Palm Oil Dependency

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2022

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bee Wilson talks to Tom about palm oil, which can be found in everything from pot noodles to shaving foam. In its purest state, squeezed from the fruit and kernels of the oil palm, it has a deep red colour and rich fragrance. By the time it reaches our supermarkets, in ultra-processed foods and cosmetics, it’s been refined, bleached, deodorised and relabelled, appearing in multiple different forms. Bee and Tom look at the reasons for its ubiquity, the consequences for those involved in its production and whether a sustainable palm oil industry is possible. Find more to read on the episode page: https://lrb.me/palmoilpod Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: https://mylrb.co.uk/podcast20b Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest today is B Wilson,
0:13.3	whose books include The Way We Eat Now and First Bite, How We Learn to Eat. She's written dozens of pieces for the LRB, most recently on palm oil. It's a review
0:22.5	of two books, Planet Palm, How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything and Endangered the World by
0:28.0	Jocelyn Zuckerman, and Oil Palm, a Global History by Jonathan Robbins. Hello, B, and thank you very
0:34.0	much for joining me. Hi, thanks for having me. Jocelyn Zuckerman's subtitle is
0:39.0	how palm oil ended up in everything. I mean, what is it in? What does she mean by everything?
0:45.2	That's a very good question, because the more I was writing, the more I realized I had to query
0:50.4	what the everything was and whether the everything itself actually needed to exist.
0:55.6	But if we assume that the everything in our shops is in some way an actual state of affairs,
1:00.4	it is fairly staggering that, as Sukkerman points out, palm oil is now in around, I mean,
1:07.0	it's just in almost every ultra processed food product that you can think of. But it's just in almost every ultra-processed food product that you can think of.
1:13.6	But it's also in pretty much every pharmaceutical product you can think of.
1:18.7	I mean, cosmetics, things like everything from soap to shampoo to toothpaste to moisturiser to foamy, squirty, shaving foam. If you're talking about foods,
1:31.7	it's in cookies, it's in cakes, it's in fried snacks, it's in baked snacks, it's in bread. And
1:40.9	it's really curious because if you ask most consumers, like, how much palm oil do you consume?
1:46.6	If you're talking about Europeans, Americans, people in the industrialized West, most people would say,
1:53.0	Parmuel, what's that? What does it taste like? What does it smell like? No knowledge of eating it.
1:58.5	And yet it's there. The kind of great cliche about it is that it's
2:01.7	hidden. And I think that's what the Zuckerman book addresses very directly. I mean, it's the,
2:06.9	as you say, the subtitle is how it ended up in pretty much everything. And it is really strange.
2:12.2	I mean, there are second part of the story, or maybe you're getting to this, is that there are
2:16.1	places in the world, many places in the world, where palm oil is consciously eaten, enjoyed, beloved, very
	...

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