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.

  • Barx [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • SpiderFarmer [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • Barx [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        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.