Planet Palm by Joyce Zuckerman

Author:Joyce Zuckerman [Zuckerman, Joyce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781787383784
Publisher: Hurst
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The fish the locals call “el avión”—the only one hardy enough to thrive in the polluted river.

The industry has likewise lobbied against the possibility of a national junk food tax. In 2013, Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University, conducted a study that determined a 20 percent tax on palm oil in India would avert some 363,000 deaths from heart disease over ten years. (In 2015, the Singaporean government introduced a “healthier ingredient scheme” in which it began subsidizing healthier alternatives to palm oil for street vendors in that country.) Given the size of its informal foods sector, enforcing such a tax in India would pose a formidable challenge. In a country still facing widespread malnutrition, raising prices on any food source also introduces ethical questions.

“There are some nutrients that you’re getting from palm oil,” explained Shauna Downs, an assistant professor at Rutgers School of Public Health. “Like, you are getting fat, which you need.” Downs wrote her PhD thesis about policies that the Indian government might adopt to address the rise in non-communicable diseases in the country. “Still,” she said, “there’s a difference between food security and nutrition security. Not every calorie is created equal. People need calories, but do they need to have a huge proportion coming from palm oil? No.”

Whatever opposition local players and multinational companies mount on the ground in India, Mexico, and elsewhere, it will undoubtedly have the backing of the palm oil lobby, which, after all, has the responsibility of finding a market for its ever-growing volumes of oil.

After my time in New Delhi, I caught a flight to Jakarta, where I joined some seven hundred participants at a forum aimed at revolutionizing a global food system that, according to its keynote speaker, a Norwegian physician and environmentalist named Gunhild Stordalen, “is failing both us and the planet.” Among the presenters at the two-day affair was the minister of health for Malaysia, Dr. Sub-ramaniam Sathasivam, who gave a speech in which he lamented that unhealthy diets were leading to increasing numbers of deaths globally and that agricultural monocultures were adversely impacting the environment. It would have been good, he said, had the Malaysian and Indonesian ministers for agriculture and finance also been in attendance, given the roles they could play in fixing such a broken system.

I emailed Sathasivam’s press secretary afterward to arrange for an interview and received an eager reply—until I mentioned in passing my interest in his country’s main export crop. “He can’t talk about palm oil,” I was told. “He can talk about anything but that.”

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