiled eggs, or poached eggs. Not using oil really seems to limit options.
Also, I don't think this is a problem limited to oil. It's probably a problem with most parts of our food sourcing.
There's also lots to be heard on the animal cruelty done to chickens in the interest of efficiency and bringing down costs for the production of eggs and chicken meat. For example, they're supposedly put in cages too small to stretch, and their beaks are broken to avoid them killing each other out of desperation[1]. From the source I referenced:
> Since birds crowded like this commonly go mad and peck one another to death, these birds were debeaked, a practice whereby workers grab baby chicks in one hand and thrust their beaks between hot, steaming blades. Workers cut off anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of chicks’ beaks while they’re fully conscious. The industry calls this “trimming their beaks.” But slicing chickens’ beaks off with a heated blade or a scissor device, as is frequently done, is not like trimming your nails. Birds’ beaks are sensitive, highly innervated and able to feel pain and other sensations. It would be like having your toes cut off without anesthesia. Not only do chickens rely on their beaks for many functions, having their beaks severed causes them immense, acute, and, often, lifelong pain.
> I can live without oil, but, for example, that means I cannot make fried eggs, scrambled eggs, or omelettes. I can only think of making hard-boiled eggs, or poached eggs. Not using oil really seems to limit options.
You don't need oil, you just need a better non-stick pan.
I'm using Tefal/T-fal, the original creators of non-stick cookware, and the pans are practically new (got them a few months ago). I'd like to think they're good enough.
Can you really make a fried egg by putting just the egg on a pan, and avoid the bottom caramelizing? There's also the concern of the lifetime of the pan. Tefal recommends adding a layer of oil to the pan before use (I think it's called curing or seasoning a pan?).
From my personal experience you can't. I'm using butter. (for health reason I should use clarified butter I know...) Though I'm not sure that cows are better treated than orangutans
I'd rather not cook with chemically treated pans that always eventually become stick as the coating wears off. I'll stick with my stainless or cast iron that'll last me a lifetime.
Tragic as it is I feel this piece illustrates the idea of bourgeois sentimentalism quite well.[0]
Some animals get a ton of support and money thrown at them while less marketable animals tend to produce no reaction when treated horrifically.
Whenever there is a tension between a group of poor locals and first world emotional interest around ecological conservation, the problem is that the locals can sense quite clearly (as the father does at the end of the piece) how little their lives are valued compared to that of animals. You can have a non-human species get a Swiss surgeon flown in, while they would never experience this level of medical care of attention themselves.
I'm certainly not condoning the horrific actions towards those animals, but underneath that tragedy there is a bigger issue at hand and a big reason why certain ecological projects fail due to zero interest in incentivizing locals. The best conservation programs tend to involve the entire community.
In the end you have frustrated first worlders wondering why the locals won't cooperate and do as they are told, even though the reason for this lack of interest is precisely the barely concealed contempt that emanates towards them. Sending trash in the guise of recycling, pollution and outsourcing negative externalities their way such as the palm oil industry while forbidding them from doing whatever might have a negative externality on first worlders.
Having grown up in the third world, and now living in the first, I get the very distinct feeling of people in the first world wanting to push away the latter they used to rise up, since it is 'dirty'.
Not to say I support the barbarism mentioned in the article.
This is such an important point that's easy to lose sight of. It's so easy to imagine ourselves as better than others; all the more so when those others live lives unfathomably different from our own. On that note, I want to share a favorite quote of mine, about the burgeoning of empathy via psychedelics:
"My most recent mushroom trip (also the largest dose I've ever taken) I became fixated on a news story I had heard that week. About an 8 year old girl from a tribe in the Amazon, who was tied to a tree and burned alive in order to scare her people off their land so it could be logged. I realized that at the moment he did it, whoever lit that gasoline actually felt/thought more or less okay about what he was doing. And my mind was illuminated with dozens of the parallels between that man's malformed, horrific perceptual/behavioral state, and mine. I saw the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance of the consequences of my acts and words. And there was nothing I could do to deny the similarity."
Environmentalism and endangered species protection is the new colonialism. Rich white people impose their values on poor brown people and try to prevent them from doing the same things that they did to develop, and rather try to keep them as the “noble savages” living in a “pristine wilderness.”
When Malaysia and Indonesia overtook West Africa in producing palm oil due to an "efficient" focus on large scale plantations, we decried it as another sign of Africa's regression, and in Nigeria's specific case, a sign of petro-dollar's damaging impact on a previously robust agro-economy.
Palm oil became a thing when cheap, shelf stable fats in the form of partially hydrogenated oil were realized to be unhealthy. Instead of the world giving up the eternally fresh package of Oreos, we move to massive production of tropical oils which are also shelf stable. It's probably time to reevaluate if we can sustain our appetite for snacks using a very small amount of precious land in the tropics that can grow palm oil.
There are alternatives to Palm oil. The most straightforward is replacing it with rendered fat from pigs or cows (lard or tallow). This has its own ethics and environmental concerns. Another solution is to revisit oil hydrogenation. We can fully hydrogenate oils such as soybean into a saturated fat very similar to that found in tallow. The resulting fat is healthier than partially hydrogenated oil, and arguably healthier than unprocessed soy oil too. It is not difficult to work with and has a neutral flavors, which is desirable for the processed food industry. We just need to get over our fear of this process.
A significant fraction of the population has a religious or moral objection to eating lard. A smaller but still substantial part of the population objects to tallow based on vegetarianism or the terrible environmental impact of cattle raising.
McDonald's fries are a special case, because, as some vegetarians discovered after years of being misled by their "cooked in 100% vegetable oil" claims, they're already flavored with beef tallow.
The same thing has ruined potato chips. All the good chip brands in this country now have limited regional distribution at best. The tyranny of Frito-Lay has totally ruined the chip industry.
Just about everyone's chips (fries) and crisps (chips!) are a shadow of their former selves. When I was a kid just about everyone made their chips and crisps in beef dripping or lard. Now not even all supermarkets carry it, all bags of crisps use veggie oil, and the only place we get decent chips is at home.
Yet beef consumption has risen hugely over the same timescales.
I find it hard to impossible to avoid palmoil in food. I eat vegetarian/vegan, which makes it even more difficult. To just mention the most frustrating/difficult to avoid one: to find margarine that doesn't use palmoil seems near impossible.
And it's in everything 'ready' - cookies, bread, chocolate, curry sauce, any ready meal, any fastfood you buy, ...
Alternative oils such as sunflower or rapeseed oils should be able to (and used to!) cover most of these use cases, but sadly our food industry seems to choose palmoil despite the ecological damage (rainforest destruction, monocultures, erosion, ...) and the widely reported slavery and social harm. Some companies (such as Ferrero) slap 'certificates' of non-harm on the package, which have little evidence behind them and, if anything, will still mean that the demand for palm oil keeps increasing.
Really disappointing. Hope companies become more conscious rather than just cost-conscious.
In Italy, there seems to be a whole campaign against palm oil. Many product wrappers, including those of margarine, claim to be free of palm oil in quite a big font. So at least in Italy there is awareness. I do not know what prompted this.
There's often palm oil in your car's fuel too which is why its culture is so extensive: it will be hard to avoid, and you'll burn more in your car than you can eat...
More like "74 air rifle pellets found in body of deceased, blind, pregnant orangutan" but hey, "fully automatic assault weapon slaughters endangered species" is a good headline too.
Several highly endangered iberian lynx are found dead each year with riffle pellets in the corpse. In 2019. Everybody knows that is a very rare animal. Some people just don't care or even enjoy doing harm.
Africa has lost 9 of each 10 lions in the last decades trying to repay its debt.
And 9 of each 10 tuna fishes and ridgeback turtles were also vanished
Is a full fledged global war against nature happening in all places at the same time.
Actually, I'd like to exchange one form of sensationalism for another.
It's a particularly egregious atrocity to harm animals like orangutans, even if that sentiment represents a blind spot that neglects less charismatic portions of the environment and glosses over comparable human tragedy.
But the headline sounds like a bank heist with high powered firearms, and that conjures different imagery than the facts of the story.
Slingshots, bow and arrow, air rifles and hunting knives are a different class of weapon.
Getting "shot" is an entirely different injury that can shatter bones and rip internal organs to shreds. To say that an animal was "shot" 74 times creates an impression of a body so mutilated that it might be unrecognizable.
74 bullet wounds also usually don't trickle in over years. If an animal gets shot 74 times it's probably going to happen in less than a minute. It's also rare to little more than only blinded by a small caliber bullet wound to the eye. Often the bullet tends to enter the skull and destroy the brain, making it impossible to climb trees.
I'd rather see the headline communicate that human activity is a constant threat to these animals, and that protection needs to endure decades. These animals aren't just vulnerable to poaching, but also pranks and the malign entertainment value that idle humans derive from antagonize them is seriously harmful ways.
The headline fails to capture this sentiment. With the shocking treatment, it suggests that one person heinously abused one animal in a single incident of overkill with a hunting rifle, and that maybe there's an effort to capture and prosecute one poacher for one particularly improper killing.
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Before I wasn't aware of its effect on orangutan habitats.
Always wonder who's buying Nutella. Sugar and palmoil.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutella
Clearly the incentives here are simple, you want to make a product that people like as much as possible while making it as cheaply as possible. Health is not really a factor, insofar as not too many people don't drop your product because they see it as unhealthy (ads will help with that, all Nutella ads I've seen in France focus on "giving energy to children for their activities" or some bullshit like that).
So that's how you end up with something that's mainly palm oil and sugar. The market has spoken. I'm sure that if they reverted back to their original recipe they'd lose a significant amount of clients.
we are invastigating how food insdustry transformed healthy snacks into palmoil and sugar to great harm for sumatrean jungle and its habitat.
Palm oil seems to be getting used to substitute other oils and and ingredients in just about everything processed lately.
Welcome to the meat industry's response to the threat.
Most dietary paranoia is driven by political polarization.
It would be interesting if humans could have tougher skin layers like many mammals do
I had only read the part at the beginning that made it clear she was alive
> By the end, Hope’s torso was slashed with deep lacerations. Multiple bones were broken. Seventy-four pellets were lodged in her body. Her months-old baby had been ripped away.
We are waging a war on our brothers and sisters. Our collective humanity deteriorate for each and every soul that we trample upon for the sake of economic progress.
I do remember that environmental groups have been complaining of its impact since the 90s - maybe far longer.
Fortunately we have easy solutions to fulfill this need that don't need to distroy climate safety, lose hundred of thousands of rainforest services and products, and to burn a lot of fuel. All just to import palm oil from the other coin of the planet, Indonesia none less.
We can culture in-situ sunflower fields, or olive oil, maize oil, rapeseed oil, Camellia oil, peanut oil, apricot, almond and apple seed oil, carob oil, avocado oil, poppyseed oil, flax, soy... some of those are even byproducts of current activities.
We could save orangutans in zoos, but millions of invisible plants, lichens, insects, frogs and birds aren't so fortunate
As far as for other uses of vegetable oils, I can't really comment.
I don't know about others, but I don't really care about the taste of oil. My main use of oil is to lubricate so food doesn't stick to pans (non-stick coating doesn't completely eliminate this need) and also to penetrate food and aid in its thorough cooking.
I can live without oil, but, for example, that means I cannot make fried eggs, scrambled eggs, or omelettes. I can only think of making hard-boiled eggs, or poached eggs. Not using oil really seems to limit options.
Also, I don't think this is a problem limited to oil. It's probably a problem with most parts of our food sourcing.
There's also lots to be heard on the animal cruelty done to chickens in the interest of efficiency and bringing down costs for the production of eggs and chicken meat. For example, they're supposedly put in cages too small to stretch, and their beaks are broken to avoid them killing each other out of desperation[1]. From the source I referenced:
> Since birds crowded like this commonly go mad and peck one another to death, these birds were debeaked, a practice whereby workers grab baby chicks in one hand and thrust their beaks between hot, steaming blades. Workers cut off anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of chicks’ beaks while they’re fully conscious. The industry calls this “trimming their beaks.” But slicing chickens’ beaks off with a heated blade or a scissor device, as is frequently done, is not like trimming your nails. Birds’ beaks are sensitive, highly innervated and able to feel pain and other sensations. It would be like having your toes cut off without anesthesia. Not only do chickens rely on their beaks for many functions, having their beaks severed causes them immense, acute, and, often, lifelong pain.
Maybe I should just stop eating eggs altogether.
Really, maybe I should just go vegan.
[1] https://www.salon.com/2019/04/20/i-studied-factory-farms-for...
You don't need oil, you just need a better non-stick pan.
Cast iron with your choice of fat has served me well since switching over completely from non-stick.
Can you really make a fried egg by putting just the egg on a pan, and avoid the bottom caramelizing? There's also the concern of the lifetime of the pan. Tefal recommends adding a layer of oil to the pan before use (I think it's called curing or seasoning a pan?).
Some animals get a ton of support and money thrown at them while less marketable animals tend to produce no reaction when treated horrifically.
Whenever there is a tension between a group of poor locals and first world emotional interest around ecological conservation, the problem is that the locals can sense quite clearly (as the father does at the end of the piece) how little their lives are valued compared to that of animals. You can have a non-human species get a Swiss surgeon flown in, while they would never experience this level of medical care of attention themselves.
I'm certainly not condoning the horrific actions towards those animals, but underneath that tragedy there is a bigger issue at hand and a big reason why certain ecological projects fail due to zero interest in incentivizing locals. The best conservation programs tend to involve the entire community.
In the end you have frustrated first worlders wondering why the locals won't cooperate and do as they are told, even though the reason for this lack of interest is precisely the barely concealed contempt that emanates towards them. Sending trash in the guise of recycling, pollution and outsourcing negative externalities their way such as the palm oil industry while forbidding them from doing whatever might have a negative externality on first worlders.
[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1881/12/25.htm
Having grown up in the third world, and now living in the first, I get the very distinct feeling of people in the first world wanting to push away the latter they used to rise up, since it is 'dirty'.
Not to say I support the barbarism mentioned in the article.
"My most recent mushroom trip (also the largest dose I've ever taken) I became fixated on a news story I had heard that week. About an 8 year old girl from a tribe in the Amazon, who was tied to a tree and burned alive in order to scare her people off their land so it could be logged. I realized that at the moment he did it, whoever lit that gasoline actually felt/thought more or less okay about what he was doing. And my mind was illuminated with dozens of the parallels between that man's malformed, horrific perceptual/behavioral state, and mine. I saw the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance of the consequences of my acts and words. And there was nothing I could do to deny the similarity."
Holistic Progress = Undefined.
There are alternatives to Palm oil. The most straightforward is replacing it with rendered fat from pigs or cows (lard or tallow). This has its own ethics and environmental concerns. Another solution is to revisit oil hydrogenation. We can fully hydrogenate oils such as soybean into a saturated fat very similar to that found in tallow. The resulting fat is healthier than partially hydrogenated oil, and arguably healthier than unprocessed soy oil too. It is not difficult to work with and has a neutral flavors, which is desirable for the processed food industry. We just need to get over our fear of this process.
I googled it, some breakfast items (egg mcmuffin, panckages) and apple pie.
It's probably just a money saving feature. I'm already old (34) and I've only ever eaten the veggie oil McD's fries.
(The rest of Revisionist History is also great!)
Yet beef consumption has risen hugely over the same timescales.
And it's in everything 'ready' - cookies, bread, chocolate, curry sauce, any ready meal, any fastfood you buy, ...
Alternative oils such as sunflower or rapeseed oils should be able to (and used to!) cover most of these use cases, but sadly our food industry seems to choose palmoil despite the ecological damage (rainforest destruction, monocultures, erosion, ...) and the widely reported slavery and social harm. Some companies (such as Ferrero) slap 'certificates' of non-harm on the package, which have little evidence behind them and, if anything, will still mean that the demand for palm oil keeps increasing.
Really disappointing. Hope companies become more conscious rather than just cost-conscious.
Africa has lost 9 of each 10 lions in the last decades trying to repay its debt.
And 9 of each 10 tuna fishes and ridgeback turtles were also vanished
Is a full fledged global war against nature happening in all places at the same time.
It's a particularly egregious atrocity to harm animals like orangutans, even if that sentiment represents a blind spot that neglects less charismatic portions of the environment and glosses over comparable human tragedy.
But the headline sounds like a bank heist with high powered firearms, and that conjures different imagery than the facts of the story.
Slingshots, bow and arrow, air rifles and hunting knives are a different class of weapon.
Getting "shot" is an entirely different injury that can shatter bones and rip internal organs to shreds. To say that an animal was "shot" 74 times creates an impression of a body so mutilated that it might be unrecognizable.
74 bullet wounds also usually don't trickle in over years. If an animal gets shot 74 times it's probably going to happen in less than a minute. It's also rare to little more than only blinded by a small caliber bullet wound to the eye. Often the bullet tends to enter the skull and destroy the brain, making it impossible to climb trees.
I'd rather see the headline communicate that human activity is a constant threat to these animals, and that protection needs to endure decades. These animals aren't just vulnerable to poaching, but also pranks and the malign entertainment value that idle humans derive from antagonize them is seriously harmful ways.
The headline fails to capture this sentiment. With the shocking treatment, it suggests that one person heinously abused one animal in a single incident of overkill with a hunting rifle, and that maybe there's an effort to capture and prosecute one poacher for one particularly improper killing.