Watch Out For Palm Oil!

I really love baking and often you need a vegan butter substitute, which you can easily find in your local grocery store. However, many, or almost all of these vegan butters, and a huge precentage of other foods contain palm oil, “palm oil is in roughly 50% of all packaged goods, from cookies, peanut butter, and breakfast cereal to cleaning products, laundry detergent, lipstick, and body lotion,” (Schaffer-RAN).

If you are vegan, or animal friendly, then you are also probably concerned about the environment. Therefore it is important to at least become aware of how much palm oil is in all of your foods and where it comes from! If you are only concerned about the welfare of animals then consider the mass deforestation that goes on, and how that effects the animals living there.

“Every day, huge areas of forest in our neighbouring countries are being cleared to make way for new plantations, causing greenhouse gas emissions to sky-rocket.

Clearing forests for palm oil plantations is also destroying the natural habitat of many critically endangered species such as the Sumatran orangutan. Experts predict that if deforestation continues, the entire species could be wiped out by 2020,” ( Greenpeace).

It not only effects, animal welfare and the environement, but also directly impacts the welfare of humans.

“Indonesia is the world’s primary palm oil supplier, with already 6 million hectares of palm oil plantations and plans for 4 million more by 2015. The damage deforestation is causing to Indonesia’s peatlands, the delicate ecosystem that many Indonesian forests exist on, accounts for 4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. It’s because of this that Indonesia ranks as the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter after the United States and China.” (Greenpeace)