As the author of a 1711 book noted, traders also smeared captives’ skin with palm oil to make them “ look smooth, sleek, and young” before sending them to the auction block.īy the mid-1600s, Europeans were rubbing palm oil on their own skin, too.

It entered the global economy in the 1500s aboard ships engaged in the transatlantic slave trade.ĭuring the deadly “middle passage” across the Atlantic, palm oil was a valued food that kept captives alive. Palm oil has long been a staple food in a region stretching from Senegal to Angola along Africa’s western coast. Palm oil and its derivatives are ubiquitous in consumer products but can appear under hundreds of names, such as glyceryl and sodium lauryl sulfate.

It became that way thanks to legacies of colonialism and exploitation that still shape today’s industry and that make it challenging to shift palm oil onto a more sustainable path. The plant that makes it, the African oil palm, can produce up to 10 times more oil per hectare than soybeans.īut as my new book on palm oil’s history shows, this controversial commodity hasn’t always been cheap. But despite boycott campaigns, the world uses more palm oil than any other vegetable oil – over 73 million tons in 2020.

It’s been called the world’s most hated crop because of its association with deforestation in Southeast Asia. Palm oil is everywhere today: in food, soap, lipstick, even newspaper ink.

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