What’s in your food?

The debate about butter and palm oil just continues to churn along.

It’s been the latest kitchen mystery: is Canadian butter now harder at room temperature than it used to be? And if it is, why?

The suspected guilty party? Palm fat. The palm oil isn’t added to the butter. In fact, it’s added to the cow.

To cow feed, actually.

A normal dairy cow eats about 35 kilograms of feed daily. If the cows are getting palm oil as part of that feed, it would normally be between 200 and 250 grams per day. In the industry, the palm product is known as a bypass fat, and is absorbed into the bloodstream by the cow’s intestines.

From there, onward into the butterfat portion of cow’s milk, and then to butter.

Now, people are legitimately upset when they learn that there’s something they didn’t expect in what they thought was a reasonably simple product.

READ THE FINE PRINT

The Dairy Farmers of Canada association is now suggesting dairy farmers stop adding palm oil to feed and is investigating the problem with a working group.

But if you’re outraged about palm oil stiffening your butter, you might not want to angrily switch to margarine without reading the label first; it’s often right there in the fine print.

And you might want to do some other careful reading as well.

Palm oil is a remarkably versatile edible oil — while there are plenty of concerns about the environmental effects of how and where it’s grown, there’s no doubt that its particular properties have meant it’s in many things you might not expect.

It’s in chocolates, breakfast cereals, margarines, processed foods, cookies, biscuits, shampoo, lipstick and other cosmetics, in some toothpaste and the list goes on.

Sometimes, it’s called palm oil, sometimes, it’s called palm kernel oil, palm kernel olein, palm kernel stearin, palm olein, palm stearin or palm superolein. In some countries, it’s simply labelled as vegetable oil.

There are legions of articles about just how hard it is to find palm oil in products, and even more articles on how much harder it is to knock the material out of your diet.

SLIPPERY SLOPE

So, where does the slippery slope of Buttergate get us in the end?

Well, it shows a couple of things: first off, that public reaction can garner an immediate effect.

Secondly, it shows us that there’s a whole lot we don’t know about our food, and often don’t care to know. Highly processed foods often have a cornucopia of ingredients designed to make them last longer and taste better that you’re not even thinking about.

And if you’re concerned about palm oil, have a look in your pantry for products containing high fructose corn syrup — and read up on the health effects of that.