I know some five years back when I was more lib, there was talk and articles on how palm oil harvesting was using slave labor and people were killing orangutans and stuff. It’s basically resulted in me avoiding stuff with palm oil, which tends to include some of the fancier snacks at times and convenience foods as well.
But it wasn’t until recently I found myself wondering, is palm oil really on par with the shit that goes on with chocolate? Or is this on some level the usual anti-Asian sentiment I see in so much Western media, possibly taking some bad instances and extrapolating it to countries and peoples’ as a whole?
P.S. sorry for the run-on sentences. I actually shaved it down a bit. Anyway, may disappear for a few hours, but this has been weighing on me a bit.
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I went to school for Gastronomic Sciences and have worked with food justice and peasant/farmer movements for a couple years now.
The biggest issue with palm oil is that it’s a cash crop produced through a monoculture, and that brings with it the destruction of local biodiversity and food ways, labor exploitation, and use of synthetic products for farming, with associated biodiversity loss and health risks for workers, who often used to be peasants who used to produce food that would be sold and bought by people in their communities, and who have been proletarianized by being pushed to work for the palm oil plantations that have taken over their land, most of the time “acquired” by land dispossession either by leveraging the legal system or by the use of armed militias to displace peasants under the threat of violence.
You can say the same about most coffee/cocoa/wheat/soybeans, but what makes palm oil particularly insidious is that it’s like a cheat code for most processed foods, because it makes them have a much better mouthfeel, something you’d normally use butter or other seed oils for, but using palm oil is way cheaper to achieve the same result. So, a cheap production of palm oil using the land that would normally be used for local nutrition, using exploited labor, and traded from countries in the global south makes it the best option to achieve a “good”, affordable processed food, because the externalities will not be included in the final price.
That being said, everyone I work with has no illusions about consumption habits single-handedly changing the global food system, that’s some neoliberal cope, so if what you can afford has palm oil in it, or you want to get a treat that contains palm oil, it’s not a moral indictment on you; It’s a symptom of how broken food systems are, and how all actors of the food system need to collectively organize better and build parallel power structures to those that international trade and unequal exchange have built for the past hundreds of years.
There’s something to be said about palm oil being an integral part of west African cuisine, and having been used for cooking there for thousands of years, but it is definitely a different kind of production and use to the one we see in the global north.
Sorry about the rambling and kind of shitty formatting, I wrote this on my phone so it is what it is.
basically what the other guy said. I also did formal education in agriculture and sustainability, and palm oil was the modern go-to commodity to demonstrate the across-the-board modern agricultural production systems that undermine communities, exploit labor, steal from indigenous, and degrade environmental resources.
most globally traded agricultural commodities are like this due to the logic of capital embracing export monoculture systems, but palm oil is among the newest to be suddenly “in everything”. in my head, I call everything of this type+kind “plantation agriculture”, because the features are strikingly similar to the old rubber plantations and other heinous colonial systems, though many modern monocrop systems use automation/mechanization (where they can) to obscure the exploitation more than the older chattel/corvee systems if there isn’t an existing pool of workers with murky legal status. or they just use forced prison labor.
there are very few items in any american’s kitchen or worn on their person that weren’t made via wanton environmental destruction and horrific exploitation, not to mention swelling the warchests of the most brutal capital formations on earth to expand their domination of indigenous and hinterland communities furthur.
to learn this fully is to see something dark and cruel in nearly every meal or article of clothing, things that should be nourishing to us and bring us comfort. even home cooked meals and homemade items from loved ones, made with care and affection.
and we all have different strategies for dealing and coping with the knowledge of what nature and humankind suffer to grow us the things we need.
Great writeup, thanks for that!
and we all have different strategies for dealing and coping with the knowledge of what nature and humankind suffer to grow us the things we need.
Indeed. For me, the way I found to cope is to try my best to buy food directly from farmers in my community or through local co-ops, but I know this is nigh impossible to most working class people living in urban areas, and it won’t reduce the exploitation of people in the global South, or the environmental degradation it entails. That, and supporting people fighting to change the food system from their local reality in any way I can. That’s why I made it my career.
When it comes to clothes, I thrift most of what I own, but then again, I’m lucky that thrifting hasn’t become expensive where I live yet.
Thanks for the writeup. I’m getting flashbacks to the quinoa craze of 2016 or so. This chunk of new knowledge is both relieving and horrifying in new ways.
The whole quinoa thing is similar but not entirely equal because it’s a case of a food that’s been part of local foodways forever, getting “discovered” by global north people and suddenly making it more advantageous to export your staple crop and rely on imports of international commodities, forever damaging the local food system and the exchanges within.
Food gentrification, pretty much.
The real-world production of palm oil is rife with the problems mentioned by others and yourself, but it is also typical of export agriculture in the global south. It isn’t something fixable through individual action and you will find that avoiding the types of things that are bad about current palm oil production are present in basically everything else or the alternatives have their own problems. Navigating ethical consumption at the level of commodity supply chains is often deeply fraught and this is one such case. For example, cobalt is often mined by child slaves. You don’t control whether that cobalt ends up in your electronics. Should we end child slavery? Yes! But it won’t come from better individual consumer choices, especially because you lack sufficient information to make judgements. Your phone might have that cobalt while your laptop doesn’t and even the manufacturer might not know. Is the palm oil in your crackers from land that orangurans inhabited? Was it stolen from indigenous people? Same deal, the information is hidden. Capitalist alienation is cascading levels of removal from the production process, of obfuscation that means you often can’t make such decisions.
I’ll give a contradictory example, though. With animal agriculture and veganism, drawing lines becomes much simpler. You just don’t consume animal products to the best of your ability. You can’t perfectly avoid them for the same reasons you don’t know where the cobalt came from, but it is very simple to avoid animal products most of the time without having to contend with the alternative being worse, as animal ag is usually a superset of other ag and production systems. It’s a “yes and” negative.
So to synthesize, if it is helpful for you, one thing you can do is try to avoid processed foods. This will decrease the length of the supply chain you know about and make it therefore more investigable. It’s also better for your health. Though to be clear, it isn’t free of ethical problems. In the US, for example, food is produced via the exploitation if a racialized economic underclass by monopolies that ensure Imperialist food policies globally, including the production of palm oil. But you can then take real action by fighting for farm workers’ rights, helping them unionize, etc. They are your neighbors.
Thank you for that writeup. Guess I’ll be less on edge in the snack aisle. I already have avoided Nestle for years and been doing BDS on an increasing scale for years as well. But like, as you put it, there’s only so much a consumer’s informed decisions can do. Guess I got some more groups to help unionize in the future.
Sounds fine! I do recommend advocating for BDS because targeted boycotts can impact fragile settler economies, they serve primarily as a propaganda tool while also having an outsized impact because they are paper tigers. A single individual participating in it won’t make it or break it but if someone catches you buying Israeli pasta couscous and not caring they might not take you seriously when you ask them to spread the word, you know? Humans are (currently) simple creatures that are hyper-aware of perceived hypocrisy in others. Same reason I take 15 minutes to vote every so often. Electoralism is usually a waste of time and my lone vote means nothing but it means I can avoid an entire conversation when pipelining liberals that might turn into a stumbling block.
I guess what this is really revealing is that I have organizer brain lol. It does build some useful habits, though.
