Sunday, November 13, 2011

A bit of unsolicited advice about fruit mince pies as the festive season draws closer

I've got a bee in my bonnet over many different issues and causes, and I so much love to share my thoughts and opinions with my readers. I'm against buying processed foods that contain palm oils, even though this is a difficult thing to avoid, as for some reason palm oil is used in a great many processed foods and even in non-food consumer goods such as toiletries. I'm against palm oil for two reasons - the big one is the loss of habitats of endangered animals such as the orangutan due to the clearing of tropical forests in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia to make way for palm oil plantations. The other reason to shun palm oil is that it is apparently one of the worst fats and oils for health.

Avoiding buying foods and products that contain palm oil is not as simple a task as it should be. Because we have a mob of spineless fools in Canberra making our laws, there is no legal compulsion for food producers to specify exactly what type of oil is in processed food products, and as a consequence palm oil in foods is often described as "vegetable oil" or sometimes "palmolein", which isn't much help to the consumer, who is forced to act like a Sherlock Bloody Holmes just to find out what he or she is eating. So one must assume that all products that contain "vegetable oil" or "vegetable oils" contain palm oil, and I'm sad to report that this applies to every single brand of fruit mince pies that I have checked in a number of different supermarket chains. God only knows what "margarine" as an ingredient is made of, so I'm avoiding that mystery gloop as well. It looks like it's going to be a fruit mince pie-free Christmas for palm oil avoiding consumers like myself, unless I should make a happy discovery of a brand of pie that uses a luxury ingredient such as butter. What kind of f***ed-up world do we live in when you've got a supermarket shelf full of baked goods, but no pastry made of tasty, natural butter to buy?

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