It is nothing less than shameful when companies lie. Especially when companies do so to improve their image and yet still continue to cause damage to the environment behind the scenes. Schär a gluten-free food company, is the latest guilty-party.
Liars. Liars. Everywhere.
There are liars everywhere. Including within food corporations. Making it hard to know who to trust. Especially when some seem to make the right noises and do strategic marketing that makes the consumer think they have made a solid choice.
Whilst the world has a major crisis on its hands in the form of global warming, it is not uncommon to see many legit food companies genuinely doing great things to help reduce their carbon footprint and reduce the harm their products or individual ingredients do the environment and the species we live side by side with.
Schar’s “no palm oil” Claim Is Classic Greenwashing
Whilst out and about shopping after my son’s music class on Thursday, we took a look around the food aisle, inspecting some snackfood ingredients lists to see if there was anything dairy and gluten-free for us to munch on during our drive back home.
I skimmed over some of some products made by Italian company Schär, and just happened to see on the front a casual logo on the bottom left corner of a vanilla flavoured wafer packet stating “no palm oil”. Thinking nothing of it, I flipped over the wafers and checked what the ingredients were, to see if they were gluten and dairy-free.
I then suddenly realised the second ingredient was a vegetable oil, derived from ‘palm fruit’. Palm oil and palm fruit are the same things. This is another case of classic greenwashing.
The Problem With Palm Oil (and Palm Fruit)
Palm oil has become a very popular oil used in baked snack foods due to its neutral taste, it is a cheap ingredient and many farmers prefer it above other oil crops due being able to get more oil per acre.
Palm oil is obtained from palm fruit crops. You see the problem here? Schär is trying to cover up the fact that they are still using palm oil by labelling its ingredient as a different name. They thought they wouldn’t get caught and could hook some more gluten-free customers in to support their brand by posing as environmentalists. Shameful Schär!
The palm oil they are using isn’t even sustainable like many companies have chosen to use. I still have concerns about sustainable options and the future. With many however simply refusing to use palm oil at all in their food ingredients due to the large habitat loss doing so has caused to the mammals that typically live where these crops are grown, for instance, Borneo and Sumatra, where orangutans especially have suffered.
The Oil Demand Isn’t Worth It
At this point, it is unknown where Schär are getting their palm oil from, but Indonesia is the biggest problem when it comes to palm fruit oil and here is why.
Borneo and Sumatra are both Sunda islands off western Indonesia. Indonesia is now the worlds biggest producer of palm fruit oil, producing approximately half of the world’s supply, where major importers China and India are always ready and waiting to fulfil another importation shipment.
13 million hectares of Indonesia will be palm oil plantations in 2020. Once known for its thriving orangutan population, this has all changed since big food producers continually drove down farmers prices and ramped up the demand for cheap oil.
A study carried out in 2018 concluded that 100,000 Bornean orangutans have been lost in the last 16 years, with further estimates reported that just the Bornean population of orangutans has decreased by 25% over the last decade.
The way they have been killed by farmers to make way for deforestation and replacement palm fruit crops, killed for meat, taken to be sold as part of the illegal pet trade and displaced due to lack of habitat is horrific – and no food item is ever worth causing this type of suffering to a peaceful and innocent species.
The Resolve
We all have a duty to care for the planet, and a duty to work together to reduce the impacts we cause to the planet. No food item is worth wiping out an entire species just to enjoy its richness in baked goods. This will be the case if we don’t speak up about our issues with palm oil.
Schär and food companies like Schar (of which there are many), are not part of the solutionaries working towards making this planet a better one for all. They would rather lie and deceive customers to try to enhance profits…
Schär, your best bet is to now remove the ‘no palm oil’ logo off the front and then you will at least be telling the truth and lose your greenwashing status for this item. And to work on removing palm oil from your food products, that is, if you care.
If you wish to make a complaint directly toSchär please go directly to their contact form to do so.
