Why you should consider giving up your favorite junk foods. (It’s not about you this time)
Let’s face it. Junk food is fantastic. Convenient junk food is even better. I’m not going to argue the satisfaction that comes from ripping open a package to have a week’s supply of cookies at a moment’s notice. Or the comfort of having a tasty meal that requires nothing but hot water. And who doesn’t eat ice cream straight from the pint sometimes?
But your favorite junk foods are harboring a dark side. Hidden within those crunchy cookies and convenient noodles is an ingredient capable of atrocities. Can you guess the culprit?
Palm oil.
Maybe you’ve never heard of it. Maybe you’ve seen it buried in an ingredients list a few times but never given it much thought. But considering palm oil is found in 50% of the packaged food and household products sold in the US, you’ve almost certainly encountered it, even if it was hiding in plain sight.
But palm oil isn’t some innocent additive, it’s the product of one of the most exploitative and ecologically damaging agricultural practices on earth.
It starts with where palm oil is produced. 85% of the global supply comes from Indonesia and Malaysia, which are home to the most bio-diverse tropical forests in the world. When these forests are destroyed to make room for palm oil plantations, the effects are devastating in a way they would be nowhere else.
The first step is to slash and burn the forests (sound familiar? *cough cough* Amazon fires *cough*). Not only does this mean destroying a complex and diverse ecosystem which takes hundreds of years to recover, it means burning a huge sink of greenhouse gas held below the forest.
Known as peat, this dense, mud-like substance makes excellent fuel and burns very well. So well, in fact, peat fires are almost impossible to put out. And the peat under Indonesia’s tropical forests stores more carbon per unit area than any other ecosystem. So this burning has two-fold consequences when it comes to greenhouse gas (GG) emissions, not only does it destroy a large sink for GGs, it releases tons of them into the atmosphere. Because of this, Indonesia is the world’s third largest emitter of GGs.
this burning has two-fold consequences when it comes to GG emissions
Palm oil is a sneaky product that can masquerade as sustainable, because it does have an incredibly high yield per unit of land- 4 to 10 times that of other oils. This spurs the argument that it can be sustainable, and there are even initiatives, such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) to promote ‘sustainable’ farming of palm oil. ‘Sustainable’ palm oil has been called into question however, by a study which noted that ‘sustainable’ plantations deforest at a higher rate than non-sustainable ones.
Remember: most palm oil is grown where Indonesian forests once stood. And can there really be any large scale ‘sustainable’ deforestation in the most bio-diverse place on earth? I would argue no, not even if the land is used ‘responsibly’ after. There’s no promise of that either, as illegal slashing and burning cuts into National Parks and violently drives indigenous people from their homeland (did I mention the egregious human rights violations?).
Can there really be any large scale ‘sustainable’ deforestation in the most bio-diverse place on earth?
If that weren’t bad enough (and it certainly is), destruction of Indonesian forests further threatens endangered animals like the Orangutan, Sumatran Tiger, and Borneo Elephant. These animals have no where else to go. But palm oil does.
We know palm oil can grow in other places, in fact, it was imported to Indonesia just over 100 years ago. Moving palm oil production out of Indonesia is the only viable solution. Though there is no guarantee companies won’t just bring their destructive practices to the new locale, it would be a step (perhaps a pitifully small one) in the right direction.
Moving palm oil production out of Indonesia is the only viable solution.
The efficiency of a product means nothing if the environment that was destroyed for it to be planted was one of the most valuable and fragile in the world. Even if you can yield more product in a smaller area, an acre of precious rain forest is hundreds of times more valuable than a few acres of prairie land taken to plant soy. So until companies decide to source palm oil from a truly sustainable agricultural operation outside Indonesia, maybe leave that pack of instant noodles on the grocery store shelf. The orangutans will thank you.
