Wednesday, July 10, 2019

All about palm oil

At the Jakarta Post, a couple of lengthy, detailed articles about growing palm oil, and whether EU attempts to influence its production are counterproductive, or not.


2 comments:

GMB said...

The way to handle this is to point out its rubbish as a food oil. We used Palm Oil in a place I worked. I assume its toxic sludge, because the only good cooking fats I know of are ghee, butter, coconut, lard and I'm struggling to think of anything else. Tropical plant fats are sometimes okay. But in this case, the palm oil. cannot be okay because we added it early in the production process. Meaning it doesn't spoil, ergo the bacteria won't have a bar of it, and therefore its not food. It follows that it should be used locally under polyculture as an on-farm fuel or something.

Whenever you clear-cut everything and put up a mono-culture more than (lets say) 5 metres thick, you are damaging a habitat. But on the other hand its a bit rich for us to be lecturing the Malaysians or the Indonesians on these sorts of practices when we don't have our own ecological/agricultural house in order. Thats where this jive is coming from as Dr Mahatir pointed out. We have our absolute evil junk CANOLA OIL. Laughably thought of as a food. When in reality its a variation on an insecticide.

Its astonishing that this industrial sludge (ie canola oil) would be added to food. We used to add it to food but we would also use it to lubricate cotton thread with a version that was artificially deodorised. The bacteria were not fooled by our prevarications, and left the canola oil alone.

The use of canola oil is a complete travesty and Malaysia would wind up outcompeting us with their palm oil so an ecological problem was .... well I won't say INVENTED .... because current agricultural practices are inherently bad for the ecology. But lets just say this ecological problem was magnified, in an unfair and one-eye-blind way, so that the Malaysians rubbish oil could not compete with our toxic industrial sludge. When the Palm Oil was and is "inherently" cheaper.


GMB said...

I may have to eat my words about Palm Oil being unhealthy. " Due to the saturated vegetable fats, it helps to increase LDL cholesterol and prevent the risk of cardiovascular disease." It may be that its simply because its a saturated fat that it doesn't spoil so quickly as it might otherwise.