How do you avoid palm oil?

www.worldwildlife.org/pages/which-everyday-products-contain-palm-oil

There’s some information here, but I agree it’s very difficult to be a responsible shopper

We try to only buy from fair trade companies who have hopefully done the filtering for us.
You may pay a bit more but at least your conscience is clearer.
I prefer shopping in the small wholefoods shops anyway for old fashioned service. They will order things specially.

I don’t know if this will help

Thanks for that Bluebelle. I’ve taken a screen shot, easier to see. I’ll pass it on. It’s not very comprehensive but every little helps.

Yes it’s only a brief one but a start I guess

Thank you, it's useful to have a list.

I scrutinise all the ingredients looking for gluten, so when I started looking for palm oil as well DH asked if I was going to 'gaze at that packet all day'.

Twinings?
Why would palm oil be in tea?

Lisagran I’m certain I won’t remember all of those! I o ly look for palm oil, I’ll have to up my game.
There should be a logo to warn us.
Still I suppose if we had every warning on the packaging to alert us to non pc ingredients we wouldn’t be able to see what we’re buying.

Shop in Iceland.

Teabags contain polypropelyne as a sealant and so they don't disintegrate in hot water and polypropelyne is likely to contain palm oil. Palm oil may also be in the plastic wrapper that seals the box of teabags as, increasingly, palm oil based stearic acid is used as a slip agent in plastics manufacture as an alternative to animal-derived stearic acid.

Polypropelyne is one of the materials that break down into the microbeads which are polluting the oceans and getting into the food chain.

It's only Iceland own brands which are free of palm oil, though, M0nica*.

We don't have an Iceland here and the only one within any reasonable distance doesn't have a car park.

Thanks Delibes, I didn't know that.

Perhaps loose tea in the future then

With great difficulty, I read the labels and try to remember what not to buy.

Now a big name such as Iceland has taken the lead hopefully other supermarkets will follow causing suppliers to think again .

My 3 and 5 yr old grandsons have promised (when they are older) to take gran to visit the orangutans in Borneo.

Will there be any left?

Jalima1108 I suspect it's nigh impossible in our modern world to avoid palm oil altogether. All we can do is try to reduce our consumption of it. Loose tea would be a start if you could find it packaged in natural material which doesn't contain palm oil. Actually, its that time of year when one can find lots of pretty tins and caddies of loose tea in the shops. Time to switch.

We had a discussion today at U3A about vegetarianism and veganism and someone said that if everyone in the world became vegan, we would need to chop down all the forests to provide land to grow enough food.

I do know that we need very little animal protein in comparison to the amount of protein obtained from vegetarian food.

How did we manage years ago without palm oil? This is a recent development surely.

Jalima people cooked from scratch and eat a more restricted range of foods.

The reasons for the increasing demand for this product is in this link www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/dec/17/palm-oil-sustainability-developing-countries

Yes, that is probably one reason M0nica

but why is it in shampoo, etc?
We did use soap, not all these shower gels - in fact we used Palmolive when I was a child, but I think it was probably from sustainable sources.
In fact, I remember my DF using 'green soft soap' for his hair, he swore by it (I did not).

I believe about half of palm oil goes towards making biofuels such as bio-diesel. It feels like it's difficult nowadays to do right for doing wrong.

Your friend at U3A is very wrong Jalima1108. There have been many studies which demonstrate that a meat-based diet requires more energy, land, and water resources to produce than a plant-based diet.

Palm oil is used as a conditioning agent that helps restore the natural oils of the hair that are stripped away by most shampoos.

Yes, that's the dilemma SueDonim. By reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and the petro-chemical industry, we use palm oil to produce alternatives.

I bought a glass teapot with an internal strainer but I keep buying the wrong tea.
I need bigger tea leaves and I keep forgetting which brand is suitable.
Once again I must make a bigger effort.
Lots of biscuits have palm oil in them, we could give them up?

I watched the interview on Victoria Derbyshire with the Director of Iceland, and I honestly will never forget him saying, that a patch of forest the size of 24 football is cut down ever HOUR...jeez every HOUR!!! to make palm oil...and he finished by saying, quote ...''Far too high a price to pay for crunchy biscuits''!!

It really hit home to me then!!

Bluebelle, I am not quite sure I understand your chart. Are they all ‘ offenders’? Under superstars, which I thought would be the best, is Nutella, one of my DD’s naughty pleasures. Just checked, palm oil is the second ingredient after sugar!

I found this link which looks useful www.ethicalconsumer.org/palm-oil-free-list M&S seems to have a lot of good palm oil free products. I hadn't realised quite how bad the crisis was either so will be definitely making a more conscious effort from now on!

I've got one of those glass teapots Pamela but I rarely use it now because it doesn't pour at all well