Palm Oil – The Hidden Ingredient

Palm oil is obtained from the pulp and palm kernel oil from the kernels of the oil palm fruit. Cold-pressed and untreated, palm oil is considered healthy because, among other things, it contains a lot of vitamin E and about 15 times as much vitamin A as carrots. It is also rich in unsaturated fatty acids. Palm oil is relatively tasteless and gives foods a spreadable, creamy consistency. At room temperature, the fat is solid; at body temperature, it melts like chocolate that melt in your mouth.

In contrast, industrially produced (refined) palm oil, as it is used massively in the food industry, contains a high proportion of trans fatty acids. When consumed in excess, these increase the risk of diabetes or heart attack, and it contains substances that are suspected of being carcinogenic.[1]

Nevertheless, palm oil is particularly popular from an economic point of view because it is efficient to produce and therefore very cheap. An oil palm is easy to care for, bears fruit all year round, and is up to six times more productive than rapeseed, which is also inexpensive. Thus, the production of palm oil in itself cannot be labeled as bad. After all, producing the same amount of rapeseed or coconut oil would require significantly more land. In addition, palm oil production accounts for a large proportion of jobs in the respective emerging and developing countries and is an important source of income, especially for millions of smallholder families. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the real problem is the predominant cultivation in huge monocultures in the most biodiverse regions of our planet. Especially Indonesia and Malaysia, but also Africa and Central America are affected. More and more rainforest is being cleared and wetlands drained and replaced by plantations that are hostile to life. Groundwater and rivers are being contaminated by the use of toxic pesticides. The habitat of thousands of animal species is being destroyed and even the range of the clouded leopard is being unnaturally cut up. The analysis of GPS data shows that the predatory cat itself avoids crossing the monocultures.

Although fire clearing is officially prohibited, many palm oil companies, plantation owners and farmers regularly burn down up to 130 million-year-old forests and their animal inhabitants by setting fires in order to create new cultivation areas. In 2019, with the help of satellite images, around 14,000 fires were counted on Borneo alone. The reason is clear: According to calculations by CIFOR, land clearing without fire costs around 300 US dollars per hectare, while the price of slash-and-burn clearing is only 20 US dollars per hectare.^[2]