Okay sonny, put down the biscuit - very slowly. And keep your crackers where I can see them.
With every bite you take of that deliciously crumbly digestive, another orang-utan dies. Perhaps saying 'This product contains furry, wide-eyed apes' on the packaging would hurt sales. Or maybe not.
Palm oil isn't really the liquefied essence of primates, of course, but harvesting one without butchering the other is tough, as Panorama: Dying for a Biscuit (Monday, BBC1) made clear.
You knew it wouldn't be good news. Panorama doesn't make hard-hitting docs about how unspeakably tasty palm oil is.
"Nobody needs another lecture on what to buy at the supermarket," warned Raphael Rowe, before doing just that. Then he was off to Borneo, armed with a GPS handset and a fish finger fixation, for heart-rending shots of traumatised orang-utans rocking in cages. And they were the lucky ones. Thousands of the ginger critters have died for an industry that makes Indonesia £5bn a year.
Shocking as the imagery was, there was little new here. As they say, you can't make an omelette without felling thousands of acres of virgin rainforest. And if you didn't already know the orang-utan was teetering adorably and tragically on the brink of extinction, you probably thought Every Which Way But Loose was a documentary.
Less gut-wrenching but more surprising, we learned Indonesia is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, due to CO2 freed by planting on peat bogs often illegally, as Rowe was able to prove. And rainforests twice the size of Wales have just been cleared for palm oil, when surely demolishing Wales would make far more sense.
Unilever's procurement chief then bravely admitted that 85% of its palm oil is unsustainable, before an uplifting late cameo from Justin King - the only life-form cuter than a baby orang-utan. Sainsbury's was the show's only winner, in fact, and was fittingly lauded for using ethical oil.
But it's taken 10 years for Sainsbury's to be able to say that, for one measly fish finger. How many apes will be left by the time Unilever et al sort it out?
More from this column
With every bite you take of that deliciously crumbly digestive, another orang-utan dies. Perhaps saying 'This product contains furry, wide-eyed apes' on the packaging would hurt sales. Or maybe not.
Palm oil isn't really the liquefied essence of primates, of course, but harvesting one without butchering the other is tough, as Panorama: Dying for a Biscuit (Monday, BBC1) made clear.
You knew it wouldn't be good news. Panorama doesn't make hard-hitting docs about how unspeakably tasty palm oil is.
"Nobody needs another lecture on what to buy at the supermarket," warned Raphael Rowe, before doing just that. Then he was off to Borneo, armed with a GPS handset and a fish finger fixation, for heart-rending shots of traumatised orang-utans rocking in cages. And they were the lucky ones. Thousands of the ginger critters have died for an industry that makes Indonesia £5bn a year.
Shocking as the imagery was, there was little new here. As they say, you can't make an omelette without felling thousands of acres of virgin rainforest. And if you didn't already know the orang-utan was teetering adorably and tragically on the brink of extinction, you probably thought Every Which Way But Loose was a documentary.
Less gut-wrenching but more surprising, we learned Indonesia is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, due to CO2 freed by planting on peat bogs often illegally, as Rowe was able to prove. And rainforests twice the size of Wales have just been cleared for palm oil, when surely demolishing Wales would make far more sense.
Unilever's procurement chief then bravely admitted that 85% of its palm oil is unsustainable, before an uplifting late cameo from Justin King - the only life-form cuter than a baby orang-utan. Sainsbury's was the show's only winner, in fact, and was fittingly lauded for using ethical oil.
But it's taken 10 years for Sainsbury's to be able to say that, for one measly fish finger. How many apes will be left by the time Unilever et al sort it out?
More from this column
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