Omnivore - Two Girl Scouts push to make cookies forest-friendly

• Via Wikimedia Commons

I generally try to avoid palm oil because of all its saturated fat, but I often fail because so many of the foods that contain it (Nutella and Girl Scout Cookies, for instance) are so delicious. I didn’t know until today, however, that palm oil actually comes from certain palm trees (something, I realize, that should have been obvious), and that thousands of square miles of tropical rainforest in Southeast Asia have been cleared to accommodate oil palm plantations.

I found this out after reading about two Girl Scouts’ four-year long campaign to take palm oil out of Girl Scout Cookies. The girls, age 15 and 16, found out about palm plantations’ impact on the rainforest ecosystem after studying orangutans for a project. They learned that deforestation was one of the main threats to orangutan populations, and that much of the deforestation was occurring in order to make way for palm plantations.