One Casualty of the Palm Oil Industry: An Orangutan Mother, Shot 74 Times
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We are waging a war on our brothers and sisters. Our collective humanity deteriorate for each and every soul that we trample upon for the sake of economic progress.
Some animals get a ton of support and money thrown at them while less marketable animals tend to produce no reaction when treated horrifically.
Whenever there is a tension between a group of poor locals and first world emotional interest around ecological conservation, the problem is that the locals can sense quite clearly (as the father does at the end of the piece) how little their lives are valued compared to that of animals. You can have a non-human species get a Swiss surgeon flown in, while they would never experience this level of medical care of attention themselves.
I'm certainly not condoning the horrific actions towards those animals, but underneath that tragedy there is a bigger issue at hand and a big reason why certain ecological projects fail due to zero interest in incentivizing locals. The best conservation programs tend to involve the entire community.
In the end you have frustrated first worlders wondering why the locals won't cooperate and do as they are told, even though the reason for this lack of interest is precisely the barely concealed contempt that emanates towards them. Sending trash in the guise of recycling, pollution and outsourcing negative externalities their way such as the palm oil industry while forbidding them from doing whatever might have a negative externality on first worlders.
[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1881/12/25.htm
Having grown up in the third world, and now living in the first, I get the very distinct feeling of people in the first world wanting to push away the latter they used to rise up, since it is 'dirty'.
Not to say I support the barbarism mentioned in the article.
"My most recent mushroom trip (also the largest dose I've ever taken) I became fixated on a news story I had heard that week. About an 8 year old girl from a tribe in the Amazon, who was tied to a tree and burned alive in order to scare her people off their land so it could be logged. I realized that at the moment he did it, whoever lit that gasoline actually felt/thought more or less okay about what he was doing. And my mind was illuminated with dozens of the parallels between that man's malformed, horrific perceptual/behavioral state, and mine. I saw the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance of the consequences of my acts and words. And there was nothing I could do to deny the similarity."
There are alternatives to Palm oil. The most straightforward is replacing it with rendered fat from pigs or cows (lard or tallow). This has its own ethics and environmental concerns. Another solution is to revisit oil hydrogenation. We can fully hydrogenate oils such as soybean into a saturated fat very similar to that found in tallow. The resulting fat is healthier than partially hydrogenated oil, and arguably healthier than unprocessed soy oil too. It is not difficult to work with and has a neutral flavors, which is desirable for the processed food industry. We just need to get over our fear of this process.
I googled it, some breakfast items (egg mcmuffin, panckages) and apple pie.
It's probably just a money saving feature. I'm already old (34) and I've only ever eaten the veggie oil McD's fries.
(The rest of Revisionist History is also great!)
Yet beef consumption has risen hugely over the same timescales.
I do remember that environmental groups have been complaining of its impact since the 90s - maybe far longer.
Fortunately we have easy solutions to fulfill this need that don't need to distroy climate safety, lose hundred of thousands of rainforest services and products, and to burn a lot of fuel. All just to import palm oil from the other coin of the planet, Indonesia none less.
We can culture in-situ sunflower fields, or olive oil, maize oil, rapeseed oil, Camellia oil, peanut oil, apricot, almond and apple seed oil, carob oil, avocado oil, poppyseed oil, flax, soy... some of those are even byproducts of current activities.
We could save orangutans in zoos, but millions of invisible plants, lichens, insects, frogs and birds aren't so fortunate
And it's in everything 'ready' - cookies, bread, chocolate, curry sauce, any ready meal, any fastfood you buy, ...
Alternative oils such as sunflower or rapeseed oils should be able to (and used to!) cover most of these use cases, but sadly our food industry seems to choose palmoil despite the ecological damage (rainforest destruction, monocultures, erosion, ...) and the widely reported slavery and social harm. Some companies (such as Ferrero) slap 'certificates' of non-harm on the package, which have little evidence behind them and, if anything, will still mean that the demand for palm oil keeps increasing.
Really disappointing. Hope companies become more conscious rather than just cost-conscious.
> By the end, Hope’s torso was slashed with deep lacerations. Multiple bones were broken. Seventy-four pellets were lodged in her body. Her months-old baby had been ripped away.
Holistic Progress = Undefined.
As far as for other uses of vegetable oils, I can't really comment.
I don't know about others, but I don't really care about the taste of oil. My main use of oil is to lubricate so food doesn't stick to pans (non-stick coating doesn't completely eliminate this need) and also to penetrate food and aid in its thorough cooking.
I can live without oil, but, for example, that means I cannot make fried eggs, scrambled eggs, or omelettes. I can only think of making hard-boiled eggs, or poached eggs. Not using oil really seems to limit options.
Also, I don't think this is a problem limited to oil. It's probably a problem with most parts of our food sourcing.
There's also lots to be heard on the animal cruelty done to chickens in the interest of efficiency and bringing down costs for the production of eggs and chicken meat. For example, they're supposedly put in cages too small to stretch, and their beaks are broken to avoid them killing each other out of desperation[1]. From the source I referenced:
> Since birds crowded like this commonly go mad and peck one another to death, these birds were debeaked, a practice whereby workers grab baby chicks in one hand and thrust their beaks between hot, steaming blades. Workers cut off anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of chicks’ beaks while they’re fully conscious. The industry calls this “trimming their beaks.” But slicing chickens’ beaks off with a heated blade or a scissor device, as is frequently done, is not like trimming your nails. Birds’ beaks are sensitive, highly innervated and able to feel pain and other sensations. It would be like having your toes cut off without anesthesia. Not only do chickens rely on their beaks for many functions, having their beaks severed causes them immense, acute, and, often, lifelong pain.
Maybe I should just stop eating eggs altogether.
Really, maybe I should just go vegan.
[1] https://www.salon.com/2019/04/20/i-studied-factory-farms-for...
You don't need oil, you just need a better non-stick pan.
Cast iron with your choice of fat has served me well since switching over completely from non-stick.
Can you really make a fried egg by putting just the egg on a pan, and avoid the bottom caramelizing? There's also the concern of the lifetime of the pan. Tefal recommends adding a layer of oil to the pan before use (I think it's called curing or seasoning a pan?).
I stopped buying anything containing palm oil a few years ago.
Before I wasn't aware of its effect on orangutan habitats.
Always wonder who's buying Nutella. Sugar and palmoil.
Clearly the incentives here are simple, you want to make a product that people like as much as possible while making it as cheaply as possible. Health is not really a factor, insofar as not too many people don't drop your product because they see it as unhealthy (ads will help with that, all Nutella ads I've seen in France focus on "giving energy to children for their activities" or some bullshit like that).
So that's how you end up with something that's mainly palm oil and sugar. The market has spoken. I'm sure that if they reverted back to their original recipe they'd lose a significant amount of clients.
we are invastigating how food insdustry transformed healthy snacks into palmoil and sugar to great harm for sumatrean jungle and its habitat.
Palm oil seems to be getting used to substitute other oils and and ingredients in just about everything processed lately.
It would be interesting if humans could have tougher skin layers like many mammals do
I had only read the part at the beginning that made it clear she was alive