While the 'unintended consequences' story is powerful, the article undermines its credibility by suggesting at first that palm oil's use in US biodiesel is a si

While the 'unintended consequences' story is powerful, the article undermines its credibility by suggesting at first that palm oil's use in US biodiesel is a significant contributor to this clusterfuck, but only halfway through does it admit that US biodiesel is chiefly made with corn and soy, ostensibly leaving less of these oils for the US food industry -- forcing imports of other oils. But the truth is even more complex: for the last two decades, US society has gone through a nutritional awakening about the risk of trans fats, and widespread phase-out of trans fats has occurred due to consumer demand and regulatory pressure. Trans fats are a hard-to-avoid byproduct of partial hydrogenation of unsaturated oils: a process you want in food manufacturing to convert a liquid oil to a solid shortening. Corn oil and soybean oil largely consist of unsaturated fats, so partial hydrogenation will turn a fair bit of product into trans fats. But palm oil and coconut oil are naturally high in saturated fats, which gives them desirable properties by natural means and without trans bonds. This is the primary reason for US food manufacturing's increased palm oil imports into the US: if widespread partial hydrogenation were still on the table, plentiful cottonseed oil could have been used instead. Crisco and Wesson were both early pioneers of hydrogenated cottonseed oil, but even today's Crisco -- the archetypal hydrogenated shortening -- has been reformulated with palm oil and soybean oil. Then there's the matter of occasional palm oil boycotts in the US and Europe, protesting about food companies' use of palm oil from plantations that haven't been certified sustainable. Other than the inherent fuzziness and conflict of interest about a trade group deciding what it means for clearcut-type agriculture to be 'sustainable', these protests unfortunately cause the average price of all palm oil to drop, leaving others whose priorities are different to buy them up on the cheap. For example, palm oil is widely used as a cooking oil in the Indian Subcontinent, because it's cheap, is produced nearby (as opposed to in the Americas or Europe), and those countries have populations whose demand for simple cooking oils well outstrips their domestic supply. There are many factors to this story: the ones investigated in the article, and others that I hope to have shown were missing. This shows that reality is sometimes maddeningly complex, different actors are frequently at odds, and one group's good intentions rarely survive the realities and the intricacies the global economy and local situations on the ground where the rubber meets the road.