Features
Palm oil is ubiquitous – yet the farming of palm oil trees is environmentally disastrous
By MARTIN ZEILIG Palm oil has been criticized by many, including scientists, activists and organizations such as Greenpeace and the Palm Oil Investigations, notes online information.
In a report published by the BBC, environmentalists argue that the farming of oil palm trees is having damaging effects on the environment.
“Palm oil production and deforestation go hand in hand,” says the report. “To build palm oil plantations, producers clear trees in tropical rainforests, destroying the biodiverse regions. Deforestation is a significant contributor to climate change; when the forests are lost, carbon is released into the atmosphere, causing global warming.”
In her book, author Jocelyn Zuckerman spent years travelling the world, “from Liberia to Indonesia, India to Brazil” covering the human and environmental impacts of “this poorly understood plant.”
Her book, “Planet Palm,” is a compelling blend of history, science, politics, and food as experienced by the people whose lives have been impacted by, as she states, “this hidden ingredient.”
Joceln C. Zuckerman is the former editor of Gourmet, articles editor of OnEarth, and executive editor of Modern Farmer. An alumna of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a former fellow with the Washington DC-based Alicia Patterson Foundation, she has written for Fast Company, the American Prospect, Vogue, and many other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, with her husband and two children.
Ms. Zuckerman agreed to an email interview with The Jewish Post & News.
JP&N: Why did you decide to write this book? How long did it take to write?
JZ: It started with a trip I took a few years ago to Liberia, the West African country founded by freed American slaves. I’d gone there to write a magazine article about land grabs. This was the trend, in the aftermath of the food and fuel crises of 2008, of agribusiness and investment banks buying up huge swathes of fertile land in faraway places where governance is maybe not all that strong and traditional land rights are easy to exploit.
When I got down on the ground, I found a landscape that was completely barren. Two palm oil companies had cut down the rainforest in order to plant oil palm for miles and miles. In one village, a scattering of mud-block and thatch houses located inside an oil-palm concession owned by a Singapore-based company, a 50-year-old father of seven described how the outsiders had shown up and bulldozed the town in which he’d spent his entire life.
Other villagers talked of how the company had destroyed their crops and gravesites, polluted their streams, and run them out of their homes. I was so disturbed by the destruction I saw in Liberia that when I got home I dove into the topic, trying to learn everything I could about it. And I was fairly astonished by what I found. It turns out that palm oil has played an outsize role in shaping the world as we know it, from spurring the colonization of Nigeria and greasing the gears of the Second Industrial Revolution to transforming the societies of Southeast Asia and beyond.
“Following the plant’s journey over the decades,” I write in my book’s introduction, “served as a sort of master class in everything from colonialism and commodity fetishism to globalization and the industrialization of our modern food system.”
From the time I decided to write the book to the time I finished was about five years, but I was also doing other magazine work during that time.
JP&N: What has been the effect of palm plantations and the palm oil industry on the natural environment, and the economies of affected countries?
JZ: It’s had a profound effect on tropical forests and biodiversity. The landscapes of Indonesia and Malaysia in particular (the two countries account for 85 percent of global production) have been ravaged. In the last two decades alone, Malaysia has lost 20 million acres of tree cover.
The oil palm grows best at ten degrees to the north and south of the equator, which is a swathe of land that corresponds with the planet’s tropical rainforests. And tropical forests, though they cover less than ten percent of Earth’s land surface, support more than half of the world’s biodiversity.
The continued razing of the rainforest for oil-palm development means that creatures like the orangutan, the Sumatrian rhino and elephant, in addition to hundreds of bird species, are losing more and more of their natural habitat.
The palm oil industry is largely responsible for the fact that more than 100,000 orangutans have been wiped off the planet in the last 15 years. In 2019, hundreds of international experts issued a report finding that global biodiversity is declining faster than at any other time in human history, with one million species already facing extinction, many within decades, unless the world takes transformative action.
Most of the folks where I reported from in Southeast Asia, Central America, and Africa used to work as farmers supporting themselves and their families by growing food. But as more and more of the land has been planted with oil palm—and often the water polluted by agrichemicals—they have no food and no means of supporting themselves and their families.
There’s also a connection to pandemics. Something like 75 percent of today’s emerging infectious diseases originate in animals, and 60 per cent of those can spread directly from animals. Over the past few decades, the number of such animal-to-human transmissions has skyrocketed.
A third of these new diseases can be linked directly to deforestation and agricultural intensification, most of it involving tropical rainforests. So, cutting down these forests doesn’t just deprive orangutans and rhinos of their homes, it also sends virus-carrying wildlife like bats in search of new habitat, forcing them into closer contact with humans.
There is also well-documented evidence of forced and child labor on plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. Malaysia, in particular, relies on hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from countries like Indonesia, India, and Bangladesh to harvest its oil-palm fruits. The workers often are brought in by recruiters who lie to them about good jobs in hotels and restaurants and then confiscate their passports and traffic them to remote plantations.
Last year, the United States announced that it would block shipments of palm oil from two major Malaysian producers over allegations of forced labor, including concerns over child workers and physical and sexual abuse on plantations. And women on three continents told me that they’d been made sick from the pesticides they were forced to handle. Many have suffered from collapsed uteruses as a result of carrying the heavy sacks of fruit.
Some made the equivalent of $2 a day, after working for decades. Workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, like those on other continents, complained of skin irritation, blisters, and eye damage resulting from the chemicals they handle. Of 43 male employees interviewed by Human Rights Watch in 2019, 27 said that they had become impotent since starting the job. A review published in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in 2019 found that male oil-palm workers in Malaysia were suffering from widespread abnormal sperm.
In 2015, an extended episode of haze linked to fires on oil-palm plantations led to an estimated 100,000 premature deaths in Southeast Asia. (A few weeks into the crisis, government officials ordered the evacuation of all babies under the age of six months.)
As yet untallied is the long-term health damage caused by the fires. The fires proved so difficult to extinguish in part because of the unique composition of the terrain on which so many of them burned. Indonesia is home to Earth’s largest composition of tropical peatlands—soils formed over thousands of years through the accumulation of organic matter—and when farmers and palm oil companies drain and burn that land as a precursor to planting, massive quantities of carbon dioxide escape into the atmosphere. The annual carbon emissions from Indonesia’s peatlands rival those of the entire state of California.
JP&N: What else would you like our readers to know?
JZ: Trade liberalization and economic growth in middle-income countries over the last two decades has led to a surge of oil flowing across international borders, where it’s enabled the production of ever-greater amounts of deep-fried snacks and ultra-processed foods, benefiting multinational companies like Unilever, PepsiCo, Grupo Bimbo, Nestle, Cargill, and others. Rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are soaring in India and in the poorer countries where the multinational corporations that peddle such junk are focused on growing their markets.
Though most of us tend to blame sugar for the world’s weight woes, refined vegetable oils have added far more calories to the global diet in the last half-century than any other food group. A few months ago, a new study headed by researchers at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine found that palmitic acid, a fatty acid found in palm oil, alters the cancer genome increasing the likelihood that cancer will spread.
The industry is also impacting health and nutrition at its source. Studies have shown that diets among indigenous peoples in Indonesia are healthier than those of people working and living on the fringes of plantations, rather than in the forests as they’ve traditionally done.
In my book, I trace the political forces and dark money at work behind the scenes of the $65 billion business—from permits issued from inside jail cells and owners hidden behind offshore shell companies to long-dead villagers signing away their rights and elders hoodwinked by sweet-talking executives.
In 2019, the World Health Organization compared the tactics used by the palm oil industry to those employed by the tobacco and alcohol lobbies. It recently emerged that a Malaysian campaign accusing industry critics of being “neo-colonialists” was in fact the (very-highly-compensated) work of a Washington, DC–based lobbying firm, one whose previous clients include Exxon and the former Burmese military junta.
PepsiCo, the parent company of Frito-Lay, uses a lot of palm oil in its snacks. Activists have traced that oil to environmental destruction and labor abuses—what they call “conflict palm oil”. There have also been campaigns targeting Nestle, Kellogg’s, and Cargill for environmental and/or labor abuses linked to their supply chains.
They’ve definitely gotten some traction, and there have been reforms in the industry, though there is still a ways to go. Across the globe, those who have dared to speak out against the industry, whether environmental activists, laborers, peasant farmers, or investigative journalists, have often been met with violence.
Read labels. Reach out to the companies that use a lot of palm oil (PepsiCo, Dunkin Donuts, Unilever, Grupo Bimbo, etc) and ask them where they source it and how they can be sure that there wasn’t deforestation or land-grabbing or other labor or human rights abuses involved. Go to the websites of the Rainforest Action Network, Mighty Earth, Global Witness, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace, and get involved in their palm oil campaigns.
“Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up In Everything—And Endangered The World”
By Jocelyn C. Zuckerman
(The New Press 335 pg.$27.99 U.S.)
Features
Building Credit in College for Future Real Estate Deals
Most college students aren’t thinking about mortgages. But the students who buy their first investment property at 25 or 27 started building credit at 19 or 20. The two are directly connected.
Real estate is a game of capital access. Lenders don’t care how motivated you are – they care what your FICO score says. A 760+ score gets you prime mortgage rates. A 620 gets you higher interest and fewer options. The difference in monthly payments over a 30-year mortgage can be tens of thousands of dollars.
The window you have in college to build credit without major financial pressure is one of the most underused advantages Jewish students have.
Credit Foundations: Where To Start
Your credit score is built from five factors. Payment history makes up 35% – the largest single component. Credit utilization (how much of your available credit you’re using) accounts for 30%. Length of credit history, credit mix, and new inquiries cover the rest.
For most students, the first practical step is a secured credit card or a student credit card. Secured cards require a deposit that becomes your credit limit – typically $200-$500. They report to all three major bureaus and build history the same way unsecured cards do.
The rules are simple but require consistency. Pay the full balance every month. Keep utilization below 30% of your limit. Don’t apply for multiple cards in a short period. These habits compound over years – a student who starts at 18 has 7 years of credit history by the time they’re ready for a first mortgage.
One underused option: ask a parent or family member to add you as an authorized user on an older card with a clean payment history. You don’t need to use the card. The account’s age and payment history get added to your credit file immediately.
Researching Investment Options During Studies
Business, economics, and finance students regularly analyze real estate markets as part of their dissertation. That work isn’t just academic – it’s actual market research that doubles as preparation for real investing decisions.
However, balancing dataheavy analysis, market research, and exams often leads to extreme burnout. To survive the final semester, many students look for external support. Some of them use EduBirdie – best dissertation writing services for timely delivery and consistent quality on deliverables when the research load is heavy. Outsourcing the formatting and drafting frees up time to dig deeper into the actual market data that matters for real investment decisions. The analysis you build during college becomes your knowledge base before you ever make an offer.
Smart students treat every finance and real estate assignment as a portfolio of personal research. That perspective shifts the work from obligation to investment preparation.
How Student Loans Affect Your Future Mortgage
This is where many graduates get surprised. Student loan debt directly affects your debt-to-income ratio (DTI) – a key metric lenders use in mortgage approval. Most conventional lenders want your total monthly debt payments to stay below 43% of gross monthly income.
If you graduate with $40,000 in student loans at a standard repayment, your monthly payment is roughly $400. That $400 counts against your DTI before you add a car payment or rent. Managing your loan balance and making consistent payments not only builds credit – it keeps your DTI workable when you’re ready to buy.
Income-driven repayment plans can lower monthly payments but extend the loan period. For mortgage purposes, lenders typically use the actual monthly payment shown on your credit report when calculating DTI.
Practical Steps For Building Credit In College
Keep Utilization Low
Staying under 30% of your credit limit matters more than most students realize. If your card limit is $500, that means keeping your balance below $150 before the billing date. Paying in full each month handles this automatically.
Monitor Your Score Regularly
Free monitoring is available through Credit Karma, Experian, and most major banks. Checking your score doesn’t hurt it. Set up alerts for new inquiries, changes in balance, or any accounts you don’t recognize. Catching errors early prevents damage that takes months to fix.
Build Your Credit Mix Over Time
Lenders like to see that you can handle different types of credit. A student card, a small personal loan, and eventually a car loan create a credit mix in college that strengthens your profile. Don’t open accounts you don’t need, but don’t avoid credit out of fear either.
Here’s a practical credit-building checklist for college students:
- Open one student or secured credit card and use it monthly
- Pay the full balance before the due date every month
- Keep utilization below 30% at all times
- Become an authorized user on a parent’s old card if possible
- Check your credit report annually at AnnualCreditReport.com
- Make all student loan payments on time once they enter repayment
- Don’t close old accounts – account age matters
Understand What Mortgage Pre-Approval Requires
When you eventually apply for a mortgage, lenders will look at your FICO score, DTI, employment history, down payment, and reserves. The credit score threshold for a conventional loan is 620, but most competitive rates start at 740 and above. FHA loans allow scores down to 580 with a 3.5% down payment.
Starting to build credit at 18 or 19 means arriving at your first mortgage application with 6-8 years of credit history. That length alone adds 15% of your score. Combined with responsible utilization and clean payment history, you can realistically hit 740+ before you graduate.
The Long Game
Real estate investing after college isn’t a fantasy – it’s a planning problem. The students who pulled it off didn’t get lucky. They started building credit years before they needed it, kept their DTI manageable, and used their time in school to understand the markets they wanted to invest in.
The credit habits you build now are the credentials lenders will evaluate later. Start with one card, pay it in full, and let the history accumulate. Five years from now, that consistency becomes a mortgage approval and the keys to your first property.
Features
How Pioneer Families Kept Hebrew Alive on the Early Canadian Prairies
Canadian Prairies of the West and Jewish Pioneer Families
Early Western Canada boasted prairies and Jewish immigrant families’ settlements. Here is how they kept the Hebrew language alive and built makeshift schools.
Western Canada in the late 1800s was nothing more than plains. Wild grass and strong prairie winds covered the terrain. But that open land and freedom became a lifeline for thousands of Jewish immigrants. They were running from dangerous attacks in Europe to the safety of farm life in Canada. These families settled where there was nothing and the closest towns were miles away. They lived without electricity or running water. But even though every day was a survival for them, they managed to preserve their heritage and language.
Their effort to do so was enormous, but the information about it is mostly available in deep historical archives. If you need to write a detailed history paper on Canadian homesteaders, you’d probably be better off using the WritePaper academic help platform. Their experts have access to extensive knowledge bases, including numerous archives. If you just want to get a glimpse of how these families did it, here are some interesting facts.
Let’s start with the early farming towns these families built from scratch.
Early Farming Towns
Between 1880 and 1910, several Jewish farming towns started on the Canadian plains. These families left dangerous conditions in European countries like Russia, Lithuania, and Romania. They wanted a safe, fresh start on the land. They built farming communities with unique names like Hirsch, Wapella, Lipton, and Edenbridge in Saskatchewan. Other families started settlements like Bender Hamlet in Manitoba. When they first arrived, the land was completely wild and flat.
The weather was incredibly tough for the new farmers. The first winters were so cold that many families lived in sod dugouts. These were temporary homes dug right into the ground with roofs made of thick dirt and grass. Luckily, local Indigenous and Métis neighbors stepped in to help. They taught the newcomers how to build warm log cabins out of wood and clay. They also showed them how to survive freezing winter blizzards. Once the families had food and shelter, they focused on education. They knew that even though Yiddish was their everyday language, their kids still needed to learn Hebrew. Without Hebrew, their religious identity would fade away in the wilderness.
Classrooms out of Logs and Mud
How do you run a school when your neighbors live miles away? Several academic papers on this era show that starting a school required hard work and teamwork. One of the articles by Eric Stelee, who also writes for the best paper writing service WritePaper, points out that studying these early schools requires looking at deep community sacrifices. Farming families had to build everything with their own two hands. They set up Talmud Torahs. These were traditional afternoon Hebrew schools. Kids there were taught religious reading, writing, and daily prayers.
Building these schools, however, wasn’t the only problem pioneers came face to face with:
- Since trained teachers wouldn’t move to remote frontier farms, communities had to find and hire traveling tutors.
- Kids often had to walk or ride horses for many miles through deep snow just to get to a single lesson.
- Before permanent schoolhouses were finished, simple log cabins and small community halls had to double as schoolrooms during the week.
- Spring planting and fall harvest affected attendance significantly. Parents often needed their kids to help them in the fields.
Real Numbers of the Prairie Frontier
Old records show exactly how fast these prairie communities grew out of the wilderness. Between 1884 and 1912, Jewish families started 31 different farming communities across the Canadian prairies. The Canadian government offered 160 acres of wild land to any settler for a fee of just ten dollars. The only catch was that families had to clear the land and farm it successfully.
In 1892, a group of 47 families started the Hirsch community in Saskatchewan. Later, in 1906, another group of 56 pioneers started the Edenbridge community further north. By the year 1911, the official census counted exactly 2,066 Jewish people living in the province of Saskatchewan alone. These families proved that hard work could protect their language and history in a brand-new country.
The Tools of Prairie Learning
Books were very rare and expensive on the early Canadian frontier. Most families could only bring a few holy books packed tightly into their wooden trunks when they left Europe. These family treasures became the main textbooks for pioneer kids.
To keep their traditions alive without modern school supplies, families had to be creative:
- Parents spoke Yiddish at home, but they also repeated Hebrew prayers and holy songs aloud while cooking or feeding farm animals.
- They would gather kids around a single, worn-out family Bible to read the Hebrew letters together by the light of a lamp.
- Small towns shared their money to hire one person who worked as both the community butcher and the school teacher.
- Permanent wood synagogues, like the Beth Israel Synagogue built in 1908, became the centers for kids’ religious education.
Hebrew stayed alive as a sacred language on the flat plains because of these efforts. Kids learned the ancient alphabet and historic prayers while living thousands of miles away from big cultural cities.
Conclusion
Canadian prairie communities proved to the world that language and heritage can be preserved if you put your heart into it. Unfortunately, most of these farms disappeared during the Great Depression and the draw of big cities. But places like Edenbridge still exist today and have become important historic sites. These places keep memories of those mud and log schoolhouses alive.
Pioneer Jewish families that came to Canada in the 1800s had nothing, yet they still managed to pass knowledge down to their children. One candlelit lesson at a time.
Features
Why Modern Torah Scribes Still Mix Ink by Hand
It’s 2026 and Torah Scribes Still Mix Ink by Hand
Did you know that Jewish ritual scribes don’t actually use any of the modern printing tools? They still mix a 2,000-year-old ink recipe by hand and here is how.
Our lives are run by smartphones and computers. Everything can be typed or copied in a matter of minutes or even seconds. Yet, there is still a certain profession that rejects all these modern conveniences. They also reject the obsession with speed we have, exactly because of all these tools. These professionals are Sofrim. They are ritual scribes in Jewish communities. They are responsible for hand-writing Torah scrolls, holy books, and small mezuzah scrolls for doorways.
The contrast between their craft and the constant typing we are used to is striking. Just think of it. If a student or even a professional is pressed for time, they just go online and look for a writing service to help them out. A digital platform like PaperWriter can write and format an entire paper in just a few hours. But this same speed is the enemy of a holy Torah scribe. To write a sacred scroll, they must be deeply concentrated and slow about their process. Rush can’t be part of it. In fact, this special care begins before the pen touches the page. First, they gather the ingredients and mix the writing ink.
The Strict Rules of Sacred Ink
Why can’t a scribe just buy a bottle of high-quality black ink at a local art supply store? It all comes down to traditional Jewish law, which is called Halakha. A Torah scroll is a highly holy object with very strict manufacturing standards. A single scroll contains exactly 304,805 letters and takes a full year of daily manual labor to finish. If even a single letter fades, cracks, or peels off the page over time, the entire scroll becomes invalid. It cannot be used in a synagogue service until it is carefully repaired.
There is also a common myth that the ink itself must be “kosher.” But Jewish law actually focuses on durability and natural purity. While the parchment page absolutely must come from a kosher animal species, the ink simply needs to be permanent, deeply black, and made from scratch.
To make sure the holy words last for hundreds of years, the ink must follow these specific standards:
- Color. It must be a deep, solid jet-black color that is easy to read.
- Durability. The ink must bond with the skin page so it never flakes off.
- Texture. It must remain smooth enough to avoid cracking over the centuries.
Modern writers often focus on how much digital tools have changed our daily habits. As a blog writer for the paper writing service PaperWriter, Jacky M. points out, “modern text has become instant, temporary, and easily erasable.” Ritual scribes, however, take the opposite path. They preserve a slow, physical process that has remained unchanged for thousands of years. They make sure ancient texts endure for future generations.
The 2,000-Year-Old Ink Recipe
To get the perfect black color and long-lasting quality, scribes use a formula that dates back to ancient times. This traditional mixture is a special kind of iron gall ink. It creates a permanent chemical bond directly on the page.
The Raw Ingredients
Before beginning the brewing process, a scribe must gather a small collection of organic materials:
- Oak Galls. Round, woody bumps from oak trees that contain a natural acid.
- Iron Sulfate. A natural mineral salt that turns the liquid dark black.
- Gum Arabic. A sticky tree sap that acts as a natural glue.
- Pure Water. The liquid base for boiling the ingredients together.
The Preparation Steps
The process of turning these raw elements into smooth writing fluid requires a lot of patience and precision:
- The hard oak galls are crushed into a fine powder.
- The powder is boiled in water for several hours until it creates a dark, strong tea.
- Tea is strained to remove solid pieces of wood.
- The iron sulfate is then added to the warm liquid.
- The gum arabic is added last to give the liquid a thick, glossy texture.
The moment the iron touches the oak gall tea, a chemical reaction happens. The pale brown liquid instantly turns into a deep, pitch-black ink. The added gum arabic keeps the ink from dripping too fast off the tip of the scribe’s traditional quill or reed pen.
Why This Ancient Ink Lasts Longer
This handmade chemical compound is perfectly suited for parchment, which is made from processed animal skins. Modern factory inks are full of harsh chemicals and alcohols designed to dry instantly on wood-based paper. If you use factory ink on animal parchment, it will eventually ruin the surface. The letters will turn brittle, dry out, and fall off the page like old house paint.
Handmade iron gall ink works completely differently. It actually bites into the organic fibers of the animal skin. As the years go by, the iron in the ink reacts with the oxygen in the air. This chemical reaction causes the ink to get darker over time instead of fading away.
Conclusion
Some traditions are just too important to be simply replaced by automation. Yes, mixing the ink and writing a sacred text by hand takes time and focus. But the result is outstanding. The tradition is preserved, and these holy texts look and feel the same as they did a thousand years ago. It’s a way for people to touch and be closer to history, so to speak.