When considering what food products are the best to buy (disregarding price or taste), the first thing I think to ask is, “Well, which is the healthiest?”  From vitamin supplements to artificial sweeteners to crazy fad diets, health benefits and drawbacks of foods are constantly present in the consumer psyche (obesity epidemic notwithstanding).  However, with regard to fats, the answer to this question is apparently none of them.  There are, of course, the chemical categories of fats that we all know so well (saturated, unsaturated, trans), but within those categories there is no clear, well-supported health difference.  To your body, palm oil is no different from canola oil is no different from soybean oil.  Many of the issues that Jonathan Robins brought up in his talk stem from the fact that fats are somewhat a somewhat unique class of food products in that they are infinitely substitutable.

This has the interesting effect that all fats, especially similar fats like oils, compete in one market.  This opens doors to all kinds of fascinating intrigue around smear campaigns, government lobbying, subsidizations, etc.  Much of the world uses palm oil heavily, as the oil palm produces oil extremely efficiently and relatively cheaply.  Soybean oil maintains a strong hold in the US because it can be grown here, so our government subsidizes it.  The soybean industry also ran enormous decades-long campaigns a few decades ago claiming palm and coconut oil were hazardous to health.  The more well-defined differences between different oil products, however, are found in the places they are grown and their environmental impact.

After health, I might consider whether a product is locally produced or fair trade.  Before this talk though, it would have never occurred to me to consider the efficiency and habitat of the plants that the products come from.  Of course I’m aware that deforestation is a problem, but I’ve never tried to specifically weigh one crop against another in the grocery store.

Oil palms are 2 times more efficient at producing fat than coconuts, and 8 times more than soybeans, so that’s less total area of land required.  However, the land used is mostly in sensitive tropical forests in southeast Asia that have high biodiversity.  The first google search result for “palm oil” is a site entitled “Say no to Palm Oil”, which lambasts the industry particularly for deforestation of ecologically unique and sensitive habitats in Indonesia and Malaysia.  Soybeans though, are grown in large quantities in the Amazon.  Can you choose between 8 acres of the Amazon vs. 1 acre of Borneo?  Before the global shift to vegetable fats around World War II, we used animal fats — should we start hunting whales again?  What about cows and pigs?  Livestock farming takes even more crops and water than plant farming to produce the same amount of food, and its responsible for huge quantities of greenhouse gas emissions.  Soybeans produce animal feed as a byproduct — does that reduce the amount of land we need to feed the animals of the growing livestock industry, or does that actively contribute to the growth of said environmentally harmful industry?

There are seemingly infinite facets of the issue to take into account, and no clear way to weigh them against one another.  Nor is there any obvious way to just reduce fat usage overall.  The world population that needs to be fed is only ever growing.  Fats aren’t even only used in foods, they’re also used in production of plastics, detergents, fuels, adhesives, and any number of products used in everyday life.  Apparently we do have artificial fat substitutes, but I can only seem to find information about compounds that are designed to mimic fat without the health detriments, as opposed to exactly replacing natural fats (much less replacing fats with the intention or potential for large scale implementation).  Could the future lie in synthetic fats, just as enthusiasm is growing for lab-grown meat?  I’m sure someone out there with more knowledge than me is either working on it, or could say why not.