[maccard]

The only really safe bet is to avoid purchasing pre-made items, and make your own sauces/treats/cakes etc. We cook all our own meals at home, but buy shampoo + cookies + cakes + chocolate bars (as normal people do). We try to stick to brands we _know_ don't have any palm oil, but I'd wager that almost all our produce doesn't have any in it.

Except I just checked and my peanut butter (whole earth) _does_ contain it, even though I thought it didn't... You might have a point.

[logfromblammo]

I have been checking every time for several years now.

If, for instance, the jar that says "peanut butter" on the front does not say "Ingredients: peanuts" on the side, I put it back on the shelf and pick up the next one.

You can't trust brands any more, and it makes shopping an arduous and time-wasting chore. Not to mention the stupid little games manufacturers play with the ingredient list for obfuscation's sake, like adding three distinct kinds of sugar so "sugar" doesn't show up as the first ingredient. Or adding 12 different kinds of filler to a crab cake, so that "crab" shows up as the first ingredient.

[maccard]

If you're looking for an alternative to your known goods on occasion (not at home, store stopped stocking it or even just not necessarily knowing that peanut butter can be made from just peanuts), it's easy to get stuck looking for options.

It's easy to be dismissive of the problem and say "just get X", buy you need to know that exists, but you can make the argument for cookies, chips, sauces, dips, soaps...

[logfromblammo]

Before checking every time, I only read the ingredient list occasionally, usually at home when eating it. I started to notice things, like this progression:

Ingredients: peanuts.

Ingredients: peanuts, peanut oil, salt.

Ingredients: peanuts, hydrogenated vegetable oil (one or more of: peanut oil, palm oil, rapeseed oil, soybean oil, cottonseed oil), salt.

The company might run up against a supply problem, where they have to choose between a bad batch of peanuts or nothing at all, and they choose to remain in business by "remediating" that bad batch. But maybe their sales actually go up, so instead of going back to basics, they keep doing the same thing, but with cheaper oil. I get it. I don't like it, but I get it. You can make more money by trying to eat Jif's or Skippy's lunch than by catering to purity snobs.

Repeat similar scenarios for other brands of other products, every year, across the whole grocery store. Products try to stay competitive by masking inferior base ingredients with added fat, salt, and sugar, then go on to game the ingredients list, to obfuscate the fact that they replaced expensive ingredients with cheaper ones, while simultaneously reducing the package weight and upping the unit price. Those oil palm farmers don't need to worry; peak capitalism has their back. Palm oil use will continue to increase, because the marginal cost of production currently makes it the cheapest of all plant-based oils, at least until oil-algae farming technology matures.