Look up Palm or palm in Palm butter, the free dictionary. Palms Casino Resort, a hotel and casino in Las Vegas, U.
If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. The oil is used in food manufacturing, in beauty products, and as biofuel. The use of palm oil has attracted the concern of environmental groups due to deforestation in the tropics where palms are grown, and has been cited as a factor in social problems due to allegations of human rights violations among growers. Humans used oil palms as far back as 5,000 years. In the late 1800s, archaeologists discovered a substance that they concluded was originally palm oil in a tomb at Abydos dating back to 3,000 BCE. It is believed that traders brought oil palm to Egypt.
West and Central African countries, used widely as a cooking oil. European merchants trading with West Africa occasionally purchased palm oil for use as a cooking oil in Europe. Palm oil became a highly sought-after commodity by British traders for use as an industrial lubricant for machinery during Britain’s Industrial Revolution. By around 1870, palm oil constituted the primary export of some West African countries, although this was overtaken by cocoa in the 1880s with the introduction of colonial European cocoa plantations. Palm oil is naturally reddish in color because of a high beta-carotene content. The oil palm produces bunches containing many fruits with the fleshy mesocarp enclosing a kernel that is covered by a very hard shell. Along with coconut oil, palm oil is one of the few highly saturated vegetable fats and is semisolid at room temperature.
Palm oil is a common cooking ingredient in the tropical belt of Africa, Southeast Asia and parts of Brazil. Many processed foods either contain palm oil or various ingredients made from it. After milling, various palm oil products are made using refining processes. Since the mid-1990s, red palm oil has been cold-pressed from the fruit of the oil palm and bottled for use as a cooking oil, in addition to other uses such as being blended into mayonnaise and vegetable oil. Oil produced from palm fruit is called red palm oil or just palm oil. White palm oil is the result of processing and refining. When refined, the palm oil loses its deep red color.
It is extensively used in food manufacture and can be found in a variety of processed foods including peanut butter and chips. It is often labeled as palm shortening and is used as a replacement ingredient for hydrogenated fats in a variety of baked and fried products. Palm oil is sometimes used as a minor ingredient in calf milk replacer. Palm oil is pervasively used in personal care and cleaning products, and it provides the foaming agent in nearly every soap, shampoo, or detergent. Palm oil is used to produce both methyl ester and hydrodeoxygenated biodiesel. Palm oil methyl ester is created through a process called transesterification. Palm oil biodiesel is often blended with other fuels to create palm oil biodiesel blends.