Usually I refuse to even click on stories with “Outraged” in the title.
“Butter doesn't get soft in my house at room temperature, but I always figured that's because the thermostat stays at 65˚F (18˚C). It turns out, though, that butter's persistent firmness has less to do with my preference for a cool home and more with what Canadian dairy farmers are feeding their cows.
“Reports have emerged in recent weeks of cows being fed supplements derived from palm oil to increase the butterfat content of their milk. The practice is partly a response to surging demand for butter during the pandemic, when everyone was baking more than ever, but the number of cows producing milk had not increased accordingly. The fastest way for the industry to respond was to boost butterfat in that milk using supplements.”
Where to begin on this one? Take a highly-polluting dairy industry not to mention all its methane emissions (burps and the occasional fart) and then start feeding its cows palm oil extracts from the tropical regions of planet that used to have virgin forest on them.
Win-win!
This is the kind of stuff that should end in prison sentences.
“Most disturbing for me, however, is the environmental piece of this puzzle. Palm oil has a notorious reputation for driving tropical deforestation, particularly in Malaysia and Indonesia, which produce 85% of the world's palm oil supply. This rapid expansion has destroyed habitats for the Sumatran rhino, orangutans, and pygmy elephants. Fires set to clear jungle growth and carbon-rich peat soils pollute the air, and some smolder for years, impossible to put out. Even national parks and protected regions are at risk, with WWF reporting that nearly half of Sumatra's Tesso Nilo National Park is now overrun with illegal palm plantations.”
Bet that’s a fun national park to visit? Have you passed a palm plantation before? It’s up there with looking at a bare concrete wall in terms of visual interest.
There are several shitty issues at play here. First, we in the rich “modern” world accept palm oil in many of the products we buy. Worse, we often don’t even know that it’s in there because you don’t have to write “palm oil” on the ingredients. If it says “vegetable oils” on the label, there’s a good chance it’s palm oil. How this kind of semantic bollocks is still legal is beyond me. Even worse, palm oil provides a certain texture in human mouths which people find pleasant, especially if you don’t tell them that the (life-changing) texture correlates with the death of an orangutan or two.
The deeper issue is therefore that there is not enough individual and institutional pushback against the idea that a 10% improvement in how a food feels in your mouth is worth the destruction of virgin forest and all the life in it. The reality is that it’s not just palm oil, it’s all oils added to food that are the problem. If you keep adding the oils and switch out palm oil with another oil, it’s worse. Palm oil is unbeatable in the oil family for quantity recovered per plantation area.
So the battle is to accept a compromise in how the Nutella feels in your mouth (with less palm oil or no oil in it one day) vs violating the planet and its non-human life, in very obvious ways. You can’t pretend this isn’t happening and just wish it all away. This stuff is bad. I find that each time I dream of eating Nutella, watching that video of the orangutan crying in the shattered remains of its Indonesian forest as the humans move in does the trick for a month or two.
At least we could start with the low-hanging fruit of products we know are full of palm oil and move up the pyramid of lies from there?
Which brings us back to the heart of the matter, all of this comes down to how special you think you personally are as a life form on Earth versus the rest of life on Earth, its ecosystems (some of which actually keep you alive, indirectly), its remaining majesty?
Though as even Greta knows, personal decisions and feelings have fuck all effect overall if not followed up by lobbying and law changes. I’m guessing we’re a bit screwed on this one, modulo a miracle or six.
But at least you can feel a little bit better about yourself if you choose to avoid the most obvious criminals like Ferrero, who makes Nutella, and Nestlé (if you’re clever enough to know that the product you’re buying is from Nestlé). With those motherfuckers, it’s not obvious though, they have their fingers in half of the planets pies (and pie holes): Aero bars, Kitkat, San Pellegrino, Maggi Soup, and even Häagen-Dasz (sorry people).
(Just to be clear, the latter does not have palm oil in it, and clearly San Pellegrino doesn’t either. These are just well-known brands of Nestlé. Kitkats do contain palm oil. So does Maggi soup. Why packet soup needs palm oil in it is beyond me.)
A couple of “resources” before we go:
Here’s a great write-up by Greenpeace on the shitshow that is global palm oil production and distribution.
And if you would like a world-class lesson in greenwashing, I suggest going to any Nestlé website and hunt around for pictures of trees and forests. I’m not going to link to their mythmaking though.