A small step away from palm oil

After my epic fail with carb counting, I've received permission from my doctor to go back to my carb-ier plant-based diet. This was a definite win for me, since aside from being much more to my taste, it's generally the most ecofrugal way to eat. Plant foods nearly always have smaller carbon footprints and water footprints than animal foods, and a diet with less meat is generally more affordable and healthier as well. But the green halo surrounding plant-based foods has one tiny little tarnished spot: palm oil. 

If you pay a lot of attention to the eco-news, there's a good chance you've already seen at least one story about how palm oil is the secret villain of the plant kingdom. Made from the fruit of oil palms, this cheap and useful oil finds its way into a huge variety of products. It's particularly handy for plant-based foods such as margarine, since it's one of the few vegetable oils that's high in saturated fat and therefore stays solid at room temperature. 

But unfortunately, the way palm fruit is generally grown and harvested does considerable damage to the environment. Because oil palms grow only in tropical climates, the growing demand for palm oil has led to massive deforestation as rain forests are cut to make way for oil palm plantations. Moreover, according to Food Revolution Network (FRN), the people who harvest the palm fruits typically work in grueling conditions for pitiful wages—if they aren't enslaved outright. Some products are made with certified sustainable palm oil, which is supposed to be grown and harvested in a more eco-friendly way. But according to FRN, these labels are often no more than greenwashing. 

The most obvious solution is to avoid products made with palm oil entirely. However, that's by no means as simple as it sounds. According to one estimate, it's found in as many as half of all packaged products sold at the supermarket. This includes both foods (margarine, baked goods, chocolate) and non-food products (soap, shampoo, detergent). In some categories, it's practically impossible to find any products without it.

Granted, it's a little bit easier if you don't buy that many packaged goods to begin with. If your diet is largely whole foods and you make a lot of your own cleaning and personal care products, you may not find quite as much palm oil lurking on your pantry shelves. When I went through ours, paying particular attention to the categories where palm oil is most common, here's what I found:

• Bread. Not generally a problem, since ours is usually home-baked. However, palm oil is listed as an ingredient on the package of flour tortillas we recently picked up. (Interestingly, the "Carb Balance" tortillas we bought when I was on my carb-controlled diet, though no better for my blood sugar, appear to be better for the earth. They contain no palm oil, only partially hydrogenated soybean oil.)
• Cat Food. Our cats eat IAMS dry food, which contains a whole lot of ingredients, but no palm oil.
  
• Cereal. We seldom buy commercial breakfast cereals, relying instead on Brian's homemade granola. Occasionally, when we can find it on sale at Costco, we'll pick up a box of Kellogg's Raisin Bran, but it appears to be entirely innocent of palm oil (and all other oils as well).
  
• Chocolate. Apparently, the "Way to Go" chocolate bars we buy at Lidl are not only Fair Trade certified but also rainforest-friendly, with no palm oil. Lidl's chcoolate chips, though not certified, are similarly clean.
  
• Cookies and other baked goods. Again, most of ours are home-baked. But we do have one box of Girl Scout cookies in our pantry (purchased when we were waylaid by Brownies while out on a walk), and it contains both palm oil and palm kernel oil. There's also palm kernel oil in the "Fiberful" granola bars we picked up one time at Trader Joe's, though the "Simply Nutty" bars we like better are free of it.
• Detergent. The last brand we bought, All Free and Clear, doesn't list palm oil as an ingredient. However, it does contain sodium laureth sulfate, which can be derived from palm oil. There's no way to tell whether it did in this case or not. As far as I can tell, there are only a handful of very pricey detergents that are certified palm-oil-free.
• Dish soap. We use Lidl's store brand, which also contains sodium laureth sulfate. So, again, impossible to tell from the label. 
• Hand soap. The Oatmeal & Honey bar soap from Trader Joe's lists both sodium palmate and sodium palm kernelate, derived from palm oil and palm kernel oil. as its top ingredients. Here, again, there are very few brands without palm oil, and they're all really expensive.
• Shampoo. Brian's shampoo contains sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), which also is often made from palm oil. Again, there's no way to tell if it was used in this particular product, but it isn't one of the few shampoos that are certified palm-oil-free. The same goes for my conditioner, Suave Almond and Shea Butter, which contains such potential palm oil derivatives as cetearyl alcohol and cetrimonium chloride.
  
• Toothpaste. Although most toothpastes contain SLS, ours does not. We buy Trader Joe's peppermint toothpaste specifically to avoid this ingredient because it gives Brian canker sores.
• Vegetable oil spread. We use two kinds: Blue Bonnet for toast and Country Crock Plant Butter for baking. Both contain a mix of vegetable oils that includes palm and palm kernel oils. As far as I can tell, the only plant-based spread that doesn't is the highly regarded, but also highly priced Miyoko's.
  

We're probably on the low end of the bell curve for use of palm-oil products. Many foods that use this ingredient, such as chips, crackers, frozen meals, ice cream, instant noodles, microwave popcorn, and bottled salad dressing, simply aren't part of our diet at all. Yet even with our mostly whole-food diet and our generally eco-conscious shopping habits, we still have a handful of products in our home that definitely contain palm oil or palm oil derivatives, and a few more that we can't be sure about.

Now, I'm not prepared to shell out extra for a soap or a shampoo that I can be absolutely certain is palm-oil-free. I'm also not willing to make my own detergent, an endeavor that as far as I can tell offers minimal savings, if any. (Besides, most recipes for homemade detergent start with soap, which usually contains palm oil anyway.) And so far, all my attempts to make my own hair conditioner have been flops. (The one recipe that seemed to work initially did not hold up well as the week went on.)

But there is one palm oil product on this list I thought we might be able to replace with a homemade version: the vegetable oil spread. Doing this could also save us money, since the Country Crock Plant Butter is pretty pricey (usually around $5 a pound, which is more than we pay for real butter on the rare occasions we buy it). And it would eliminate the need to keep separate products on hand for baking and for spreading.

I've seen several recipes for vegan plant butters online, some simpler than others. One, at Fork and Beans, called for liquid lecithin, an ingredient we don't have and can't easily buy; another, from A Virtual Vegan, seemed a bit too fiddly. But the recipe from The Loopy Whisk looked pretty straightforward and called only for ingredients we had on hand: refined coconut oil, a neutral-tasting cooking oil (we used canola), non-dairy milk (we used unsweetened almond milk), and salt, with an optional pinch of turmeric for color. (We declined the option, since we prefer a white spread to one that tastes of turmeric.) The cost of all these ingredients, by my calculations, is about $1.30 for 2 cups—on a par with our Blue Bonnet, and significantly cheaper than the Country Crock.

The process of making the plant butter is simple enough: just whisk these ingredients together, then chill them until they start to firm up, then whip them again for about two minutes. The recipe said the chilling step would take only 10 to 15 minutes, but it took us 20, even with only a quarter-sized batch. But eventually we got something thick enough to beat up (whisking it by hand, since the container we used was too small to accommodate our mixer's whisk attachment) until "super pale and fluffy." Then we chilled it overnight as instructed.

When I tried it on my toast this morning, I found that it was definitely harder than Blue Bonnet, though not as hard as real butter chilled to refrigerator temperature. This made it a little harder to spread, but I eventually figured out that all I had to do was scrape my knife blade along the surface to remove a thin curl of the "butter." This actually melted into the surface of my hot toast more readily than the Blue Bonnet usually does. And once it was melted in, I could barely taste the difference. It was a little less salty, maybe, but that wasn't a problem in the least.

So we have now determined that this DIY plant butter makes a perfectly good substitute for Blue Bonnet on toast. However, the real acid test will be to see how it does in baking. Brian was already planning to make a pot pie at some point this week, so he'll just use the new plant butter in the crust. If it works as well for that purpose as our Country Crock, then we can just cross this pricey product—and with it, the main source of palm oil in our diet—off our shopping list entirely.

 

Postscript: Success! Brian's plant-butter pie crust came out crisp, flaky, and delicious. He noted that it had a less complex flavor than a crust made with real butter, but the texture was just as good, and actually superior to the results we used to get with the plant butter. It was also better than either straight coconut oil or straight palm oil, both of which we've tried in the past. The coconut-oil crust was tender but limp, while the palm-oil one was very crisp and brittle. This was the perfect golden-brown mean. He now thinks we don't even need to buy butter for this Thanksgiving's pies, which means that our rhubarb pie will actually be vegan. (The pumpkin pie, made with eggs and evaporated milk, will remain vegetarian only.)

We still need to test the new plant butter in cookies and fruit crisp, but we have every reason to believe it will perform just as well for those applications. If it can handle shortcrust, it can handle anything.

[UPDATE, 6/19/24: Since writing this, I've learned that palm oil isn't so bad as I thought. It has been responsible for some tropical deforestation, but not all that much: according to Our World in Data, only about 2% of global forests have been lost to palm plantations. And it's gotten much better in recent years: over 270,000 hectares of land in Indonesia were cleared for oil palm in 2009, but fewer than 48,000 in 2015. So it's not as if our insatiable lust for palm oil is the main reason we're losing the rainforests.

Granted, even a little deforestation is bad, especially in the tropics. But the real catch is that most other oilseed crops require more land to grow than oil palms. If we replaced all the world's palm oil with coconut oil, the closest plant-based substitute, we'd need more than ten times as much land to grow it—all of it in tropical regions. Granted, it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, since the two crops are farmed very differently. Coconut palms produce more than just oil, and they're also often grown alongside other crops. But it's by no means clear that my coconut-oil-based plant butter is better for the planet than the commercial stuff containing palm oil.

The bottom line: boycotting palm oil isn't really a good idea. It makes more sense to look for products containing palm oil that's sustainably grown. The main sustainable certification for this crop comes from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). If you can't find RSPO-certified products where you shop, try writing to the store and asking for them.]