Dear Dot,
A friend posted something on Facebook recently about how I should be avoiding palm oil in food because of deforestation. But I vaguely recall hearing that the problem had been fixed. Should I still be avoiding palm oil?
–Chloe

Dear Chloe,
During the 90s, food companies were looking to replace trans fats in their products and cosmetics companies sought alternatives to synthetic and animal-based ingredients. Enter palm oil. It’s the foaming ingredient in shampoos and detergents. It makes ice cream less prone to melting. It offers cheap raw material for biofuels. Palm trunks and fronds can be turned into plywood, even composite parts for automobiles. Palm oil is like magic, including in its ability to make huge swaths of forests vanish. Abraca … dang, not good.

Demand for palm oil has driven orangutans, tigers, and other wildlife into near extinction and fueled enormous biodiversity loss. (Dot’s heart aches.) Toppling those trees has also accelerated climate change, as the felled forests sequestered vast amounts of carbon. 

But in what has been called “huge, huge, huge news,” demand for palm oil has fallen five years in a row, and is now less than five percent of historical high levels. Glenn Hurowitz, founder and CEO of the environmental advocacy organization Mighty Earth, points out that this drop is taking place as palm oil prices have reached an all-time high. It isn’t that palm oil has lost value, explains Hurowitz. Rather, “something huge” seems to be taking root: “The link between deforestation and agricultural expansion in palm oil seems to have been broken.” Let’s put that in plain English, Chloe: While companies continue to crave palm oil, they’re not cutting down forests with the same abandon to get it. …

Read the rest of Dot’s answer.