18/10/2026
🎙️ I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: Palm oil is not the problem!
🇳🇬 I grew up in a Nigerian household where we used authentic red palm oil for everything from soothing irritated skin to cooking stews 🤤
🤷🏾♀️ So perhaps I take the vilification of palm oil a little personally.
💔 BUT, it’s hard not to, given how this amazing tree has been treated.
😢 We’ve taken it from its natural environment…
❤️🩹 Forced it to grow under unnatural, high-stress conditions that limit its productive life to around 25 years…
🤕 Stripped away its vibrant orange color (and with it, the beta-carotene antioxidants that make it so nutritious)…
😭 and then blamed palm oil itself instead of the corporations designing and profiting from these systems.
😡 It’s both illogical and disturbingly familiar.
🤦🏾♀️ If we swapped it out for another oil tomorrow, those same problems would persist. Because palm oil isn’t the issue — unsustainable production and trade models are.
💯 The real solution lies in transforming how we produce and trade food altogether:
🫱🏿🫲🏾 Supporting systems that respect the environment, protect animal welfare, empower small producers and cooperatives, and uphold food sovereignty.
👉🏾 Otherwise, you’ll remove the palm oil only to find that half the other ingredients in your products are fuelling the same problems.
👉🏾 Palm oil is a great example of how systemic problems manifest — and how, instead of addressing root causes, we fixate on symptoms and look for easy scapegoats. whether that’s a crop, foreigners, or different religious/ ethnic group…
History keeps repeating itself, just with a different “enemy.”
🤷🏾♀️ But maybe we’re not quite ready for that conversation…