Palm oil is a butter substitute. Every baked product at the grocery store that used to be made with butter is now made with palm oil, because it is cheaper. Palm oil is made up of long highly-saturated fatty acids that cause it to be solid at room temperature, giving it physical properties very similar to butter, making it suitable as a substitute. However saturated fatty acids are bad for your health. Butter is also saturated fat and is also somewhat bad, but palm oil is much worse because the varieties of fatty acids it contains are much different from animal fat fatty acids and the human body metabolizes them differently, so they have a much higher impact. Similar physical properties but worse health properties!
It is nearly impossible to find frozen baked goods that are still made with butter. This pie claims to be made with healthy ingredients, and specifically touts its butter content, but it conveniently omits mentioning palm oil entirely. Since palm oil appears first on the ingredients list before butter, that means there is more of it. Possibly almost the entire “butter-like” fraction of the pie consists of palm oil.
This pie alone contains 400% daily value saturated fat, which is terrible for long-term health. I love apple pies and I was planning to eat this pie as my sole food over the course of 2 days for my One-Meal-A-Day (OMAD), but I’m not willing to risk eating palm oil. Thanks for nothing for getting my hopes up, pie box!
- traditional wholesome German ingredients like palm oil
- palm oil - just the way grandma used to make at home
- contains memories of butter
I’m sure someone below will mention how palm oil is also bad for the environment and bad for the farmers and bad for the economy. I will only be answering questions about the film Rampart.
For all those decrying the ethics of palm oil - you are aware of the yields per hectare of the various plant oils, right?
Would anybody like to suggest how to switch away from palm oils without deforesting what remains of the Amazon?
The difference is the others don’t require a tropical environment to grow. So you can grow them without any deforestation.
Where are you suggesting to find another 500 million acres of land, a tad more than the size of Alaska, without environmental impact?
Ooh, what if we use Alaska?
The obvious answer is some of the Land used to grow soybeans and corn for animal feed.
By that logic though, imagine how much land we could reclaim for other purposes (including reforestation) if we shifted more existing farmland towards palm oil.
That’s not where palms grow.
True. So reforest the land instead.
so we’ve gotten a shitton better at aero- and hydroponics. can we grow the right palm tree in a greenhouse yet?
i’m in the california bay area so palm trees are more of a wealth indicator than a “hey they grow here” thing. but they’re everywhere because people want to signal that they’re wealthy, even if they aren’t.
That will never be able to compete on price with clear cut rainforest land and trained primates doing the picking.
nonsense this is statesia we got children
we make them. with environmental impact because you can’t exist without it, but we do what we can to minimize it yes. We got a shitton of land out in texas that is being used as oilfields. get some environmental remediation out there first to make it suitable for farmland, use some of the grassy areas as well (not all we need the grassy areas), and there’s a good quarter of that chunk at least.
and I’d bump that up to like 650million acres, because we’re not using prime farmland to get this oil. yields will probably be less.
but like, the room to grow this is there. i drive by sunflower fields (that are either for oil or eating) fairly regularly.
Ok. Texas is 170M acres. We’ve allocated Texas, that’s 30% of what we need. Which other US states can we sacrifice? :)
I’m liking this plan.
i don’t think missouri or mississippi would mind if we sacrificed them. but we’re going to need 10 million acres from a few states each in europe to make this work i think.
Do butter.
Can’t tell if you’re making a pun or being serious :)
In case you’re being serious, I’m pretty sure we’d need magnitudes more land and methane emissions for butter.
The cow is not killed when butter is harvested. But they do need to be fed, so I’m not sure about that.
The grass and/or grain the cow eats does though.
Animals take up a ton more space than do plants. I’m sure you’ve heard all the arguments at some point for moving away from meat. I’m not going to rehash them (especially since I’m a meat eater), but it’s just a question of how many magnitudes more land cows would use, not if they would use more land.
I was being serious; figure up the tons per hectare per year of butter production.
Google says 250kg per hectare, So about 6% of palm oil productivity. About 15x the land usage.
Aren’t some of those plants grown in plains? I don’t think the yield per hectare is the whole story. Palm oil is tropical, leading to deforestation, but at least some of the others you listed are not.
Where are you suggesting to find another 500 million acres of land, a tad more than the size of Alaska, without environmental impact?
Why are you moving the goalposts? In your first post the goal was without further deforestation of rainforests, but in your reply, you changed the goal to without environmental impact. As long as global population growth is a thing, the former is possible, the latter not so much.
I’ll admit I’m not terribly interested in this topic. I only replied to your comment (at the same time as another commenter making a similar argument) because you come off as a shill for palm oil, which is odd.
I’m not trying to write a thesis and pick exact words here. Let me move the goalposts back.
Where do you suggest to find 500M acres without deforesting something and driving a few more species extinct?
Just because a random Internet stranger doesn’t know a better solution off the top of their head, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem to be clearly seen.
I’m not arguing there isn’t a problem, I’m pointing out the stupidity in advocating for an even worse solution. No, I don’t have the answer either.