This video is sponsored by Audible. And this is by far the most consumed plant oil in the
world, or at least this is that oil in something closer to its original traditional form. The
version used today in processed foods, soaps, cosmetics, biofuels, all kinds of things might
look more like this, or maybe like this. It can be refined into innumerable forms, but
all of them are fats derived from the fruit of the oil palm. This is by far the number
one edible grease in the whole wide world. This and derivatives of this are in probably
dozens of products in your home right now, quite possibly on or in your body. Is that
a bad thing? Probably. Yeah, I think so. Probably a bad thing, at least from an environmental
standpoint.Though, I'm not at all convinced that the alternatives would be much better,
unless you think that 'stop guzzling so much grease' is an alternative. 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 the new book, Planet Palm by longtime food and
environmental journalist Jocelyn Zuckerman.
"The meat of the fruit gets crushed and that's where you get the palm oil and then inside
there's a kernel. And you can also crush that and you get palm kernel oil. So you get two
different kinds of oil from the fruit. And the oil from the kernel is mostly used in
cosmetics."
So this is the former. This is oil made from the fruit parts of the fruit. It was made
in Ghana. The oil palm is native to West Africa where this has been the cooking oil for thousands
of years. In its relatively unrefined form like this, it tastes ... real strong. I don't
know how to describe it. It's got this sort of bitter thing going on, this very vegetal
thing, it has the aroma of my spice drawer. The first thing you probably noticed was the
color, right? That color is from carotenoids, the same things that make carrots and tomatoes
and salmon orange.
"But the stuff that's used in processed foods has been treated in all these different ways
so as to make it basically tasteless, odorless, colorless."
The other thing you probably noticed about this is that it is thick.
"Palm oil is 50% saturated fat, so it's semi-solid at room temperature."
The oil made from the kernel, or seed, of the fruit is even more saturated. This is
80% saturated. This is palm kernel oil. Because they're so saturated, these fats behave more
like animal fats, which are generally pretty saturated, right? As a result, they are solid
at room temperature or semi-solid at room temperature and they are less quick to go
bad, less quick to oxidize, go rancid. Where I live in the American South, 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 went bad real fast, and it's liquid, so you can't
make soap or biscuits with it. The industrialist who built this house in Macon, Georgia, was
among the geniuses who figured out that you could add hydrogen atoms to unsaturated fats,
and you can make them more viscous and more shelf-stable, hence crystallized cotton seed
oil, Crisco. I have a whole vid about that linked in the description.
If instead you get your oil from a palm tree, it's already saturated. There's no need for
fancy modern industrial processing. Already saturated. This is a very rare property for
a plant oil to have. The oil you get from the giant seed, or kernel, of the coconut
tree is 90% saturated. What we think of as a coconut, the brown and white thing, that
is the coconut's kernel. 90% saturated, that fat is, but the coconut palm tree does not
yield as much oil as the oil palm tree does. The oil palm's productivity is insane.
"In Africa, they're very tall and thin and people have to climb up them and often falls
would be fatal. The way they're bred now, particularly in Southeast Asia, they don't
grow as tall and the trunks are much thicker. But the original ones look just 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 outlawed, the British traders
started sourcing palm oil and used that same infrastructure, particularly in the Niger
Delta — sort of swamp area, and then rivers that go up into the interior where the oil
palm trees grew naturally. So the canoes that they used to use to shuttle human beings for
the slave trade, they then started shuttling palm oil. And it was used during the Second
Industrial Revolution for soaps, in particular. People were starting to work in factories
and going home really dirty. And so soap became a much bigger thing. Also for use in lighting
lamps, and eventually in margarines."
Ah, margarine — oil-based butter replacements. Is there anything more emblematic of what
food writer Michael Pollan calls the "American Paradox"? His books like The Omnivore's Dilemma
are available now on Audible, the sponsor of this video. Let's thank them and hear what
Pollan means by that.
"...speaking of something called the French Paradox, for how could a people who eat such
demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple cream cheese actually be slimmer
and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to speak in terms
of an American Paradox. That is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating
healthily."
If you think you don't have time to read books like these, consider Audible. Listen while
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30 day Audible trial with my link in the description, audible.com/adamragusea. Thank you, Audible.
Now, we were talking about the dubious advent of margarine. Vegetable oil based butter replacements
could be made with naturally saturated palm oil. That could also be made with unsaturated
oils that have been partially hydrogenated. The problem with that, of course, is that
it results in trans fats, which medical science now regards is basically the worst kind of
fat that you can eat. Indeed, Crisco now is no longer made with trans fats, or if there
is trans fat in here, it's a very, very small amount. What's in here instead? Well, a few
things, but one of them is palm oil. The big push to eliminate trans fats from processed
foods is certainly part of palm oil's meteoric rise, but it's not even close to being the
whole story.
In her 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 this is so cheap is because of how productive the oil palm is. The yield
that you get per acre of cultivated land is insane, it's miles ahead of any other oil
crop. But there's another reason this is cheap.
"Stolen land, slave labor. Big part of it."
The story of the modern palm oil industry begins with the introduction of that African
tree into Southeast Asia. Most of today's palm oil comes from Malaysia and Indonesia.
"Basically, it grows best 10-degrees to the north and south of the equator. So it's basically
that tropical belt around the world."
These are basically the same places where rubber trees grow, and European colonial rubber
plantations started to shift to oil palm when synthetic rubber started to eat into their
business.
"But then after independence, these governments had lots of poor people and so gave them parcels
of land and oil palm seedlings and encourage them to grow oil palm as, as I said, a poverty
alleviation scheme. And then once the industry learned how to fractionate and process it
into all these different uses, then it was it, they were able to just sell it more around
the world."
The resulting deforestation of vital tropical rain forest has been huge in its contribution
to global warming and in its devastation of habitat. You probably already heard about
the whole orangutan thing. Orangutans are the closest living relative to humanity. If
you ever looked at one in the eye, it is straight up like looking at a person. Orangutans are
losing their homes to oil palms. Though they are hardly the only important species to be
effected. How about humans?
"So in Malaysia and Indonesia, in particular Malaysia has a smaller population and higher
standard of living. So a lot of Malaysians aren't particularly interested in these menial
jobs on oil palm plantations. So they rely on a lot of imported labor, often from Bangladesh,
from Myanmar, Rohingya. And a lot of these folks are brought in under false pretenses.
Recruiters come to their villages and say we can get you jobs in restaurants or in hotels.
They put them on a boat and then they traffic them in. And then they land on these plantations.
Often they confiscate their passports and they have to basically pay off these wages
that they've paid to the recruiters in advance, thinking that they're going to get good jobs.
And then they're stranded on these plantations. And some of them have had to literally make
escapes under cover of night."
Now, the United States and other countries have banned imports from, or otherwise sanctioned,
certain palm oil producers over these abuses. But Zuckerman's reporting shows how it can
be really hard to trace the origin of oil once it gets all blended together in the international
commodities market and refining process. So that's what she means by slave labor. What
does she mean by stolen land? Well, by way of example, she travels in her book here to
Liberia where the government there is getting its oil palm industry going by renting jungle
to big companies. That land is inhabited, but not by people living a modern, developed-economy-type
lifestyle. People like that are hard to displace without significant compensation. But people
living in older or traditional lifestyle are often less able to assert their rights.
"The people who had lived on that land, they got tiny payments, but they now had no place
to farm or to live. And they said that their rivers were poisoned because of the agrochemicals,
but the government wanted to use this as a poverty alleviation scheme. And so the government
tend to be on the side of the companies that are giving them — there's also often lots
of corruption involved. So the companies are paying government officials who maybe don't
care so much about the people who were actually living in these villages, or in these forests
that are then razed."
In her book, Zuckerman also travels to central America. Workers there on oil palm plantations
are fighting to unionize to improve their horrific working conditions. They get snake
bites, they have falls, stuff falls on them, they get covered in agrochemicals, all while
making pitiful wages.
"I interviewed one man who tried to come to the states on one of the 'caravans.' And he
said I've worked for this company for 10 years and it's just nothing. You just can't support
... He had three kids. He said there's no way to support a family even though I'm working
— he was working six days a week, basically around the clock."
Now, labor abuses are in agriculture all over the world, but the concentration of the palm
oil industry in these equatorial nations, with their particular economic and political
problems and histories, probably makes this particular crop more of a center of badness.
So what are you, as a conscientious consumer, to do? Well, of course you can try to buy
less palm oil. About two thirds of it gets consumed in foods. The most conspicuous place
you'll generally see it is in pre-packaged baked goods, where they need a shelf-stable
solid fat. But of course, any other vegetable oil is going to have its own problems. They
all take far more land to produce oil. That's one of the reasons why palm oil is popular.
It doesn't take much land.
And honestly, looking at labels will only get you so far, especially considering that
palm oil is fractionated and added to a million products under a million different names.
Even if you somehow get all palm oil out of your diet, it's still probably in your bathroom.
It's in your toothpaste and your makeup and your shampoo and your moisturizer. You can
look for products with an RSPO label. It's conferred by the Roundtable on Sustainable
Palm Oil.
"And when I was in Honduras, I talked to folks on these plantations and they said the RSPO
investigators had just been there. And they said, one, we were coached before they came.
We were given a script. This is what we're supposed to say that how great our working
conditions are. And then after the inspectors left, they said that those who didn't follow
the script were punished or fired. Those who did were given to a banquet with soda and
food."
In her book, Zuckerman goes to Ecuador and visits smallholder farms that work with Natural
Habitats. That's a company that tries to buy and sell palm oil the right way. She was super
impressed. You could look for that, but it's a tiny sliver of the market. In general, I
think this is one of those problems that 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,
period. Though what country consumes the most palm oil? It's India.
"As a cooking oil and then also in all those chips and snacks that they make. But as you
may know, there's so many street vendors in India, and when I was over there, it seemed
that they were all using palm oil because it was cheaper than the other oils that they
would get. And it was interesting because they denied it. First they said, 'No, we're
not using palm oil.' And then I could see the wrapper underneath it. And same with their
shopkeepers. I was with a woman from the Public Health Foundation of India. And we went into
some shops and asked for cheap oil and they gave us mustard oil and soy oil, I believe.
And then we said, 'Don't you have anything cheaper?' At first, they said no. Then he
said, 'Okay, well, here's the palm oil.' So there's this stigma about it because they
know that it's not healthy and because it's not grown domestically, but they're all using
it because it's cheaper."
I think it's dumb when we focus our consumption guilt on one product or one ingredient or
one company. That's the thinking that leads us to loudly decline something on moral grounds
while quietly accepting something just as bad over here, except now with some smug moral
superiority mixed in. What you do with this information is up to you. But this is what
palm oil is, this is how it ended up in everything, and this is why some very smart people are
very worried about that.