A review by confirmyourpassword
Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything--And Endangered the World by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman

challenging informative sad medium-paced

4.5

It's really hard to read about the complete devastation wrought to humans, non-humans, and the environment in Planet Palm without feeling pure rage, and Zuckerman does a great job of plainly stating the horrors of industrial agriculture without overly moralizing about the ecological destruction, land theft, and worker exploitation that comes with it. I didn't know anything about palm oil production and this book gives all the context necessary to understand where we are today. There's some optimistic developments grounded in cynical realism, but overall an depressing but instructive read.

There's two things of note that might turn off some readers:

1. There's tons of little tidbits, trivia, and factoids that help ground each chapter in a specific place and time. I knew most of them so I found it fascinating to connect all of these disparate facts into an interlinked web of history, but a lot of them can be niche and may make it boring and/or frustrating to read if you aren't into that.
2. The prose is somewhat inconsistent and bounces around between formal and informal voice, which is noticeable but doesn't especially affect the content of the text.