Endangered Primates and Palm oil

Mrs_Money

I don't know if any of you saw the piece on BBc Breakfast today about endangered primates - it made depressing watching - read more on the BBC website - but the spokesman interviewed cited Palm oil as one of the main reasons for the destruction of habitats. Apparently there is a lot of jungle clearance going on to make Palm oil plantations - he said look at the palm oil in your cakes and biscuits - I know it's in a lot of cereal bars and - my particular beef - peanut butter! Plus it's now also being used for bio diesel (another complicated eco debate).
We love peanut butter in our house and up to now have been buying Meridien's crunchy style - just peanuts, no salt, sugar or palm oil. Palm oil is not good for the arteries, apparently, and anyway peanuts have enough oil! However Waitrose has just stopped stocking it, so I'm thinking we should start making our own - anyone on here do this now? Do you have to buy a special machine - I can't imagine the gooey mess if I tried it in my liquidiser!!!:eek:

A_fiend_for_life

I've noticed that palm oil and vegetable oil is making up a larger proportion of peanut butter certainly in the last year or two. I avoid things that have palm oil in them and also avoid 'hydrogenated' and the generic vegetable oil label too. Not sure if they put these things in animal feed though which would be difficult to avoid without going organic. It is certainly put in some fish feeds though.

There have been campaigns to clear up the label on 'vegetable oil' labeling and certainly on banning hydrogenated vegetable oil though I am not sure how far that has progressed. I find it annoying that firms who have so called pharmafoods that are apparently good for the heart but also sell spreads with hydrogenated oil.

The primate picture is getting quite bad though I have only read the grauniad article rather than the actual report.

geordie_joe

Mrs_Money wrote: »

so I'm thinking we should start making our own - anyone on here do this now? Do you have to buy a special machine - I can't imagine the gooey mess if I tried it in my liquidiser!!!:eek:

If you do a google search for "make peanut butter" you will find loads of sites that tell you how to do it.

Mrs_Money

Thanks for that Geordie Joe - I had done that and found out that most people were using food processors - as I don't have one, I'll have to try using my ancient blender (in true MSE style I am not going out to buy a processor!) and put up with the gooey mess!

Gigervamp

Palm oil is also used in a lot of soaps. Check out the ingredients and look for Sodium Palmate, or Sodium Palm Kernelate.

feesh

We went to Malaysia on honeymoon last year and I was shocked from the moment the plane started its descent into Kuala Lumpur.

The palms stretch for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles, on every "spare" bit of land, right up to the city limits and up to the end of the runway.

The whole country is just covered in neat rows of palms.

It is an important aspect to their economy, and to be fair, a lot of them are grown on old rubber plantations which the British were involved in running back in the days (at the expense of rainforest).

However, although the economy is helped by this, through the provision of jobs, the bulk of the money is going overseas - just like the rubber plantations, these new palm oil plantations are in the hands of overseas investors including large British and Dutch companies.

We went to the Sepilok Orang Utan sanctuary and if my (future) children never get to see those beautiful animals outside of a zoo, I will be a very unhappy woman.

We have found some brands of peanut butter that don't use palm oil, including some of the cheaper brands. But the best so far is a MASSIVE jar available for just over £3 from our local organic shop, made purely from peanuts - no other ingredients.

andrione1

thanks for bringing this to our attention OP.

i have been trying to avoid food with palm oil in it for a while, but because of arteries, rather than ethical reasons - i didn't know.
i will make more of an effort than ever now.

oatcakes use palm oil instead of olive oil, because it is cheaper, but there is usually not an alternative, which is really annoying.

anyway, depressing news, but thanks for letting us know.

liz545

I emailed Lush to ask about the origin of the palm oil in their products, this was their reply:

"Thank you for your email. Firstly, we would like to assure you that our Palm oil supplier operates a 'Good Neighbour' policy in the sourcing of the ingredient. This means that:


1- the product has not been derived by destruction of the environment in any way (such as de-forestation),
2- the product has not been manufactured by using exploitation of labour methods,
3- the product has not been cultivated by genetic modification, nor have genetically modified ingredients been used in its manufacture.

Our visit to Sumatra provided us with a chance to visit the charity 'Sumatran Orang-utan Society' (SOS) whom we currently support with a donation providing a new vehicle, the Orang-u-van that distributes literature to children in remote areas. They kindly showed us round their replanting projects in Banda Aceh, which was one of the worst affected areas by the Tsunami in 2004. The SOS projects were mainly to educate local school children and promote the environment to Indonesians, trying to change their attitudes towards illegal logging and killing of wildlife.

We are now researching the alternatives and best course of action to take with regard to palm oil and will keep you updated. We are continuing to support SOS in working in the area and were impressed with the effectiveness of their projects."

So while they use palm oil in the manufacture of some of their products, it's sustainably produced and they are researching alternatives for the future. Some good news, at least!

Ben84

andrione1 wrote: »

thanks for bringing this to our attention OP.

i have been trying to avoid food with palm oil in it for a while, but because of arteries, rather than ethical reasons - i didn't know.
i will make more of an effort than ever now.

oatcakes use palm oil instead of olive oil, because it is cheaper, but there is usually not an alternative, which is really annoying.

anyway, depressing news, but thanks for letting us know.

The problem I've found with trying to avoid palm oil is that it seems to be in everything. Just about every margarine, packet of biscuits, anything with pastry. It's also in many personal products, and used to make detergents found in multipurpose liquids and washing liquids. Often it's listed ambiguously on food packets as vegetable oil, while the detergents don't always have ingredients listed on them and the chemical compounds made from palm oil may not be obvious in their source to many people.

You would have to make almost everything you eat, and even then palm oil is in many of the simple products we would normally use to make our own food. For example to glaze dried fruits.

I tried to avoid it, but found it almost impossible.

Gigervamp

There is a Round Table of Sustainable Palm Oil. It's been a while since I last checked it, but I seem to remember that Cadburys was one of the members.
http://www.rspo.org/

Violetta_2

Greenpeace have a lot of info on Palm oil .