Palm Oil, Why is it in Almost Everything I Try to Buy?!

Does bread and breakfast cereal need to contain Palm oil? What about peanut butter and lemon meringue pie? Or toothpaste, or shampoo? Of course not, so why the hell is it there?? Companies who claim that their palm oil is sustainably sourced are very seldom telling the truth; they either don't know and take someone else's word for it, or they more likely don't care. Forest destruction and the slaughter of wildlife continues, while they are still filling almost every product we can buy with unnecessary palm oil.

On a recent journey I was thirsty. Stopped at the small Tunbridge Wells service station on the A21 and nearly bought a bottle of M & S sparkling Florida Orange drink. But saw in time that it contains palm oil so put it back. Why a soft drink of any kind needs to contain oil, let alone palm oil, is beyond my comprehension. What was in them before palm oil became the go to ingredient for every manufactured product in the universe? Palm oil comes from the nut, palm kernel oil which is used in soaps etc comes from the outer layer around the nut. 

So, when did palm oil become ubiquitous? Not before the 1960's. I understand that the oil palm tree - Scientific name: Elaeis guineensisis - originated in West Africa, where it's been used by humans for four or five thousand years. But don't blame Africa, the continent itself uses all the palm oil grown there. Its spread to Indonesia and Malaysia began in the nineteenth century, introduced by colonial Europeans from The Netherlands and Britain. However it wasn't until the 60's that oil palm plantations in the Far East began to spread beyond what had previously been rubber plantations and onto land carved and burned out of the rainforests.

The oil palm is an easily cultivated, highly productive tree and creates more usable oil from its nuts than any other tree on the planet. So it's cheap, easily available and who cares about the orang-utans, or the forest ecosystems, or the carbon released into the atmosphere by their destruction? Not the companies producing and exporting the oil, that's for sure. And we're to blame for encouraging them.