It actually wasn't that bad.
Side note, migraine brain still seems to be in effect, I tried to spell cupboard cubpoard four times before I worked out what I was doing wrong.
I shared a little outrage earlier at yet another Greenpeace video of more rainforest being trashed so Palm Oil can be grown to feed our seemingly insatiable appetite for the stuff in bloody everything. The big companies seem to have no real incentive to ensure the stuff that ends up in their products is in any way produced in an ok fashion. Palm Oil isn't actually a hideous thing, it requires less water to produce and doesn't take as much space to grow as many other oils, but it not ok that the rainforest is being trashed wholesale in order to grow it. Armchair outrage aside, and a couple of messages from a friend, I figured I probably better go and look in my cupboard. This is what I found...
A look at the Jordans website and they know where their products come from and list sources.
My chocolate on the other hand? Cadbury, you could do better:
Cadbury's website says this:
Firstly we can reassure you there is no palm oil in the Cadbury Dairy Milk milk chocolate we make and sell in Australia and NZ. While we have always been upfront about using a very small amount of palm oil in some of our fillings where there is no substitute, we buy our palm oil from key suppliers who participate in the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) which develops and enforces standards for sustainable palm oil production.
Why am I reassured that there is no need for palm oil in the antipodes? Well, because the information comes from the .nz website, the UK website only tells you which products contain palm oil.
Why Cadbury? I went to a Quaker school, we had a room called the Cadbury room (which was sorely understocked and was a really a meeting room), I still want to like Cadbury despite the fact I know they've been bought out. But ultimately very few of the brands we feel like we like, or can trust actually mean anything.
My larder is at the little emptier side of the week, but I try for various reasons - mainly sugar, plastic and palm oil - not to buy things that are already made up and covered in wrapping. It's not like we eat no sugar - there are large pots of different sorts in the larder, but if I put them in food, I know that I'm doing it and if there aren't packets of biscuits in the house then no one an accidentally eat a whole packet. I didn't quite dare look in the fridge and the bathroom cupboards will be a whole other thing - but companies are sneaky at getting all this stuff into our houses knowing full well that we don't have time to check labels as we chase children round supermarkets. (I have a good story of when I had to dive after Sally as she scarpered off at high speed (shopping is sometimes like interval training), I left my trolley unattended for all of about 30 seconds and returned to find an old lady standing next to it who proceeded to upbraid me for leaving my handbag unattended - no mention of the toddler waggling his legs in the seat.) Brands fool us into thinking we can trust then and its really a bit shit. What if meat packets had to carry pictures of the animals in the conditions they actually lived; the run offs from the chemical factories; the monocultures and homeless orang-utans? Just a bit of transparency - just as long as its biodegradable.