[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.