While showering a few weeks ago, I realized I had run out of conditioner. So I reached up and grabbed my wife's bottle -- Clairol Herbal Essences Rainforest Flowers, "with essences of nourishing palm."
The label caught me slightly by surprise. As an environmental journalist, I've been writing about the ecologically destructive effect of palm oil for some time now.
Whether it's used as an additive in soap, cosmetics or food, or processed into a biofuel, palm oil is one of the worst culprits in the climate crisis. Most of it comes from the disappearing, ultra-carbon-rich rain forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, of which a whopping 25,000 square miles have been cleared and burned to make way for palm oil plantations.
That burning releases enough carbon dioxide into the air to rank Indonesia as the No. 3 such polluter in the world. It also destroys the last remaining habitat for orangutans, Sumatran rhinos, tigers and other endangered wildlife. So what was this deadly oil doing in our otherwise ecologically friendly apartment?
I started to inspect other items on our shelves. Despite our efforts to keep our family green, we'd admitted into our home several products containing palm oil: Burt's Bees soap, chocolate truffles from Trader Joe's, Kashi breakfast bars, Whole Foods water crackers and many others.
Probably the worst offenders were Entenmann's chocolate-covered doughnuts, which actually list palm oil as the first ingredient -- and palm kernel oil as the second. Lots of other products, some of them marketed as "green," contain this rhino-killer too: Oreos, Chewy Chips Ahoy!, Orville Redenbacher's popcorn, Hershey's Kisses "Hugs," Twix and many other processed foods. Even some Girl Scout cookies have it, which is why this spring, 12-year-old Girl Scouts Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen of Ann Arbor, Mich., refused to sell the cookies and have encouraged the organization to drop the ingredient.
The great tragedy of all this palm oil use (about 30 million tons globally every year) is that it's so easily replaced by healthier vegetable oils, like canola, that come from significantly less-ecologically sensitive areas. Indeed, every single product I examined had either a variant or a competitor that didn't contain palm oil -- with no discernible effect on price or quality. Sitting next to those Whole Foods-brand water crackers were Haute Cuisine water crackers made with canola oil. Down the aisle from palm-oil laden Ivory soap was palm-oil-free Lever 2000.
