Palm Oil – What’s the deal? Good or bad?
Fairtrade, higher-welfare, free-range, organic, nutritional, seasonal, locally-sourced… There’s a lot to worry about these days when you’re deciding what to eat and feed your family.
If you obsess over what’s in your food, how it was made and where it has come from, you’ve probably heard about palm oil and that it’s bad for the environment. You might even have tried to avoid it but quickly found that product labelling is confusing and alongside all those other things to worry about, like buying free-range eggs, fair-trade bananas or organically-reared meat, it’s slipped down the list of priorities.
Palm oil isn’t just bad news for the environment. It’s destroying the homes of animals like the orangutan and the Sumatran tiger.
You’ll find palm oil in more than 50% of all the food you buy and it can be found in everyday items like margarines, biscuits, breads, cereals, noodles and even shampoo, lipsticks and detergents.
So what can we do about the issue?
Well, there is now such a thing as GOOD palm oil. It helps to protect forests and wildlife where it is grown and secures an income for farmers by making more palm oil from less land.
However, good palm oil only accounts for 21% of all palm oil consumed globally, so that’s why we all need to share the story of #GoodBadPalmOil and make sure that brands and retailers know that we, as consumers, care about this issue and expect them to take action.
You can help by getting involved with a new campaign from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) called ‘What’s your food made of?’ The campaign features three short fun films of knitted foods which raise awareness of good and bad palm oil.
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By 2020, RSPO wants ALL palm oil being used in our food to be sustainably sourced. If you are interested in helping them achieve this, please either share on Facebook, Twitter or you can read more about the campaign below.
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Read more about the campaign
The post Palm Oil – What’s the deal? Good or bad? appeared first on Hilary's New York Lifestyle Blog.