Thursday, July 7, 2011
Food & Life Two Girl Scouts push to make cookies forest-friendly
Posted by Katie Valentine on Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 10:56 AM
I generally try to avoid palm oil because of all its saturated fat, but I often fail because so many of the foods that contain it (Nutella and Girl Scout Cookies, for instance) are so delicious. I didn’t know until today, however, that palm oil actually comes from certain palm trees (something, I realize, that should have been obvious), and that thousands of square miles of tropical rainforest in Southeast Asia have been cleared to accommodate oil palm plantations.
I found this out after reading about two Girl Scouts’ four-year long campaign to take palm oil out of Girl Scout Cookies. The girls, age 15 and 16, found out about palm plantations’ impact on the rainforest ecosystem after studying orangutans for a project. They learned that deforestation was one of the main threats to orangutan populations, and that much of the deforestation was occurring in order to make way for palm plantations.
So, the girls promptly gave up all foods with palm oil. And when they found out Girl Scout Cookies had their shunned ingredient in them, they made it their mission to eliminate it from the cookies. Last week, they met with the leaders of Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. It didn’t go as well as they might have hoped, as the article explains:
The girls were frustrated to hear that palm oil will stay in the cookies.Amanda Hamaker, who manages cookie sales for the organization, told them it's too late to change the recipe for next year's cookies.
"I mean, the cookie boxes have been printed," Hamaker says.
She says her bakers tell her they need palm oil to make the cookies taste great and resist crumbling and spoiling. And so far, there is no affordable source of sustainable palm oil. Hamaker says she won't do anything to jeopardize cookie sales because scouts need the money for camp, trips and charity projects.
I guess they should have predicted that the effects of mass deforestation don't stand a chance to the priorities of box printing and crumble-resistant cookies. But the girls aren’t giving up, and their resolution and determination are inspiring. How many times have you found out a food was particularly harmful to animals, people or the environment, gave it up for a few weeks, and then eventually forgot your initial surge of righteousness and went back to eating it without guilt? These girls not only gave up palm oil; they fought to take it out of their organization’s most famous fundraiser. It makes me not want to eat Nutella or Girl Scout cookies. Ok, that's a lie. But it makes me inspired enough to avoid them, for the Orangutans' sake.
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