Is there really no other way?

It was on the front page, with the caption ‘A woman uses her feet to pound palm kernel seeds to extract cooking oil at Essan Pattisan, in Niger State, at the weekend,’ snapped by Trust newspapers’ photo editor, Afolabi Sotunde. As you can see, the sight is so telling and self-indicting that one needs no […]

It was on the front page, with the caption ‘A woman uses her feet to pound palm kernel seeds to extract cooking oil at Essan Pattisan, in Niger State, at the weekend,’ snapped by Trust newspapers’ photo editor, Afolabi Sotunde. As you can see, the sight is so telling and self-indicting that one needs no other reason to go off palm oil. Let me confess that I have never been a regular eater of palm oil. But the occassional times I eat food cooked with it, I’d always enjoyed it. However I have grown more careful since discovering that healthwise the ‘sleepy oils’, those that grow condensed due to change in weather, are the heart unfriendly ones. Palm oil is one such culprit.
But all my reservations about palm oil paled into insignificance when I saw the process of its production, so aptly caught by Afolabi’s lens. I became convinced that I will never willingly and consciously put palm oil in my food again. The last time I felt so strongly against a published photo was when a local barber was caught by the sharp lens of our Kano bureau photographer, Sani Maikatanga, effecting a uvula removal on a new-born child. Everything about the picture repulsed me. In this day and age that little baby did not deserve such a crude surgery in those unhygienic conditions.
Then came the palm oil pounder. It wasn’t just the fact that the lady’s two legs were the ones doing the pounding instead of the many pestles available around her, it is also the fact that no one has any idea how clean those legs were or whether any provision was made to prevent any other thing from falling into the mortar. It is food processing of the crudest form and should not be the prevailing practice in this day and age. One wonders what the several universities of agriculture and other agric research institutions spread all over the country are doing that simple oil-extracting implements cannot be created to provide the rural woman with an easier method of doing the job than this crude and unhealthy way.
A few of the people with whom I shared my disgust about this picture have told me that the process does not constitute too much of a health hazard because the oil gets really cooked, therefore all unwanted germs get killed in the process. But from my little experience with palm oil cooking, I know that some people prefer to add it at the tail end of the cooking so that it can retain its ‘rich’ taste. The smoky boiling process that might allow the oil to lose all its germs is not subscribed to by all users. How then can we guarantee our safety?
In the final analysis, the challenge is before our agric scientists and technology experts to come up with a simple tool with which to do this task effectively. It is sad that this rural palm-oil maker has to go through the same hardship encountered by generations of women before her because we have refused to move her from the crude practice that dates back to less-enlightened ages. It is true that a sizeable number of Nigerians consume palm oil daily, but we seem to care very little about the process that brings it to our table. Now that we know, those who can should please devise another way to produce palm oil than this.
There has to be another way, and it doesn’t need to be so complicated. I remember a time when some institute in Kano created a groundnut-oil extracting implement. It was quite a media event with so many government officials being shown distributing same to rural women. I don’t know whether these Kano folks have been weaned off their traditional method of doing groundnut oil (which mercifully does not involve using legs to pound the nuts) or whether the small machines have all broken down due to lack of repairs, but I do know that if simple semi-modern implements can be made to mill groundnut into oil about two decades ago, then the same can be done for palm oil. Again, I throw this challenge at our agric and technology experts.