Palm oil supplies over a third of all the vegetable oil on Earth while using less than a tenth of the land devoted to oil crops — the most efficient fat humanity has ever found, and the most controversial
29/06/2026 (Silicon Canals) - In Riau province on Sumatra, a harvester walks between rows of oil palms with a long aluminium pole tipped by a curved blade. He angles it up into the crown of a tree, hooks the stem of a fruit bunch the size of a watermelon, and pulls. The bunch — orange-red, spiked, weighing perhaps forty kilograms — thuds onto the soil. He moves to the next tree. Within hours, the bunches will be on a truck heading to a mill where steam, pressure, and centrifuges will separate out the oil that ends up in biscuits in Birmingham, instant noodles in Jakarta, and shampoo in São Paulo.
