Watching a documentary about orangutans is like seeing a simian snuff movie. In the most recent one I saw with my family, we watched as a baby was orphaned, her mother starved after their forests were burnt down for palm oil. The baby turned her sweet Yoda eyes on the camera. My children, genuinely distressed, turned their eyes on me for moral guidance. It’s at that point that I thought to look at the list of ingredients on the packet of chocolate biscuits we had just eaten. Oh. They had palm oil in them. We were growing fat on baby orangutan tears.
Modern life is complicated. On the one hand we like orangutans. On the other we like chocolate biscuits, possibly, in my case, even