Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything--And Endangered the World

by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman

It's in our instant noodles and chocolate bars, our lipsticks and fuel tanks. But what is palm oil, and how has it come to dominate our lives so completely?

Jocelyn C. Zuckerman travels across four continents and back in time two centuries to find answers about the most widely used vegetable oil on Earth. The obscure oil palm fruit, she discovers, has played an outsized role in history, from greasing the gears of the Second Industrial Revolution to transforming the economies of Malaysia and Indonesia. But this little fruit also belies an industry of vicious exploitation and ruinous damage to our planet. The multi-billion-dollar palm oil business has been built on stolen land and slave labour, once spurred the colonisation of Nigeria, and has swept away lives and cultures. Fires lit to clear the way for plantations spew carbon emissions to rival those of entire industrialised nations. Mass deforestation so ravaged the landscapes of Southeast Asia that animals like the orangutan now teeter on the brink of extinction.

Combining history, travelogue and investigative reporting, 'Planet Palm' offers an unsettling, urgent look at the global palm oil industry, illuminating what has today become an environmental, public health and human rights disaster.

• ISBN10: 1620975246
• ISBN13: 9781620975244
• Publish Date: 25 May 2021 (first published 13 May 2021)
• Publish Status: Active
• Imprint: New Press
• Format: eBook
• Language: English

Reviews

[Jeff Sexton]

Eye Opening, Yet Problematic Itself. This is a well documented work - roughly 30% of the text was bibliography, even if much of it wasn't actually referenced in the text of the advance reader copy I read. (Perhaps that will be corrected before actual publication, so if you're reading a fully published version circa June 2021 or later, please comment and let me know. :D) It does a tremendous job of showing the development of palm oil from regional subsistence level agriculture to today's modern arguably Big Palm level industry, and how it spread from regional staple to in seemingly every home in the "developed" world, at minimum. It is here that the book is truly eye opening, and truly shows some areas that perhaps still need some work.

HOWEVER, the book also often lauds communists and eco-terrorists, among other less than savory characters, for the "efforts" to "combat" this scourge - and this is something that is both pervasive throughout the text and a bit heavy handed, particularly when praising a team of Greenpeace pirates who tried to illegally board a cargo ship a few years ago.

Still, even with the aforementioned pervasive praise of people who arguably truly shouldn't be, the fact that the text does such a solid job of explaining the various issues and histories at hand alone merits its consideration. Recommended.