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Comment by robgibbons | Hacker News Reader

As a soapmaker, I used beef tallow as a primary ingredient for a long time. More recently, trying not to use animal-derived products led me to try palm oil, as it's a nearly perfect substitute for tallow. The properties of palm oil are ideal for soapmaking, as well as many other products.

Palm oil is one of those wonder ingredients that are useful in so many ways, and I truly hope we can find a way to make its cultivation more sustainable. For now, it's most important to know where your ingredients are sourced and the local impacts of harvesting them.

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You are raising a very interesting point, so. I assume you sourced your tallow locally, right?

So the question is what's more sustainable. Palm oil from another continent or locally sourced tallow from farmers supplying meat locally as well. And I have no idea what the answer is, only that it is an incredibly hard question.

I assume that at the scale palm oil is used, the size of an animal industry capable of providing enough tallow would surely be far more unsustainable. The fattier animals that produce tallow in large quantities have a trophic efficiency of 1/5 or 1/6 so for every pound of animal mass they consume 5-6 pounds of plant food. That's a lot of calories wasted just chewing cud.

I though cattle were more like 1/10.

10% is the average-ish trophic efficiency in the wild. In industrialized farming we have optimized feed, antibiotic growth promotion, and lack of exercise that brings that down to 1/6 or so for cattle

The confounding variable is that the cows would have been produced anyway for food, so using leftover tallow, bone, etc is ecologically virtuous

Unless you pay for it.

The cows are produced for money. Muscle meat is one of the most lucrative products, but demand for any part of the cow incentivizes more cows.

It's possible that it would still be ecologically the lesser evil because the market value is low and what you might choose as an alternative isn't necessarily better, but it's not so clear cut as you make it sound.

And as many people have discovered, once you try to commercialize use of a 'free' resource it stops being free real quick.

Does anyone making biofuel still get their feedstock for free?

Yeah, that was my thought. Having local farms supplying local butchers and using every single bit of the animal.

It's more complex than that since if we're talking about land use or calorie production since most livestock is grazed on marginal crop land and would need to be compared to that of the palm trees.

The appropriate way to calculate efficiency might to be separate out the rendered tallow from a nutrient-weighted food output (today, we don't actually have a calorie shortage, but we are definitely nutrient deficient) and an life cycle analysis of all the inputs.

In terms of other aspects of environmental footprint, it also depends a lot on how the animal was raised. While conventional beef might be 30+ kg CO2eq/kg, full LCA has shown regenerative beef can be net negative (due to soil carbon sequestration): https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019... Water footprint also is similarly nuanced and needs to be split into green/blue/grey water.

> most livestock is grazed on marginal crop land

There's a lot to unpack there. What is "marginal crop land"?

It conjures images of scrubland in the North American west or the African savanna. But more than half the cattle in the world live in Brazil and India. My understanding is that rainforests take up so many nutrients that the soil is actually very poor and unsuitable for most kinds of agriculture. So one could easily say that recently burned Amazon rainforest is "marginal crop land", and that would make this statement technically true while still being no consolation at all.

The next biggest chunk of the earth's cattle live in China, where my understanding is that they're effectively creating their own "marginal crop land" - they graze, they take up the nutrients in the soil, then they're slaughtered and their meat is shipped overseas, taking those nutrients along with them. So the soil keeps getting less fertile. Grazing is supposedly a major factor in the expansion of the Gobi desert.

The USA? I don't know. Perhaps all the biggest CAFOs are located in marginal crop land, but the grain they're feeding to the cattle is all grown on prime crop land.

Perhaps some specialty farms are creating eddies in the current, but it's hard to see much evidence that they're changing the overall flow unless we're very careful about how we frame the conversation.

In North America, cattle are grazed on grasslands which have a long-term symbiotic relationship with grazing ungulates (the buffalo, now mostly gone, an immense tragedy). Cattle are only grain-fed for the last few weeks of their lives. There's this standing myth that cattle spend their lives in feedlots and that's simply false, as a visit to any ranch will tell you. And even that feed is largely inedible by humans[0].

The analogy between modern cattle and the wild grazing of buffalo isn't perfect. There are problems with modern grazing that need to be addressed. The North American grasslands are prone to desertification if over- or under-grazed. The work of the Savory Institute is largely about promoting "regenerative grazing", not just in North America but also eg Africa[1].

Anyway, if you live in North America and eat/utilise relatively local beef, then you aren't a participant in some kind of misuse of "prime crop land".

[0]: https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/fao-sets-the-record-s...

[1]: https://savory.global

It's even more complicated than that, because large parts of Brazil are pampas or other dry lands, where grazing cattle is the most suitable form of food production.

I suspect at this point that former rainforest land accounts for most of the grazing heads, but it's difficult to find numbers.

Brazil, India and China are big countries by land area. Different parts of each country have different soils and even climates.

No idea what the GP means by marginal crop land, but yes, people tend to grow cattle on land that isn't very good for crop, for one reason or another (the most common reasons being a rocky terrain or a non-plane surface, poor soil is usually not such a reason as soil is always fixed anyway).

> My understanding is that rainforests take up so many nutrients that the soil is actually very poor and unsuitable for most kinds of agriculture.

That's a characteristic of the Amazon forest specifically (and not even all of it). The soil is poor because it's an old land with a lot of raining, that carries the nutrients away, it's not a fault of the forest. Other rain forests have different characteristics.

> But more than half the cattle in the world live in Brazil and India.

Not true.

https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-production-ranking-co...

> So one could easily say that recently burned Amazon rainforest is "marginal crop land", and that would make this statement technically true while still being no consolation at all.

The point is that cattle can be raised in marginal crop land. Palm trees cannot. Yes, we should stop cutting down rainforest for cattle and palm oil. The difference is that we can raise cattle in the tons of marginal crop land we have around the world.

> The next biggest chunk of the earth's cattle live in China

Not true.

https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-production-ranking-co...

> Grazing is supposedly a major factor in the expansion of the Gobi desert.

Supposedly? Care to provide a source for that?

> Perhaps all the biggest CAFOs are located in marginal crop land, but the grain they're feeding to the cattle is all grown on prime crop land.

Care to provide source for that?

If you really are concerned about the rain forests, then you should be against palm oil and raising cattle in the amazon rainforest. But it seems like you are just against raising cattle.

If we could consume the exact same plant calories, that would be an apt comparison. However, I'm loathe to consume such plant matter like corn cob, stalk, leaf, and other plant matter that is indigestible to humans.

It's crazy how much beef fat is thrown away because no one wants it. I just asked the butcher and they gave it to me, and I made my own tallow.

Obviously this doesn't work at industrial scales, but if you really want to be ecological, try working things out locally first with the stuff that's getting tossed.

It is interesting how that has changed over time. In the 1830's, the most valuable part of the beef animal was the hide, followed by the tallow. The meat was the cheap byproduct.

Same for pork. In the 1940's, lard was highly valuable, and pigs were bred to maximize lard production.

I couldn't exactly confirm.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.096205135&view=1u...

Sorry, I don't have time right now to read your link but I will get back to it after my event this evening.

My citation for hogs... my father was a breeder of fine, pedigreed Duroc-Jersey swine. He literally lived through (and helped lead) the switch from selecting for maximum lard production to selecting for minimum back-fat.

By the time I was cleaning barns after school, we were well into the "minimize fat" era. Which in my opinion has been taken too far, as pork now is often very dry. A little marbling would go a long way.

(Aside: I vividly recall one night, near the end of the second cup of coffee, a nasty differential equations pset that was kicking my ass. I remember to this day saying to myself: You have two options here: a) wrap your mind around diffeq, and get that engineering degree, or b) go home and clean hog barns for the rest of your life. I chose option 'a'. Powerful motivation.)

Haha well, those valuable-in-1830's parts are the parts that do not spoil at room temp and last a really long time, so that may have something to do with it.

But it is an IMO superior (health and taste) fat for cooking and its absolutely crazy that people don't gobble it up, instead opting for canola, palm, safflower, etc.

Tallow making: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1191748243429957632

(Note that this here is scrap cuttings and the leaf fat, around the kidneys, is more ideal for making large quantities, but is also often thrown away!)

Tallow slow-fried fries: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1215090611264610304

For a long time, everyone said saturated fats and meat fats were a one way ticket to heart disease. Vegetable fats took over and it’ll take a while for anything to change.

Trans fats are the real killer and bans are already in effect around the world. The FDA banned trans fats in the U.S. as of June 2019: https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/final-dete...

That seemed to happen rather quickly, at least once the evidence became overwhelming. The FDA was only a few years behind major cities like San Francisco, though some European countries were way ahead of the curve.

Red meat and dairy have significant amounts of trans fats. You're still probably better off with vegetable fats if you can help it, at least where partially hydrogenated oils are banned.

> Red meat and dairy have significant amounts of trans fats.

Natural trans fats [1] are made by bacteria in the rumen, and are rather different than manufactured trans fats created from seed oils with hydrogen gas and catalysts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_linoleic_acid - "The biological activity of CLA was noted by researchers in 1979 who found it to inhibit chemically induced cancer in mice [...] In 2008, the United States Food and Drug Administration categorized CLA as generally recognized as safe (GRAS)."

> You're still probably better off with vegetable fats if you can help it, at least where partially hydrogenated oils are banned.

Most polyunsaturated oils are deodorized ("refined"), so customers don't realize they're eating rancid oil.

I bought unrefined grape seed oil years ago. Didn't know what to do with the obviously-rancid oil. Now I would give it to my father, so he could use it to help start his barbecue's charcoal.

Worrying about trans fats and heart disease when over half of your population is so obese it's impairing their ability to walk seems insane.

Then again, trans fats isn't the addictive high-margin industrial product... :(

Trans fats are similar to smoking in that they directly contribute to arteriosclerosis. Like smoking, obesity is a secondary concern. No doctor would tell you to keep smoking to stay trim; likewise, I doubt any doctor or scientist would suggest a diet heavy in trans fats (e.g. margarine) if for some reason such consumption would keep you trim.

I'm saying that banning addictive sugary food be a thousand times more effective w.r.t public health than banning trans fats.

Making a big show of banning one while letting the other run wild is very bad optics.

(Then again, I'm not sure how we might even go about curtailing sugars, they're just way too embedded in our culture.)

> I'm saying that banning addictive sugary food be a thousand times more effective w.r.t public health than banning trans fats.

I get that, but I don't think the empirical science supports a claim that sugar is more costly than trans fats from a public health perspective; and certainly not that it's 1000x worse. In any event, the effects of sugar are indirect and complex. For example, AFAIU a high sugar but low calorie diet isn't particularly bad for you. By contrast, trans fats have a simple, clear, and substantial causal relation to arteriosclerosis.

50 years of prescribing partially hydrogenated oils and low-fat foods was based on poor, incomplete, and sloppy science. Going forward maybe we should instead base public policy on sound, concrete, reproducible science and straight-forward regulations. Not everything needs to be fixed with government mandates, and usually shouldn't without clear reasons.

In those days, leather was very much a part of many manufactured goods. Not to mention, the primary mode of transportation was the horse, which required a saddle.

Refrigeration technology greatly increased the reach, durability, and thus value of raw meat.

Electricity and the lightbulb depleted demand for candles (and tallow).

Coconut oil works very well for soaps. You can get great great results with it. I've tried (as a hobbyist maker) red palm oil and coconut oil and I found the latter much preferable. Coconut oil costs more, of course.

I use it as well in most of my formulations. It yields a high lather and is very cleansing (almost too cleansing -- it's often described as very "drying".) It's best used along with olive oil, to get a simultaneously cleansing + moisturizing bar.

So aside from the additional cost, is there any catch in using it instead of palm oil or tallow, provided you balance it out with a moisturizer like olive oil?

You might get away with just those two, but it would probably yield a very soft bar. A soft bar typically takes longer to cure (be ready to use/sell) and doesn't last as long once it's being used.

In my experience coconut oil, like olive oil, would still need to be mixed with a harder fat like palm or tallow, or hard butters, like cocoa butter. It is on the soft side of oils.

The "old reliable" recipe mixes these three in equal parts: Coconut, Olive, Tallow. Each of them imparts a quality that the others lack. Coconut = cleansing, Olive = moisturizing, Tallow/Palm = Hardness, stability

Did you watch the Seven Worlds, One Planet episode on Asia?

For anyone who is wondering how to source sustainable palm oil, there are some links to investigate oneself https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1Wbwgx6HCMbF8SrnST...

Honest question: Why not use olive oil? Since it has been used in soap making for centuries, I'm curious why you prefer palm oil or beef tallow over what to my amateur thinking is an ideal renewable option.

Olive oil (pomace) is one of the ingredients I use in formulations. Olive oil is very moisturizing, but doesn't lather at all, and it renders a very soft bar of soap. Tallow and palm are both hard, stable lather-building ingredients.

In short, olive oil and palm oil are not really comparable. They would both be best used in some combination to yield a product with both moisturizing and lathering qualities.

I've been using this 100% olive oil (fat-wise) soap for several years, it doesn't lather quite as well as other soaps i've used but it does the job well enough:

https://www.hollandandbarrett.com/shop/product/oliva-pure-ol...

Traditionally, castile soap is 100% olive-oil based. It's often sold as liquid soap, to eliminate any disadvantages of the softness that olive oil gives to solid bar soap.

I'll have to give that a try, I used to use the Kiss My Face 100% olive oil bars before they shut down and were acquired, now their products are awful.

I've been using this [0] as a replacement which has been good but the Laurel blend seems to dry my skin more than the straight olive oil KMF bars did.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Aleppo-Soap-Hand-made-All-Natural-12-...

Is lathering important for any particular reason?

I've been using castile soap for a while now, and, while it's true that it doesn't lather as much as some other soaps, that's never really bothered me.

It ultimately depends on the person using it.

Lather is often associated with a soap's cleansing qualities, which is usually desirable. But some people prefer their soap to be more moisturizing than cleansing.

I personally find pure castile soap to be too moisturizing and not cleansing enough. I prefer a more balanced soap with a bit of both qualities.

Does it actually make the soap more cleansing, or is it just a perception thing?

My understanding was that, when companies add lathering agents to their products, it's the same as dyes and fragrances: really just there for cosmetic purposes.

Surfactant types and levels are different from different ingredients. That's what does the "cleansing" you're asking about. Not all oils and fats clean the same way. Some are better for different "messes" than others. Like wood ash makes a fantastic soap to strip grease. However, it also dries the hell out of your skin and can lead to lots of cracking.

It's all a balancing act as to how strong of a soap you want compared to damaging.

Thanks friend - I sort of assumed it was something along those lines but was curious about your thoughts as a pro.

Olive oil gives you very soft soaps, (hydrogenated) palm oil and beef tallow give you very hard soaps.

hence palmolive, presumably? Somewhere in between?

Hah, never made that connection.

But yeah presumably.

What about hydrogenated vegetable oil?

It's certainly used in soap, but I've never tried it. From what I understand it's often derived from soybean oil.

Each type of oil/fat has a unique fatty acid profile that contributes different qualities to the product after saponification. Palm oil has a uniquely high palmitic and oleic acid content, both of which provide very desirable qualities to the end product.

Raw agricultural oils have a limited number of unsaturated chemical bonds between some of the atoms in their carbon chain structure.

These carbons are available for reaction with alkalies such as lye, which saponifiy each pair of target carbons by adding a molecule of water H_O_H. H_ to one carbon, _OH to the adjoining carbon. The properties of the resulting material, soap, are not very similar to the original oil, it is quite water soluble by comparison, and capable of easily emulsifying regular oil & grease as expected for water rinsability.

If the raw oil is instead reacted with hydrogen gas, one _H goes to each reactive carbon and the molecule after that point is referred to as being saturated with hydrogen. That's why they call it hydrogenated vegetable oil. Things like Crisco which are solid at room temperature and able to cook at high heat because they are hydrogenated, even though the raw oil they are made from is light and does not even solidify under refrigeration.

The lye is not very reactive with vegetable oil that is already saturated (plain mineral oil is saturated naturally).

The heavier fractions or varieties of palm oils can be solids at various room temperatures, and under refigeration the heavier waxes from olive oil often separate from the lighter fractions readily. But both of these waxy fractions are solid naturally just because they have a higher melting point, there has been no hydrogenation and the raw solid oil when melted can be reacted with lye as fully as raw light fractions can.

Palm oil is not sustainable, period. It’s either being grown on plantations where forest used to be or more plantations are being cut out of the jungle to meet growing demand.

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