Planet Palm
How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything—and Endangered the World
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- CHF 17.00
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- CHF 17.00
Description de l’éditeur
Finalist, Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism
In the tradition of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, a groundbreaking global investigation into the industry ravaging the environment and global health—from the James Beard Award–winning journalist
Over the past few decades, palm oil has seeped into every corner of our lives. Worldwide, palm oil production has nearly doubled in just the last decade: oil-palm plantations now cover an area nearly the size of New Zealand, and some form of the commodity lurks in half the products on U.S. grocery shelves. But the palm oil revolution has been built on stolen land and slave labor; it’s swept away cultures and so devastated the landscapes of Southeast Asia that iconic animals now teeter on the brink of extinction. Fires lit to clear the way for plantations spew carbon emissions to rival those of industrialized nations.
James Beard Award–winning journalist Jocelyn C. Zuckerman spent years traveling the globe, from Liberia to Indonesia, India to Brazil, reporting on the human and environmental impacts of this poorly understood plant. The result is Planet Palm, a riveting account blending history, science, politics, and food as seen through the people whose lives have been upended by this hidden ingredient.
This groundbreaking work of first-rate journalism compels us to examine the connections between the choices we make at the grocery store and a planet under siege.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Zuckerman links the cultivation and production of palm oil to "the combined twenty-first-century crises of obesity, malnutrition, and climate change" in this sharp exposé. She details how palm oil and other natural resources spurred the scramble for Africa by European colonizers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and cites evidence that the British soap-making company Lever Brothers (now part of Unilever) used slave labor to harvest palm oil on the 1.8-million acres it controlled in the Belgian Congo. An ingredient in everything from toothpaste to nondairy creamer, palm oil now accounts for a third of the world's vegetable oil consumption. In the Brazilian state of Bahia, Zuckerman meets a chef who demonstrates how palm oil is integrated into the local cuisine. In Sumatra, she visits a conservation organization for orangutans, whose habitats are threatened by the palm oil industry's deforestation practices. Zuckerman also documents how plantation workers in Honduras are subjected to hazardous chemicals for appallingly low wages. Vividly describing people and places damaged by the palm oil industry, Zuckerman establishes a through line connecting 19th-century imperialism to the exploitative practices of today's multinational corporations. This deeply reported account sounds the alarm loud and clear.
