Palm oil is a butter substitute. Every baked product at the grocery store that used to be made with butter is now made with palm oil, because it is cheaper. Palm oil is made up of long highly-saturated fatty acids that cause it to be solid at room temperature, giving it physical properties very similar to butter, making it suitable as a substitute. However saturated fatty acids are bad for your health. Butter is also saturated fat and is also somewhat bad, but palm oil is much worse because the varieties of fatty acids it contains are much different from animal fat fatty acids and the human body metabolizes them differently, so they have a much higher impact. Similar physical properties but worse health properties!
It is nearly impossible to find frozen baked goods that are still made with butter. This pie claims to be made with healthy ingredients, and specifically touts its butter content, but it conveniently omits mentioning palm oil entirely. Since palm oil appears first on the ingredients list before butter, that means there is more of it. Possibly almost the entire “butter-like” fraction of the pie consists of palm oil.
This pie alone contains 400% daily value saturated fat, which is terrible for long-term health. I love apple pies and I was planning to eat this pie as my sole food over the course of 2 days for my One-Meal-A-Day (OMAD), but I’m not willing to risk eating palm oil. Thanks for nothing for getting my hopes up, pie box!
- traditional wholesome German ingredients like palm oil
- palm oil - just the way grandma used to make at home
- contains memories of butter
I’m sure someone below will mention how palm oil is also bad for the environment and bad for the farmers and bad for the economy. I will only be answering questions about the film Rampart.
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These pies cost 15+ at Aldi’s but they are really good
It still says “butter” in the ingredients so they’re not lying.
Remember that laws are pedantic, and if there isn’t some strict regulation on how much % of something must have butter in order to legally be described as “made with butter”, then adding a teaspoon of butter to the entire product and substituting the rest with palm oil is still technically “made with butter”.
Yeah but there’s more of it than butter.
They’re not going to list all the ingredients on the advertisement on the outside of the box.
That’s what the ingredients list is for.
I know. But it’s still butter. So technically they still made it with butter. They never made any promises on the box of how much butter there’d be.
That “handmade touch” claim sounds like BS too. wtf does “hand-crisped crust” mean? and something tells me “filled by hand” just means that a human hand pushed a button. “This pie is meticulously crafted” LOLZ thanks, Michaelangelo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t2IkfuWTJ8
Hand filled…
German here and I can say I’m turning around half the cartons in the supermarket and check for palm oil. I’ll try to buy alternatives. Though it’s really hard. It’s either price increase, shrinkflation or cheaper ingredients. Oftentimes a combination of those.
In case of the Apple Pie: Channel the German grandma inside of you and bake it yourself. It’s not too hard. Takes an hour or so, though.
The smell and the taste of self made apple pie with simply butter, flour, sugar and apples is unbeatable. Don’t buy comfort “foods” like this - learn to make them yourself.
Some people don’t have ovens.
Then buying this frozen pie from OP would not work for them either.
Apple crumble with vanilla ice is very nice as well.
What are you talking about? This is just like grandma used to make it! With a heaping glob of palm oil scooped out by her palm, measured by eye yet always coming out the same constant taste.
Too bad after the 18th hear attack, poor me maw is in heaven now but she sure did love her palm oil.
That’s exactly why I don’t trust their phones. /s
Worried about health. Planned to eat nothing but pie for 2 days.
Wat?
I’m pretty skeptical that palm oil is more unhealthy than butter. The farming practices surrounding it’s production are not wholesome sure. But it tastes good and cost less than butter.
It’s good and cheap, therefore it’s okay to deforest tropical regions.
Cattle farming is also a major cause of rainforest deforestation (although beef cattle since that is internationally transportable where dairy is more perishable). Palm oil produces more calories per production acre than dairy, where many acres have to be used to grow the grains used to feed the cattle. The transition is being managed irresponsibly, but once stabilized palm oil should have less environmental impact than butter.
Yes, that’s bad enough. OP should have just said that instead of lying about/spreading misinformation on it being bad for your health.
I specifically did not say that deforesting the rainforest was good. Don’t put those words on my mouth.
Who eats pie thinking it’s healthy?
However saturated fatty acids are bad for your health.
Saturated Fats have been much maligned by Ancel Key’s lipid heart hypothesis, but it doesn’t stand up to modern scrutiny - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2020.05.077
Saturated fats are not bad for your health.
This should be illegal.
In the netherlands we have an award for the most misleading commercial/advertisement/packaging.
It could be argued that is, but that company is small enough they can get away with it. The larger the food company is the more conservative they tend to be with callouts like that on pack. Lawyers would typically only pursue claims against mega food companies, and even then it would be a class action where everyone gets $5 or some shit
It is illegal in certain parts of the world.
i am concerned about foods using anything with palm oil,
but i wonder if its possible to make it more ethically.
and ngl they should put a asterisk near the our ingredients section
i heard somewhere that palm oil is very good to use but pretty unethical.The better question is - what’s the ethical alternative? Every other plant oil uses far more land to grow
You seem very insistent on ignoring the fact that different kinds of land have different levels of environmental impact when it comes to farming.
Does that make up for 10x the land usage?
Everybody else seems very insistent on ignoring the different yields of the various plant oils.
Also, as far as I’m concerned it’s just the latest stage of colonialism. First we got exploited by western powers, now we get told we can’t develop our countries. Never mind Europe having destroyed all their wilderness in the process of industrialisation, we’ve somehow been designated the global nature reserve.
You want the land to be left alone? Pay us. No? Are we still just a colony of the west then?
Most people consider learning from the previous mistakes of others to be a virtue and a sign of intelligence.
It’s easy to say that when your country is currently experiencing a higher standard of living due to those mistakes. Give us the same standard of living and we’ll talk.
idk, but i think if there was a more ethical alternative most companies would switch to that
No company gives a fuck about ethics. They aren’t people. Some people at a company might, but they would have to overwhelm the profit motive. That’s exceptionally rare.
For all those decrying the ethics of palm oil - you are aware of the yields per hectare of the various plant oils, right?
- Soybean: 0.47 ton oil/ha/year
- Sunflower: 0.78 ton oil/ha/year
- Rapeseed: 0.74 ton oil/ha/year
- Palm Oil: 3.36 tons oil/ha/year
Would anybody like to suggest how to switch away from palm oils without deforesting what remains of the Amazon?
Do butter.
Can’t tell if you’re making a pun or being serious :)
In case you’re being serious, I’m pretty sure we’d need magnitudes more land and methane emissions for butter.
I was being serious; figure up the tons per hectare per year of butter production.
Google says 250kg per hectare, So about 6% of palm oil productivity. About 15x the land usage.
The cow is not killed when butter is harvested. But they do need to be fed, so I’m not sure about that.
Animals take up a ton more space than do plants. I’m sure you’ve heard all the arguments at some point for moving away from meat. I’m not going to rehash them (especially since I’m a meat eater), but it’s just a question of how many magnitudes more land cows would use, not if they would use more land.
Aren’t some of those plants grown in plains? I don’t think the yield per hectare is the whole story. Palm oil is tropical, leading to deforestation, but at least some of the others you listed are not.
Globally, palm oil occupies approximately 19 million hectares (about 47 million acres) of land.
Despite supplying over one-third of the world’s vegetable oil, this footprint is remarkably small—using less than 10% of the total land allocated to all oil-producing crops worldwide.
Where are you suggesting to find another 500 million acres of land, a tad more than the size of Alaska, without environmental impact?
Why are you moving the goalposts? In your first post the goal was without further deforestation of rainforests, but in your reply, you changed the goal to without environmental impact. As long as global population growth is a thing, the former is possible, the latter not so much.
I’ll admit I’m not terribly interested in this topic. I only replied to your comment (at the same time as another commenter making a similar argument) because you come off as a shill for palm oil, which is odd.
I’m not trying to write a thesis and pick exact words here. Let me move the goalposts back.
Where do you suggest to find 500M acres without deforesting something and driving a few more species extinct?
Just because a random Internet stranger doesn’t know a better solution off the top of their head, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem to be clearly seen.
I’m not arguing there isn’t a problem, I’m pointing out the stupidity in advocating for an even worse solution. No, I don’t have the answer either.
The difference is the others don’t require a tropical environment to grow. So you can grow them without any deforestation.
Globally, palm oil occupies approximately 19 million hectares (about 47 million acres) of land.
Despite supplying over one-third of the world’s vegetable oil, this footprint is remarkably small—using less than 10% of the total land allocated to all oil-producing crops worldwide.
Where are you suggesting to find another 500 million acres of land, a tad more than the size of Alaska, without environmental impact?
Ooh, what if we use Alaska?
The obvious answer is some of the Land used to grow soybeans and corn for animal feed.
By that logic though, imagine how much land we could reclaim for other purposes (including reforestation) if we shifted more existing farmland towards palm oil.
That’s not where palms grow.
True. So reforest the land instead.
so we’ve gotten a shitton better at aero- and hydroponics. can we grow the right palm tree in a greenhouse yet?
i’m in the california bay area so palm trees are more of a wealth indicator than a “hey they grow here” thing. but they’re everywhere because people want to signal that they’re wealthy, even if they aren’t.
That will never be able to compete on price with clear cut rainforest land and trained primates doing the picking.
we make them. with environmental impact because you can’t exist without it, but we do what we can to minimize it yes. We got a shitton of land out in texas that is being used as oilfields. get some environmental remediation out there first to make it suitable for farmland, use some of the grassy areas as well (not all we need the grassy areas), and there’s a good quarter of that chunk at least.
and I’d bump that up to like 650million acres, because we’re not using prime farmland to get this oil. yields will probably be less.
but like, the room to grow this is there. i drive by sunflower fields (that are either for oil or eating) fairly regularly.
Ok. Texas is 170M acres. We’ve allocated Texas, that’s 30% of what we need. Which other US states can we sacrifice? :)
I’m liking this plan.
i don’t think missouri or mississippi would mind if we sacrificed them. but we’re going to need 10 million acres from a few states each in europe to make this work i think.
Don’t eat processed foods, kids.
