I live in a slightly strange household where half it's members do not like chocolate! Actually that is not strictly true - everyone likes chocolate bars but Simon and Ben do not like chocolate cakes, puddings, ice cream etc!
Ben however, recently discovered that he likes Nutella and a friend bought him a 1kg jar of it for his birthday. That is now finished and despite trying to persuade him to eat the many flavours of jam I have made, he still wanted a replacement jar of Nutella. I put him off for a while but the nagging became too much to bear so I stopped on the chocolate spread aisle in the supermarket recently and was about to pop a jar in my basket when I paused to read the ingredients:
Sugar (as expected) then .... palm oil.
Palm oil is something we try hard not to eat - it is high is saturated fats and it is produced from trees grown on deforested land in Indonesia and Malaysia which has many detrimental environmental problems as outlined here in more detail.
The Nutella went back on the shelf. The own brand chocolate spread was also made with palm oil so that stayed put too.
Apparently "Leader Price" which used to be "Mutant", a French budget supermarket chain similar to Aldi or Lidl makes a Nutella-like product without palm oil. I will need to investigate. Whilst I would prefer not to buy it at all, is there anything wrong with a little indulgence once in a while?! In the meantime I do have about 8 types of jam to tempt Ben with and a large pot of Marmite! I really hope that does not have any palm oil in it.
My grandmother used to make chocolate spread at home...equal parts margerine or butter as available, golden syrup and cocoa powder. Add finely ground hazelnuts...
ReplyDeleteI'll give this a go gz - thanks :)
DeleteOoh I never knew that. In this day and age they really should be getting more responsible and changing for a different ingredient to replace the palm oil
ReplyDeleteAnd palm oil is in so many things.
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