Is the palm oil the wonder plant it is made out to be? | Eye News,The Indian Express
They have many benefits but the cultivation of palm oil also leads to widespread exploitation and environmental degradation
Wonder: If there’s one palm that stands head and shoulders above all others in terms of its usefulness to us, it has got to be the oil-palm. This tree, which may soar to over 20 m in height, has two species: one native to West and North-west Africa, and the other to tropical Central and South America. The African variety has taken to life in South-East Asia – especially in Indonesia and Malaysia and we are now offering it large tracts of suitable tropical habitat too. There’s no environmental altruism involved; there’s just one word: oil.
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The oil extracted from both the fruit and kernel of the oil palm (its yield is much higher than that of the other palms) is like manna from heaven. Not necessarily for our health, but for miscellaneous purposes. It’s been used by us for 5,000 years, and during the Industrial Revolution, the British used it to lubricate heavy machinery. More than that, because it contains more saturated fats than other vegetable oils, such as sunflower, canola, corn and soya, it makes the perfect cooking medium for deep frying and is not susceptible to oxidation.
It contains no trans-fat. It’s great for baking and making pastry dough. Apart from being used as a cooking medium, found in virtually every kitchen, it has been gleefully pounced upon by the manufacturers of commercial foods from chips to cheese puffs. It is stable as any well-governed democracy ought to be and maintains quality, flavour and consistency – so well beloved of commercial food manufacturers. So much so, that it is estimated that each person on earth, consumed 7.7 kg of the stuff in the year 2015 and its demand is rising fast. In 2018-2019, world production of palm oil was 73.5 million metric tons.
All of this did not, of course, go down our gullets in some form or the other – we put it to other uses too. Look closely at the labels of your shampoo, shaving cream, body lotions or detergents. Invariably ingredients derived from palm oil will be among them it – its name perhaps disguised (we shall see why…). Unilever’s ‘Sunlight’ soap has it, and well then there’s the tell-tale American firm ‘Palmolive’ which gives the game away! It’s thought that 70 per cent of such products have palm oil in one form or the other, and if it is a foaming product, then you can be pretty certain that it contains palm oil. It has been claimed that 50 per cent of all the products used by urban Indians have palm oil in them, in one form or the other.
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