Become A World Food Commodity, Here's The History Of Cooking Oil From Palm Oil

YOGYAKARTA The history of cooking oil is very interesting to watch. This is because cooking oil is a very strategic industrial commodity and concerns the lives of many people.

In Indonesia, the cooking oil most often used is palm cooking oil (Refined Bleached Deodourised Olein/RDBO). Given that Indonesia is a palm oil producing country. In addition, palm cooking oil is also quite ideal in terms of price and availability.

So, how did the use of cooking oil as food processing ingredients start?

According to the Britannica epicenter, palm oil has long been processed into oil and became a staple material in areas spread from Senegal to Angola along Africa's west coast, quoted by VOI from Kompas, Thursday, October 13, 2022.

The commodity of palm oil began to be crowded in the global market around the 1500s, because it was widely used by transatlantic slave trade vessels.

When the ships travel across the Atlantic, palm oil is a valuable food that keeps the prisoners alive. In fact, the traders also used palm oil to decorate the skin of the prisoners to make them look smooth, light, young, before being auctioned.

Over time, the popularity of palm oil has decreased, and has lost its reputation as raw material.

This happens because exporters make palm oil cheaper with a work-efficient method that allows palm fruit to fragment and soften, even if the results are cracked.

Buyers of palm oil in Europe then processed it chemically to remove the smell of palm oil. As a result, palm oil can become a liquid that tastes bland and replaces the more expensive consumption fat or other oil functions.

Palm Oil Starts Production For Industrial Needs

As is known, palm fruit and seeds can be squeezed to produce various types of oil and make food into fire.

Palm oil attracts producers because it can blend with other ingredients. The cost of producing palm cooking oil is said to be cheaper than cooking oil from cotton or sunflower.

Even so, palm cooking oil is sold cheaply because there is a legacy of colonialism and exploitation that is still waiting for the industry to date. This condition makes it difficult to shift palm oil production to a more sustainable lane.

Based on The Guardian's report on February 19, 2019, international financial organizations saw palm oil as a engine of economic growth.

In fact, since the 1960s, scientists have warned that a high content of saturated fat in palm oil can increase the risk of heart disease.

In response to this, food producers have started replacing palm oil with margarine, which is made with vegetable oils with lower saturated fat content.

However, in the 1990s, researchers discovered that the process of making oil in margari, known as partial hydrogenation, actually created different types of fat, namely trans fats that are not healthier than saturated fats.

The results of the study led to international calls demanding restrictions on the use of foods containing trans fats.

In 1994, food and beverage company Uniliver, which incidentally was a British-Dutch conglomerate, removed partial hydrogenated oil from 600 fat mixtures, and replaced it with fat-free components.

Uniliver tries to replace trans fat ingredients that are more profitable, as a substitute for butter. However, in the end, this step actually brought Uniliber to take advantage of oil from palm oil.

Currently, there are 3 billion people in 150 countries who use cooking oil from palm oil. On average, the world community consumes 8 kg of palm oil per year. Of this amount, 85 percent of the palm oil comes from Malaysia and Indonesia.

Such is information about the history of palm cooking oil. Hopefully useful.