The Oil Palm And Its Criticized Oil

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

One of the many types of scenic palms on our wonderful planet is the Oil Palm. The petioles of its long feathery leaves are armed with sharp thorns, which discourage the desire to get to the scarlet fruit clusters. Fortunately, there is such an assistant as the wind, which is not an obstacle to thorns. Strong gusts of wind thin out a dense accumulation of reddish-orange fruits, which, breaking away from the friendly community, are trying to hide in the grassy growth, making its way through the stones of the palm tree's near-stem circle. Picturesque fruits from ancient times give people valuable oil, about which there is so much controversial talk today

A coconut tree, decorated with a necklace of large weighty fruits, involuntarily attracts the eye of a tourist who fears for his safety. Since on the island of Koh Phangan, Coconut palms grow everywhere, then behind their majesty and menacingness you do not always notice that other types of palms grow next to them. Therefore, I paid close attention to the Palm tree, which I passed many times, heading to one of the waterfalls of the island, when I saw a bright spot in its crown, which surprised me.

I had to turn to the World Wide Web for help in order to get acquainted with the new "discovery" - the Oil Palm. Now I could see a rather dense chain of sharp thorns along the edges of strong leaf stalks, sympathizing with the people harvesting palm fruits. In the photo I took, these thorns, protecting the inviolability of weighty bundles of bright fruits, are clearly visible:

Seven or ten days later, an obliging wind allowed me to get acquainted with the pretty reddish-orange fruits, separating some of them from a weighty picturesque bunch, alluring but out of reach. They write that, depending on the age of the palm, the fruit bunch can weigh from five to thirty kilograms, and the color of the fruits is not always so sunny, but may be purple and even black. The bright sides of the fruits that fell from "my" palm gleamed in the sun, looking through the gray-green grass under the tree:

Of course, I could not resist and recruited some fallen handsome men. Successfully gliding to the surface of the earth, the fruits were crowned with miniature black tridents, complementing the warlike nature of the leaves of the Oil Palm. Otherwise, the fruits look quite peaceful, don't they? Under the thin, smooth, reddish-orange skin is a fleshy and oily pericarp, penetrated with fine fibers. This pulp tastes pleasant, fatty and slightly sweetish. The fibers are clearly visible in the photo, in a green circle, with which I have outlined a small part of the fetus with a broken protective shell:

An orange-yellow oil called "palm oil" is extracted from the pericarp pulp. This oil is used in the manufacture of margarine, as well as household candles and toilet soap. More valuable is the oil extracted from the seeds located inside the pericarp and protected by a hard shell, which is not easy to get rid of. This oil is called "palm kernel oil". The transparent whitish seed-kernel of the oil palm fruit tastes like white coconut pulp, and therefore palm kernel oil has a nutty taste and is almost colorless. Having tasted both the pulp of the pericarp and the kernel of the oil palm fruit, I realized that both types of palm oil simply cannot be harmful to the human body, since they do not contain any harmful components. Moreover, oil producers are doing a lot of work to develop varieties of the Oil Palm, which have almost no protective shell in the seed, and the percentage of oil content is higher than that of wild palms.

The oil palm, whose homeland is the territory of equatorial West Africa, where edible oil was prepared from palm fruits as early as three thousand years before our era, enterprising people at the beginning of the twentieth century began to cultivate in a number of countries of Southeast Asia. The ruffy palm tree has taken root perfectly in its new place.

The fertility of the oil palm allows for the production of palm oil in volumes that exceed the production of oil from other oilseeds, and the cost of its production is much lower. Most likely, it is this fact that gives rise to competitors to criticize the quality of palm oil and its threat to human health. Having tried the "raw material", I am no longer afraid of products in which palm oil is one of the ingredients. Unfortunately, our would-be food producers manage to spoil many types of "raw materials", but this is a completely different topic.