Soap Switch

Since moving here in August, I'd grown pretty fond of Trader Joe's tea tree oil soap. It's long lasting, fresh-smelling, and comes in a 2-pack for $1.99. Unbeatable, really. However, I was negligent in my purchasing of it a few months ago, not reading the label to ensure that there was no palm oil, which I was afraid there was. Soap was on my list when I went there this morning, and sho' 'nuff - palm oil in every last bar of soap they had on their shelves. I paid for my foodstuffs and hi-tailed it to Whole Foods, whose vast selection offered me a glimmer of hope, if not TJ's famously low prices. I stood there facing the wall of soaps with decadent-sounding blends like carrot and pomegranate with cranberry. Were I not on a no-palm oil mission and had money to burn (or dissolve, as it were) on $8 bars of soap, I'd sample a whole slew of these saponified goodies, but I was very limited in my choices today. Kiss My Face provided me with my only solutions - their olive oil soaps fit the bill to a T (or nearly. $3.99 for an 8 oz. bar isn't exactly a bargain, but is well worth the price considering their commendable ingredient list: saponified olive oil, water, sodium chloride, fragrance, and the chamomile and lavender extracts in each of the two bars I purchased). They're hefty bricks and should last us way longer than TJ's soaps did, and they're made with olive oil, folks! Y'all know how I love my olive oil!

My point of posting this is to remind people that palm oil is all over the place. It's like the Plague. You gotta be on your toes and watch out for this stuff, 'cause it's sneaky. Why no palm oil? In case some readers missed a post a few months ago, the cultivation of non-sustainable palm oil (if a product uses the sustainable variety it will explicitly say so; otherwise it's safe to assume that it's not) is seriously impacting the habitats of many animals in southeast Asia, including orangutans, in a bad, bad way. So bad that we can expect the species to be obliterated in fifteen years. It's up to consumers to effect a change by refusing to support the cycle. Read yo' labels, folks! There are always alternatives! Information is out there in abundance - just do a Google search. Here's a bit for more information: http://www.cmzoo.org/conservation/palmOilCrisis/

Lots of zoos are spreading the word on this crisis - in fact, my beloved husband is at the Pittsburgh Zoo as I type this participating in a Palm Oil Awareness task force meeting. It's serious business. To illustrate my point further I have included a few shots of a 5 year-old orang who is near and dear to us - Jiwa. Something to think about.