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 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 long time food and environmental journalist jocelyn zuckerman the meat of the fruit is um 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 mostly used in cosmetics so this is the former this is oil made from the fruit part of the fruit it was made in ghana the oil palm is native to west africa where this has been like 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 kind of has the aroma of my spice drawer the first thing you probably noticed was the color right that color is from keratinoids 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 like 80 percent 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 cottonseed oil crisco i have a whole bit 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 like 90 saturated what we think of as a coconut the brown and white thing that is the coconuts 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 palms productivity is insane in africa they're very tall and thin and people had to climb up them and it was often false would be found the way they're bred now particularly in southeast asia they don't grow as tall and the trunks are much thicker um so 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 um the the british traders started sourcing palm oil um and used that same infrastructure it was particularly in the um 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 um 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 much bigger thing also for use in them 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 omnivores dilemma are available now on audible the sponsor of this video let's thank them and hear what pollen 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 you do the dishes or something if you get an audible membership you'll get one credit a month for a title in the premium selection that's new releases and such you download the title and you own it forever in addition to that one download a month you get full access to the audible plus catalog which is basically everything else thousands of audiobooks original audio entertainment guided fitness and meditation ad-free versions of your favorite podcasts all ways to get some joy and enlightenment in your ears when you think you don't have the time you can try audible free for 30 days do you and me both a favor go to audible.com slash adam ragusia or text adam ragusia to 500 500 get that 30 day audible trial with my link in the description audible.com adam ragusia 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 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 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 um 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 um so gave them parcels of land and oil palm seedlings and encouraged them to grow oil promise as i said a poverty lake alleviation scheme and then once the industry learned how to fractionate and process it into all these different uses then it was they were able to just sell it more around the world the resulting deforestation of vital tropical rainforest has been huge in its contribution to global warming and in its devastation of habitat you've probably already heard about the whole orangutan thing orangutans are the closest living relative to humanity if you've 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 affected 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 in these like menial jobs on the oil pump plantations so they rep they um rely on a lot of imported labor um often from bangladesh from myanmar um rohingya and a lot of these folks are brought in under false pretenses um they recruiters come to their villages and say we can get you jobs in restaurants or in other hotels um they put them on a boat and then they traffic them in and then they land on these plantations often they confiscate their passports um and they have to pay 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 you know make escapes um 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 an older or traditional lifestyle are often less able to assert their rights the people were who had lived on that land they got tiny payments and but they now had no place to farm or to live and they said that their their rivers were poisoned because of the um the agrichemicals um but the the government you know wanted to use this as a poverty alleviation scheme and so the governments 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 are actually living in these villages or in these forests that are then raised 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 agra chemicals all while making pitiful wages i interviewed one man who had tried to come to the states on one of the um caravans and he said you know 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 round table on sustainable palm oil 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 about how great our working conditions are and then after they after the inspectors left they said that those who didn't follow the script were punished or fired um those who did were given a banquet with soda and food in her book zuckerman goes to ecuador and visits small holder farms that work with natural habitats it'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 as a cooking oil and then also in in all those chips and snacks that they make but um the as you may know there's so many street vendors in india and um when i was over there it seemed that they were all using palm oil because it was cheaper than the other oils that they could get and it was interesting because they denied it at first they said no we're not using palm oil then i could see the wrapper underneath them and same with the shopkeepers i was with them 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 i said no and then he said okay well here's the palm oil so there's like there's the stigma about it because they sort of know that it's not healthy and because it's not grown domestically um 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 kind of 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 like everything and this is why some very smart people are very worried about that

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,633,580

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Id: fgcfgTTuku0

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021