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A review by laurenkd89
Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything--And Endangered the World by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman
4.0
This is an excellent, comprehensive piece of reporting on one of the world's biggest problems: palm oil. Many environmentally-conscious consumers know about this evil crop, including how it has led to or been the cause of:
• massive (often illegal) deforestation in the world's most carbon-rich and biodiverse places,
• full or near extinction of hundreds of species that depend on these deforested habitats,
• huge releases of the CO2 that these high carbon stock rainforests capture and sequester, thus being a significant driver of climate change,
• eradication, exploitation, and/or displacement of indigenous peoples,
• despicable human rights violations from child labor to modern-day slavery to toxic agrochemical exposure,
• and many negative health outcomes including obesity and heart disease in countries like India and Mexico that sell processed foods loaded with the stuff.
So with all of these amazing things about palm oil easily accessible from a quick Google search, to borrow a phrase from John Oliver, why is it still a thing? Zuckerman explains why in many reasons, not least of which is the fact that our world - from Indian supermarkets to your own home - is dependent on and addicted to palm oil. You'll be hard pressed to find a home, even one of the most eco-conscious, free of the substance in one form or another, from Palmolive to L'Oreal cosmetics to Nutella to fried and packaged foods.
Zuckerman traces the history of palm oil, from when it was a nutritious and healthful Bahian food to when it entered the European commodity trade and led to many human rights abuses in its labor-intensive sourcing to when Europeans started massively clearing tropical rainforests and starting plantations of their own (only in the early 19th century). You'll note characters (really, villains) whose names are still around today: William Lever of Unilever fame, who put the stuff in his soap, and Pietro Ferrero of Nutella fame, who started using palm oil to give Nutella that creaminess that it's known for. They were not good guys in the race to own the palm oil supply chain.
Each chapter in this book dives deep into the issues I bulleted above, with Zuckerman going on-the-ground as much as possible to get firsthand accounts from workers, smallholder farmers, poachers (yes, poachers!), environmental activists, palm oil barons, government officials, etc. She travels to remote areas in these (formerly) biodiversity zones and sees the destruction that industrial-scale palm oil has wreaked on the most beautiful and sacred parts of the world. It's no secret that trying to investigate and uncover bad things about the palm oil industry puts a target on your back - palm oil is money, and there's a LOT of it in this industry - so I applaud Zuckerman's real reporting efforts, rather than just doing all her research from the desktop.
I work in the agriculture industry, and I thought I knew a decent amount about the horrors of industrial agriculture, especially for commodities like palm oil, cattle, rubber, soy, etc. that have and continue to cause massive deforestation. But this taught me so much that I didn't know in a relatively short book - including and especially all of the health and nutrition concerns related to palm oil, and how they are tied to socioeconomic disadvantage, both on a personal and geographical scale.
Although Zuckerman tries to end the book on some hopeful notes - promising partnerships and agreements, NGO watchdog groups that monitor for deforestation in almost real time, and our capacity to change what we thought would never change - you are still left with a sense of dread at the scale, intensity, difficulty to control, and most importantly, money behind this problem. I truly hope things will change, especially as the knowledge we have about this industry grows. The first step, at least, is consumer awareness.
Thank you to the publisher for the ARC via Netgalley!
• massive (often illegal) deforestation in the world's most carbon-rich and biodiverse places,
• full or near extinction of hundreds of species that depend on these deforested habitats,
• huge releases of the CO2 that these high carbon stock rainforests capture and sequester, thus being a significant driver of climate change,
• eradication, exploitation, and/or displacement of indigenous peoples,
• despicable human rights violations from child labor to modern-day slavery to toxic agrochemical exposure,
• and many negative health outcomes including obesity and heart disease in countries like India and Mexico that sell processed foods loaded with the stuff.
So with all of these amazing things about palm oil easily accessible from a quick Google search, to borrow a phrase from John Oliver, why is it still a thing? Zuckerman explains why in many reasons, not least of which is the fact that our world - from Indian supermarkets to your own home - is dependent on and addicted to palm oil. You'll be hard pressed to find a home, even one of the most eco-conscious, free of the substance in one form or another, from Palmolive to L'Oreal cosmetics to Nutella to fried and packaged foods.
Zuckerman traces the history of palm oil, from when it was a nutritious and healthful Bahian food to when it entered the European commodity trade and led to many human rights abuses in its labor-intensive sourcing to when Europeans started massively clearing tropical rainforests and starting plantations of their own (only in the early 19th century). You'll note characters (really, villains) whose names are still around today: William Lever of Unilever fame, who put the stuff in his soap, and Pietro Ferrero of Nutella fame, who started using palm oil to give Nutella that creaminess that it's known for. They were not good guys in the race to own the palm oil supply chain.
Each chapter in this book dives deep into the issues I bulleted above, with Zuckerman going on-the-ground as much as possible to get firsthand accounts from workers, smallholder farmers, poachers (yes, poachers!), environmental activists, palm oil barons, government officials, etc. She travels to remote areas in these (formerly) biodiversity zones and sees the destruction that industrial-scale palm oil has wreaked on the most beautiful and sacred parts of the world. It's no secret that trying to investigate and uncover bad things about the palm oil industry puts a target on your back - palm oil is money, and there's a LOT of it in this industry - so I applaud Zuckerman's real reporting efforts, rather than just doing all her research from the desktop.
I work in the agriculture industry, and I thought I knew a decent amount about the horrors of industrial agriculture, especially for commodities like palm oil, cattle, rubber, soy, etc. that have and continue to cause massive deforestation. But this taught me so much that I didn't know in a relatively short book - including and especially all of the health and nutrition concerns related to palm oil, and how they are tied to socioeconomic disadvantage, both on a personal and geographical scale.
Although Zuckerman tries to end the book on some hopeful notes - promising partnerships and agreements, NGO watchdog groups that monitor for deforestation in almost real time, and our capacity to change what we thought would never change - you are still left with a sense of dread at the scale, intensity, difficulty to control, and most importantly, money behind this problem. I truly hope things will change, especially as the knowledge we have about this industry grows. The first step, at least, is consumer awareness.
Thank you to the publisher for the ARC via Netgalley!