Palm Oil

Or "Huile de palme" au Francais.





1 A picture from Malaysia
2 Palm oil from Ghana
3 Palm oil margarine
4 Palm oil fruit
5 Palm oil fruit


In VS Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas, Mr Biswas runs a store out in plantation country. The story, like most of Naipaul's, is set in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago. VS Naipaul's family went from India to T+T, and like Fiji, it is very Indian, like Jamaica is very British and the Dominican Republic is very MLB.

At Mr Biswas' store, there is "red butter", and I could never understand what exactly the red butter was; it is palm oil margarine. Palm oil contains lots of betacarotene, the same molecule that creates the orange color of carrots. According to Wikipedia's Palm oil article, if one cooks the palm oil in a certain way, the oil turns a whitish color, as seen in the picture; I really don't understand at this time why carrots don't also lose their color when they are cooked.

Along with soybean oil, palm oil is the most used cooking oil in the world. It is also used to make shampoo and soap - viz the brand name "Palmolive". English Wikipedia's article "Palm oil" doesn't really give much information on the industrial uses of palm oil, nor does it give much information on where palm oil is grown. It is grown in tropical areas: Southeast Asia, West Africa, Central America, South America.


Palm oil is made from the palm oil fruit and palm kernel oil is made from the kernel of the fruit.

Here are some serious links about palm oil:

Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB) (en)
Univanich Group of Thailand (en)
RIVOC (Rivers Oil Company) of Nigeria
Portuguese Wikipedia's article "Azeite-de-dendê" (pt); there is a list of the world's palm oil producers at the end of the article

There are pictures at these sites of palm oil trees that are cultivated to be only 10 or 15 feet tall, so as to make it easy to work at the palm oil farm.