They may not be
what you’d expect to find in a fancy restaurant, either side of the Channel,
but no breakfast table in a French home or café is properly laid without them.
My teenage daughter
doesn’t like either of them, which may be the strangest thing about her. It was
her primary source of trepidation when embarking on a recent exchange visit to
a French family.
Knowing her fear of
croissants, we acquired a jar of Nutella to familiarise her with the flavour
before she went. With the result I ended up eating most of the jar myself,
rediscovering a taste from my own teen years.
I’m not the total
sucker for anything chocolate-flavoured that so many people seem to be, but
that dash of hazelnut makes it a lot harder to resist.
As for croissants,
I’m not sure how they achieve that distinctive taste and texture – flaky on the
outside, stretchy inside – but if you’ve never eaten one in France you won’t
know just what I’m talking about. For some reason, anything called croissants
served anywhere outside their homeland are simply not the same.
For those of us who
care not just about how our food tastes, but where it comes from, there are
problems, however.
I was disturbed
this week by a revelation from an old friend we stayed with recently in
beautiful Burgundy.
“Generally I cook stuff from scratch but I draw the line at croissants,”
Cheryl said. “We had a surprise today because we found out there was some palm
oil in frozen croissants in our fridge. Looks like I may be making the next
croissants myself after all.
“Can I just suggest that you have a look at your processed food and see
just what has been put in the stuff you bought.”
Follow that piece
of advice and you may find your kitchen cupboards are full of palm oil.
If the ingredients
listed on tin or packet include an unspecified “vegetable oil”, chances are
it’s palm – if it’s the healthier olive or sunflower oil, it’s likely to say
so.
Several companies
in France – including supermarket own brands – have taken lately to labelling
products proudly as “free of palm oil”. Which tells you how far ahead of us
they are in recognising a real issue.
But what’s wrong
with palm oil anyway?
According to the
World Health Organisation, eating it increases the risk of heart disease. But
it’s the effect of it on the health of the planet that really concerns me.
Particularly the
rate at which high-yield, industrial-scale plantations are spreading across several
parts of the world, notably Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, patches of South
America and a large swathe of Africa.
In many places
these plantations are taking the place of ancient rainforest, a sterile
monoculture displacing what was the most vibrant biodiversity anywhere.
On the grand scale
this is bad for the atmosphere, a very likely cause of global warming.
On the local scale,
in Borneo and Sumatra, it’s bad for creatures such as the orang-utan, now in
danger of extinction.
And if you’ve ever
watched Bruce Parry’s excellent series ‘Tribe’ you’ll know how people too are
driven off their land by companies chasing the big profits palm oil can bring.
Peasant farmers in Colombia, Honduras and Malaysia are among the thousands who
have lost their homes and livelihoods.
Earlier this year
Nutella, in a bizarre tie-up with WWF (that’s the World Wide Fund for Nature,
not the wrestling association), announced that in future all its palm oil would
come from “sustainable sources”. So that’s good and green, right?
Wrong.
That word
“sustainable” is one of the tricksiest around.
However
“sustainable” that oil farm is today, it’s still likely to be on land that was
primal forest until yesterday.
It may be capable
of sustaining Western food habits, fancy soap products – and our not-as-green-as-they’re-painted
“bio-fuels” – but it’s no longer sustaining the plants, people and creatures
who used to live there.
And justice for all?
WHEN is a cause “just”? It’s a
question worth asking because that’s when the USA says it will use drone
strikes – missiles fired from unmanned aircraft.
In late July the Americans resumed a campaign of drone
attacks in Yemen, a desperately poor and troubled country you might think had
enough problems already.Last week there were eight drone strikes in different parts of that frightened and confused country. Was every death they caused “just”?
Worldwide, there have been American drone attacks on 27 different sites in the past six months.
Was all the fear spread by the overhead buzzing of the remote-control planes “just”?
If this is how America wages the “war on terror”, it seems legitimate to ask which side are the terrorists.
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