Why palm oil is in everything, and why that's bad

this video is sponsored by audible and this is by far the most consumed vegetable oil in the world, or at least this is that oil in something closer to its original traditional form, the version used in processed foods today , soaps, cosmetics, biofuels, all kinds of things could be seen. More like this or maybe this can be refined in countless ways, but they are all fats derived from the fruit of the oil

palm

. This is by far the number one edible fat in the entire world. It and its derivatives are probably in dozens of products in your home right now, quite possibly on or in your body, it's a bad thing, probably yes, I think it's probably a bad thing, at least from an environmental standpoint, although I'm not entirely convinced that the alternatives are much better.

Unless you think cutting down on so much fat is an alternative, it probably should be. If you're wondering how

palm

oil ended up in

everything

and endangered the world, you're in luck because that's the subtitle of Long Time Food's new book Planet Palm. and the environmental journalist Jocelyn Zuckerman, the flesh of the fruit is crushed and from there you get palm oil and then inside there is a seed and you can also crush it and you get palm oil, so you get two different types of Fruit oil and seed oil are mainly used in cosmetics, so this is the first.

This is an oil made from the fruit. Some of the fruit was made in Ghana. The oil palm is native to West Africa, where it has been used as cooking oil. for thousands of years in its relatively unrefined form like this it has a very strong flavor I don't know how to describe it it has this kind of bitter thing this very vegetal thing it has the aroma of my spice drawer the first thing you see I probably noticed that the color is right , that the color comes from keratinoids, the same things that make carrots, tomatoes, and salmon orange, but the material used in processed foods has been treated in all these different ways to make it basically tasteless, odorless, colorless, the other thing.

You've probably noticed that it is a thick palm oil that has 50 saturated fat, so it is semi-solid at room temperature. The oil made from the seed or kernel of the fruit is even more saturated, it's like 80 percent saturated. This is palm kernel oil. Because they are so saturated, these fats behave more like animal fats which are generally quite saturated, as a result they are solid at room temperature or semi-solid at room temperature and spoil less quickly, oxidize less quickly and turn rancid where you live. In the southern United States, the really abundant oil a century or two ago was cottonseed oil, a byproduct of the cotton textile industry.

That oil is mostly unsaturated, so it spoiled very quickly, and it is liquid, so you can't make soap or cookies with it. The industrialist who built this house in Macon, Georgia, was among the geniuses who discovered that hydrogen atoms could be added to unsaturated fats and make them more viscous and more stable, hence Crisco crystallized cottonseed oil. I have a bit about that linked in the description, if you get the oil from a palm tree instead, it's already saturated, there's no need for sophisticated modern industrial processing, it's already saturated. This is a very rare property for a vegetable oil to have in the oil obtained from the giant seed or kernel of the coconut. the tree is about 90 saturated what we consider a coconut, the brown and white thing that is the core of the coconut 90 saturated, that fat is, but the coconut palm does not produce as much oil as the oil palm, the productivity of the palms of oil is crazy in Africa they are very tall and thin and people had to climb them and it was often false to find the way they are raised now, particularly in Southeast Asia, they don't grow as tall and the trunks are much thicker. but the originals look like a coconut palm.

What I found so interesting when I was researching this book was that basically the infrastructure for the slave trade when the slave trade was banned, the British traders started getting palm oil and using that. infrastructure, it was particularly in the um niger delta, a kind of swampy area and then in the rivers that go up inland, where oil palm trees grew naturally, so the canoes that they used to use to transport human beings to The slave trade began to transport palms. oil um and it was used during the second industrial revolution for soaps, in particular people started working in factories and came home very dirty, so soap became much more important, also for use in lighting lamps and Finally, in margarines, ah, oil-based margarine.

Butter Replacements Is there anything more emblematic of what food writer Michael Pollan calls the American Paradox? his books such as the omnivore's dilemma are now available on audible the sponsor of this video we are going to thank them and listen to what pollen means when talking about something called the French paradox because how is it possible that a people that consumes substances as manifestly toxic as foie gras and triple cream cheese be thinner and healthier than us? I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox that is remarkably unhealthy. people obsessed with the idea of ​​eating healthy if you think you don't have time to read books like these consider listening to audible while you do the dishes or something like that if you get an audible membership you'll get one credit a month for a title in the premium selection, which are new releases and such, you download the title and own it forever, in addition to that download per month, you get full access to the audible plus catalog, which is basically

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Free versions of your favorite podcasts. All the ways to get a little joy and enlightenment in your ears when you think you don't have time. You can try audible free for 30 days. Do you and me a favor. Visit audible.com. Slash Adam. ragusia or text adam ragusia at 500 500 get that 30 day trial of audible with my link in the description audible.com adam ragusia thanks audible now we were talking about the dubious advent of margarine, butter based replacements of vegetable oil could be made with naturally saturated palm oil which could also be made with unsaturated oils that have been partially hydrogenated, the problem with that, of course, is that it produces trans fats which medical science now considers to be basically the worst kind of fat. fat that can be eaten, in fact, crisco is now no longer manufactured. with trans fats or if there are trans fats here, it is a very, very small amount, what is here instead, well, a few things, but one of them is palm oil.

The big push to remove trans fats from processed foods is certainly part of palm oil's meteoric rise. But it's not even close to being the full story. In our new book here, Jocelyn Zuckerman shows how palm oil is popular because yes, it is naturally well suited to many commercial applications and because it is extremely cheap. Part of the reason it's so cheap is because of how productive oil palm is, the yield you get per acre of cultivated land is crazy, it's way ahead of any other oil crop, but there's another reason why it's so cheap. that it's about cheap stolen land, slave labor, a lot of this is the history of the modern palm oil industry.

It starts with the introduction of that African tree into Southeast Asia, most of today's palm oil comes from Malaysia and Indonesia, it basically grows best 10 degrees north and south of the equator, so it's basically the tropical belt in Everyone, these are basically the same thing. The places where rubber trees grow and European colonial rubber plantations started changing to oil palm when synthetic rubber started to affect their business, but then after independence these governments had a lot of poor people and gave them plots of land and oil palm seedlings and encouraged them. They were promised to grow oil, like I said, a poverty alleviation plan in the lakes, and then once the industry learned how to break it down and process it for all these different uses, then they were able to sell it more around the world, which led to the resulting deforestation of vital tropical forests.

The rainforest has been enormous in its contribution to global warming and its habitat devastation. You've probably already heard about the whole orangutan thing. Orangutans are humanity's closest living relative. If you've ever looked one in the eye, it's direct. It's like looking at a person. Orangutans are losing their homes to oil palms, although they are not the only important species affected. What about humans? In Malaysia and Indonesia in particular, Malaysia has a smaller population and a higher standard of living, so many Malaysians are not particularly interested in these menial jobs on the oil pump plantations, so They say they depend on a lot of imported labor, often from Bangladesh, from Myanmar, Rohingya, and many of these people are brought in under false pretenses, they are recruiters.

They come to their villages and tell them we can get them jobs in restaurants or other hotels, they put them on a boat and then they traffic them and then they land on these plantations, often they confiscate their passports and they have to pay, basically, pay. of these salaries that they've paid recruiters in advance thinking they're going to get good jobs and then they're stranded on these plantations and some of them have had to literally, you know, escape under the cover of night. The United States and other countries have banned imports or otherwise sanctioned certain palm oil producers for these abuses, but Zuckerman's report shows how it can be really difficult to trace the origin of the oil once it's all mixed up on the market. international commodity and refining process.

So that's what she means by slave labor, what does she mean by stolen land? Well, as an example, in your book you travel here to Liberia, where the government there is running their oil palm industry by renting the jungle to big companies, that land is inhabited, but not by people who live a lifestyle modern and developed, people like that are difficult to displace without significant compensation, but people who lead an older or more traditional lifestyle are often less able to assert their rights; The people who had lived on that land received small payments and but now they had no place to farm or live and they said their rivers were poisoned because of agrochemicals, but the government wanted to use this as a poverty alleviation plan and therefore That's why governments tend to be on the side of the companies that give them, there's often a lot of corruption involved too, so the companies pay government officials who maybe don't care much about the people who actually live in these villages. or in these forests that are then raised in his book Zuckerman also travels to Central America the workers there in the oil palm plantations are fighting to unionize to improve their horrible working conditions they are bitten by snakes things fall on them they are covered in chemicals agra everything while earning pitiful wages I interviewed a man who had tried to come to the United States in one of the caravans and he said, "You know, I've worked for this company for 10 years and it's nothing you can't stand." He had three children.

He said there was no way to support. a family even though I am working he worked six days a week basically twenty-four hours a day now there are labor abuses in agriculture all over the world, but the concentration of the palm oil industry in these equatorial nations with their Particular economic and political issues and histories probably make this particular crop more of a center of evil, so as a conscientious consumer, what can you do right? Of course, you can try to buy less palm oil. About two-thirds of it is consumed in food, in the most visible place where I usually see it in pre-packaged baked goods where they need a shelf-stable solid fat, but of course any other vegetable oil will have its own problems, They all require a lot more land to produce oil, that's one of the reasons palm oil is popular, it doesn't take much land and honestly looking at labels will only get you so far, especially considering that the Palm oil is fractionated and added to a million products with a million different names, even if you somehow eliminate all palm oil from your diet, it's probably still in your bath in your pasta.teeth, your makeup, your shampoo and your moisturizer.

You can search for products with an rspo label. It is awarded by the round table on sustainable palm oil. When I was in Honduras, I talked to people on these plantations and they said the rspo investigators had just been there and they said they trained us before they came, they gave us a script, this is what we're supposed to say about how good which are our working conditions and then, after the inspectors left, they said that those who did not follow the script were punished or fired um those who did were given a banquet with soft drinks and food in his book zuckerman goes to the equator and visit small farms that work with natural habitats is a company that tries to buy and sell palm oil the right way, she was very impressed, you can search for that, but it is a small portion of the overall market, I think this is one of those problems where people like me can't just consume our way out of people like me.

In the United States, most of us probably just need to consume less, but the country that consumes the most palm oil is India as a cooking oil and then also in all those chips and snacks that they make, but as you know, there are There are so many street vendors in India and when I was there it seemed like everyone was using palm oil because it was cheaper than the other oils they could get and it was interesting because at first they denied it and said no. By not using palm oil, I could see the packaging under them and the same with the merchants.

There was a woman with them from the public health foundation of India and we went to some shops and asked for cheap oil and they gave us mustard oil and soybean oil, I think, and then we said, don't you have anything cheaper? At first I said no and then he said, well, here's the palm. oil, so there is a stigma about it because they know it's unhealthy and because it's not grown locally, but everyone uses it because it's cheaper. I think it's silly when we focus our consumer guilt on one product or one. ingredient or a company, that's the kind of thinking that leads us to reject something out loud on moral grounds while silently accepting something just as bad here, except now with some smug moral superiority mixed in what you do with this information depends on you, but this is What is palm oil, this is how it ended up like everything and that's why some very smart people are very concerned about it.