Palm oil.

Hey lovely people out there!
I have recently written a soap-box speech (an argumentative essay) on why palm oil should be banned. I got some good feedback from it, and thought it would be good to put up here.
just keep in mind its meant to be read aloud :)

love you amazing people!
(if you want to help, search palm oil and there are a million petitions you can sign about labeling palm oil and discontinuing the use of palm oil)



PALM OIL SHOULD BE BANNED!
Orang-utans share 97% of our DNA; they’re practically our cousins. So how would you feel if 90% of your cousin’s habitat had been destroyed for Palm Oil plantations? Would you feel sad? Angry? Of course! Yet I don’t see any sad or angry faces in the room. Perhaps because you don’t know the facts. That the equivalent of 300 soccer fields are being destroyed every hour for Palm Oil plantations, or that Palm Oil cost the lives of an estimated 50 orang-utans every week. Well, I’m here to educate you.

So what is Palm oil? Palm Oil is an edible oil derived from the fruits of palm trees, more specifically the pulp of the fruit. Palm oil is reddish in colour and is semi-solid at room temperature. Sound harmless, right. WRONG!

Most of the Palm Oil that ends up in our food is unsustainably harvested. It’s unsustainable because the palm oil plantations can’t be grown at a rate fast enough to equal the rate of the harvest, resulting in more deforestation and more dead orang-utans. But still, Palm oil is used in over 40% of the food on our supermarket shelves. But its not just food, your shampoo and conditioner probably contain palm oil, and so does your makeup. It’s possible to grow sustainable Palm Oil plantations, and there are a few out there, but a only a tiny amount, 8% in fact, is used for the global supply of palm oil. Thankfully, some companies have begun to use alternative oils, canola and sunflower oils in particular.

So other sustainable oils can be substituted for Palm oil. In fact, almost all products containing palm oil could be made using other oils. Some of those other oils include…
Soybean oil
Canola oil
Sunflower seed oil
Peanut oil
Cottenseed oil
Coconut oil
Olive oil
Corn oil
Grape seed oil
Hazelnut oil
Linseed oil and
Sesame oil
If there was a product that actually required palm oil, that’s another thing, but the fact is that’s not the case. There IS NO good reason to use palm oil in any product! The only problem is there is no incentive for companies not to use it.

Labelling laws allow companies to state their product contains vegetable oil, but much of the time this is palm oil. Companies do not have to label when they use palm oil. This means the individual consumer has no choice in whether they buy products containing palm oil or not. Basically this mean that the individual is powerless to influence Market forces. If we as consumers knew which products contained palm oil then we could vote with our money by not purchasing those products, and this may lead to some change. Currently Australians unknowingly consume on average 10 kg of palm oil annually. We don’t have the choice to do otherwise.
If you would like to help change this go to this website and register your protest.

Zoo.com.au/palmoil


The continued use of palm oil is outrageous. Human beings are already responsible for the extinction of too many animals to count. How can we all just stand by and let this happen. If this continues, by 2020 all great apes will be extinct, and our rainforests destroyed. But don’t worry, but don’t worry we’ll still have Oreos.

So enjoy your next packet of potato chips.



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