The expert’s comment: JULIE BAVANT
Julie Bavant: “As a principle, I boycott products with palm oil because it goes against my principles.”
What’s the controversy?
Thomas Audoual :
“You should know that the agri-food industry uses palm oil because it is cheap. In addition, palm oil has many industrial properties: it will help creating texture, crispness, to lengthen the preservation of certain components or certain products such as biscuits for example.”
Thus there has been an over-use of palm oil and of course it has had a major ecological impact: we are talking about massive deforestationin theAmazon for example, but also the massacre of certain animal species such as orangutans and an overexploitation of human labour in sometimes dreadful conditions”.
What are the alternatives?
Gwenaëlle Fuzelier :
“When you want to replace palm oil, you can use several types of fat,it will depend on the product, what we call the “food matrix” in which we stand, if we are talking about a biscuit, a pastry or a prepared dish.
At Bjorg we have chosen to replace palm oil with oils of better nutritional quality. We do this mainly with the aim of improving the nutritional quality of our products. For example, in our biscuits with chocolate filling, we have replaced palm oil with vegetable oil: oleic sunflower oil, which has a better nutritional profile than palm oil.”
Julie Bavant :
“Palm oil can be replaced by deciding to cook things ourselves on a day-to-day basis.
I really like coconut oil for pastries. I also use it in some soups; when I make a sweet potato and red hubbard squash soup, for example. I just put a teaspoon of coconut oil at the end, it replaces all the oils and it’s very good.
Sesame oil is delicious with soy sauce,it makes a rather surprising dressing and it is a nice change. Avocado oil is also excellent and it’s good for your health.”
