Palm Oil. The good, the bad and the cookies.

I had heard about the problem with palm oil production and its ubiquitous use in ever day food items via the “Don’t Palm Us Off” campaign at Melbourne Zoo. I had never really looked much further into it though but I recently discovered that over 50% of supermarket items contain palm oil.

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Even ever delicious noodles contain palm oil.

Come on….Not the noodles?

Globally over 74.01 million tonnes of palm oil was consumed in 2014 with around 70% of the worlds cosmetics and household detergents containing raw materials derived from palm oil.

But while you might not be able to imagine giving up noodles or lipstick (the horror) there is another alternative.

The team at Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the not-for-profit association that champions sustainable palm oil, believe we have a choice between good and bad palm oil and that achieving 100% sustainable palm oil is a realistic and vital ambition. They have asked people to get on board with spreading the word.

They have brought in knitted ice-cream to make the whole process easy.

We do have  a choice between good palm oil (sustainable, grown under fair working conditions and with the goal of protecting vulnerable species and forests) and bad palm oil.

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So what can we do?

We know that the production of ‘bad’ palm oil is causing  significant rainforest deforestation and is causing endangered animals to lose their natural habitat. You can read more about that in this article in The Guardian. 

We also know that the use of alternate oils is not always a viable option due to the fact that palm trees produce 4-10 times more oil than other crops,  so planting alternate crops could also have environmental consequences.

I would prefer not to be eating foods that contain palm oil in the first place, but seeing as their use is so wide-spread, I am definitely keep to support the use of sustainable palm oil only.

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One way to do that is to look  out for the RSPO symbol on products that we buy and try to only purchase items that contain sustainable palm oil.

To find out more information you can visit

http://goodbadpalmoil.org

One final video, this time of knitted cookies. 🙂

So what do you think about the use if palm oil? Did you know that there was so much of it in your house? Will you make a choice to only buy products with sustainable palm oil? 

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Dani xx

Disclosure: RSPO commissioned this post for me to raise awareness of good palm oil. All opinions are my own.

 

 

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