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.
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.